My plea is guilty, confesses Ben Bentley.

Guilty of showing my two daughters the sea, of letting them play on the beach with a bucket and spade, of allowing them to bury me up to my Adam’s apple in sand and roundly laugh at me.

The moment is captured for posterity on my mobile phone. When I look at that picture today I think: “That moment was educational. For the human sandcastle as well as for my kids.” It was at least as educational as the lessons my eldest daughter would have been doing at school at the end of term (ironically, it was a seaside project involving a bloke who takes donkeys into schools) when we took them out of the classroom.

No-one died, no-one got hurt. But a ‘crime’ had been committed. And that ‘crime’ was that we were holidaying during school term time. And that, without being able to demonstrate ‘exceptional circumstances’, is, according to some school rules, simply not allowed.

The inflammatory issue of taking your kids out of school during term time has hit a nerve. A Shropshire Star feature on the subject earlier this week showed that few parents who have children of school age do not have an opinion. Everyone I spoke to about the topic ran off at the mouth, raging on one side of the argument or the other. Our website has been besieged with comments from all sides of the argument.

• Read Ben’s feature here

At this time of year, it’s a modern-day predicament. What about the single parent on an offer of a cheap break with their kids? Or workers who can’t take leave during school holiday time because other colleagues have booked that time off already?

The problem could be solved at a stroke if holiday companies didn’t rip us off. Like many parents on an average wage, I cannot afford to pay inflated holiday prices that kick in the moment school’s out. But I can’t imagine going into a travel agents, turning out my pockets and saying “This is all the money I’ve got. Go on, give a week in Egypt.”

I see the error my ways, M’lud. Ultimately it is my fault for having kids (and no, I’m not being sarcastic – you pays your money and you takes your choice). Although I see it’s quite all right for schools to close early to let kids go home to see a World Cup football match. Are these “exceptional circumstances”? If my holiday was World Cup related would they happily authorise my children’s absence?

I recognise that taking kids out of school is wrong, disruptive and a threat to standards (those pesky targets again), and I would not have done it had our kids been taking tests or missing important parts of their education (our eldest is six, the youngest is two-and-a-half).

In mitigation, I should mention that my wife is a teacher and we also did some work with our school-age daughter similar to that she would have been doing in the classroom.

To which the judge would, presumably, hike up my sentence on the basis that therefore we should have known better.

So I am guilty. In the worse case scenario, under the current system our family could be fined up to a total of £400 for an unauthorised absence, or worse, taken to court for not paying the fine. From September some county schools are banning unauthorised absences altogether.

I’ll take my punishment and I won’t do it again.

Honest.