Mumsnet Talk

I went back to work 4 weeks ago and this is the 2nd time I had to stay at home with my 1 year old.... I stupidly didn't clarify this when I started,but was wondering what my rights are...

Generally you take it out of your anual leave- it is never classed as sick leave. i think you're entitled to a certain amount of days off unpaid as well.

i'm not an expert, but where I work you have to take it as annual leave. Many mums report themselves sick to avoid doing this. There is no allowance for taking time off for others' sickness.

In my firm it would be from annual leave. They also get quite irritated about it if it happens a lot.

My 8 year old said to me the other day "we aren't allowed to be ill are we mummy" and I realised that I have taken a pretty hard line about it!

Annual leave, although when DCs were poorly toward the end of the year and DH and I had used up all our A/L entitlement and had no-one else who could help out, one of us would end up ringing in sick ourselves

Also - you may be entitled to special leave which I only found out after being off loads with DC1 when I went back to work and they started nursery catching every bug going!

Many contracts allow a couple of days a year for attending to sick relatives, funerals etc. Most companies take it out of your leave. However, when I worked as a teacher- because we had a lot of set holidays, if your child was ill and you stayed off you got your pay docked. I was honest first time as I didn't know this - the other mums told me to lie in future and have a tummy bug!

We had to make the time up (at line managers discretion) or use annual leave.

Neither. It's unpaid leave for emergencies involving dependents. Your employer may let you take it out of annual leave so you don't lose pay, but they don't have to.

Statuatory parental leave is 13 weeks, this is unpaid. You're contract will state whether or not you have any paid parental leave.

The 13 weeks unpaid parental leave is something different. It has to be applied for in advance and the employer can choose when you take it.

It is , as flowery said, unpaid emergency dependents leave you take in the case of a sick child/granny/any other dependent.

At my place it's also make time up or annual leave. By the books we aren't supposed to book annual leave after the fact (must be in advance blah blah blah). We are supposed to take unpaid emergency leave in this case. But my manager is more understanding, and will go and add an annual leave for us parents using his admin rights on the system. (We can't do it ourselves).

I'd also rather use a paid leave over an unpaid leave. We aren't allowed to use sick leave up for child sickness.

thank you that's really useful, as usual mumsnet does not disappoint!I will have to discuss this with my manager. and next time I might have to claim a tummy bug ;-)

Here should give you all the info you need.

As flowery says it's normally unpaid leave but bigger employers will sometimes have a Special Leave policy which may allow for a small number of paid days. Where I work we can take 8 paid days per year which is lots. But most employers allow for a certain amount of unpaid leave. i wouldn't claim it as your own sick leave as 1. that is fraudulent 2. it will look bad on your sick leave record if you apply for promotion another post / in a redundancy selection, for example.

As a teacher, who can't take holiday-our pay is docked if we are absent due to ill children.