Should school/childcare hours fit in with work hours or should work hours fit in with school/childcare?

[aubergineinautumn]

Lots of women (mothers) cant do lots of jobs because the hours dont fit with childcare but is the answer employment side (eg 35 hour week/right to flexitime/right to pt work/term time hours/change culture of presenteeism etc) or childcare side (eg schools open 8-6 m-f/ 24/7 free childcare/ more subsidies for nannies/au pairs etc)?

I think we need a bit of both and am definately in favour of a max working week of 35 hours.

[malinois]

Would that be a compulsory or voluntary max working week of 35 hours? Because I know I certainly couldn't do my job in 35 hours per week and neither could lots of others. There would be lots of people in other countries willing to do it for us though...

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

I think flexitime is brilliant for all sorts of reasons as well as childcare. Stuff like caring for elderly relatives also often falls to women and is so much easier if you can choose to go in an hour later or whatever, though again it's not perfect.

[NorthernChinchilla]

It's such a broad issue, requiring legislative, cultural and personal changes I think it's almost impossible to answer, apart from 'all of the above'!

Iceland appears to have a pretty good record in this respect.

I think if we took one step back we'd realise in the first instance the ridiculous nature of saying that (at a guess) 75% of jobs take precisely 37.5 hours per week to do. And that they must be done in one chunk 9-5.
I think we'd need to realise that caring for others in society is neither less important that 'other' work, nor specifically the role of women, and value it accordingly.
We definitely need better childcare provision, with an increased level of state subsidy, staff training and increased value placed on it.
We'd also have to stop judging success on how far up the greasy pole someone was, or how much they were paid (and if I could get my Dad to do that, let alone society, I'd be on to a winner!)

However, I do believe that things are slowly improving in this area- as LRD says, just the move towards flexitime becoming more accepted helps.

[aubergineinautumn]

See, that is something I've heard on here but never understood. Why cant some jobs be split up so that no one person is doing more than 35 hours a week?

eg hospital doctors usually work v long hours but why cant we have more doctors doing fewer shifts each?

Yes I think that flexitime should be available for everyone, not just parents.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

I do think some of it is based in an attitude of 'I suffered so so must you'. Every doctor I've known has said that the very long hours you work in the early stages of a medical career are dangerous and absurd ... but they also tend to say that it's 'testing' and 'proves' who can cope, and a fair few also admit it is partly to do with feeling that if the system were changed, the new generation would have it easier.

I think there are also a lot of people for whom the current system works, and they only see negatives to change - not realizing how badly it doesn't work for others.

[EdithWeston]

With doctors, the number of hours doing the job and the numbers of patients seen are all valuable in building the experience and expertise needed. If working hours are reduced (and who wants to be seen by an over-tired doctor?) then the knock on effect is that training time must be extended by months/years to maintain the level.

I think it is work patterns which would provide flexibility - unless someone can come up with a model for teaching children other than in forms. Because with forms, a core days is needed, though attendance (before and after school clubs) can be varied.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

I'm sure that's true edith, but would it be impossible to extend the training time? After all it's hardly set in stone at the moment - if you do medicine as an undergraduate it takes 5/6 years; if you go in as a postgraduate you only take 4 (and have 3 previous years of degree-level work which may or may not be remotely relevant/useful).

[EdithWeston]

I don't think it would be impossible, but it might create some interesting logjams and gaps during a transition period.

[AMumInScotland]

The thing is, there are lots of jobs which can't be done flexibly - if a shop or office is open certain hours, then those hours need to be covered. Same thing with p/t work - if they can get people to job-share then that's fine, but two people covering 9 till 2 is not the same as having cover till 5.30. Same with termtime hours.

I think businesses should be imaginative and flexible, but it's just never going to be the case that all jobs can give employees the right to work when it suits them, whatever their childcare needs.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

I can see your point there edith.

[NorthernChinchilla]

Good point about the school day Edith.

Of course the current model of work is outdated as it assumes that work is the only thing the person- or rather, man- will be doing. That there will be no other commitments or responsibilities. I think part of the cultural shift needed is for employers to ask 'how can this work be completed' as opposed to sticking rigidly to a timetable Dickens would recognise.

There are always going to be roles that demand set hours in some respect (can't imagine an airline pilot being able to do flexitime halfway over the Atlantic) but equally that pilot may wish to work only three days a week for a reduced level of pay- why not?

[GrimmaTheNome]

Bit of both. As others have said, some jobs - including traditionally female roles - are never going to fit with school hours (nurses, carers).

And of course, all the changes should apply equally to women and men. DH and I have reached a lovely stage where we both work part time and flexibly ... I'm just about to boot him out the door to get DD from the bus-stop. (We're very lucky, we both have the sort of job that doesn't require set hours of physical presence.)

[aubergineinautumn]

I think we need to go right back to the drawing board and think outside the box.
I'm sure i read about somewhere else where the school day is split into 2 shifts eg 8-1 and 1-6 and pupils have classes in one or the other. There really is no need for the core school day to be 9-3/4 if schools are open 7/8am til 6/7pm. whay cant extra curricular activities be in the middle of the day instead of at the end?

I've done 35 hr wk jobs that didnt need 35 hrs to do, but jobs come packaged as that without ever considering exactly how long all the tasks take. My mums did a pt job in the same office as a team of fters and she did almost as much work as them- they wasted so many hours searching for holidays online (she said), although in cant imagine there are many jobs like that anymore!

I've also done a job share, but we didn't need to 'cover' the office for 35 hours, we both worked mostly 10-4 because that was when most of the work needed done, and it also involved alot of travelling time so desk sharing wasn't a problem.

Re: shops and offices- why are they open 9-5? personally I'd go to my local shops if they were open at 7-8pm every night, when I want to go shopping, but as they are closed i end up in supermarkets or out of town malls.

Re: Medicine, I dont think that a junior doctor who has trained for 40hrs a week over 2 years will be any less capable then one trained 80hrs over 1 year. In fact more 'down time' to absorb the knowledge mught lead to improvements in practice and less sleep deprivation will most certainly make them safer.

[malinois]

I think there are a lot of jobs that simply don't fit into the 9-5 pattern. My job can take me anywhere in the world at very short notice and when I get there I might be doing anything from working 100hrs+ straight to fix a critical problem, to managing a 9 month project.

This is completely incompatible with childcare but luckily I have a DP who works P/T from home.

I don't see how stopping me from doing my job would help me or my DC - some bloody American would just do my job instead :)

Perhaps rather than using legislation to enforce working practices that would simply put us at a huge disadvantage to the rest of the world we could encourage men to be as flexible in their working patterns as women tend to be?

[aubergineinautumn]

But you must realise that 90odd% of workers dont have jobs like that?

[anastaisia]

People often think that it must be hard for me to work around home educating, but I actually find that it's far more flexible and much easier for me to arrange care around work than it would be to arrange my work around the school day.

I know home ed is the extreme, but really, what's to stop us from re-imagining both working patterns and school system to compliment each other if we're going there at all :)

(resists going into great detail on just how I'd love to see this go right now because I'm only up late supposedly finishing an essay, but I'll come back when it's done)

[aubergineinautumn]

Yes, I agree. Ie why can't some kids go to school at the weekends?

Also I think in Japan pupils go to an extra school in the evenings.

[maybenow]

erm... what about 'the answer' being that BOTH parents share the parenting????

[aubergineinautumn]

A large proportion of DCs don't have two parents.