To think schools should get with the times re working parents.

You want children to be at school 50 hours a week! Why not just put all kids in boarding schools! Where will the money for this appear from?

Who said they had to work for a pittance? Or indeed that OP would be ungrateful?

Tbh op wrap around care is a nightmare to staff. No one wants to work split hours for such rubbish pay.

At my school our asc is limited in capacity as we cannot staff it.

Do you have any family that would help out?

@Frogpole @Princesscounsuelabananahammock
This was the OP’s response to a poster suggesting dad helps with pick up and drop off.

They can but DO THEY?

Lots do, but they charge you extra, it’s called wrap care.

You know the teachers are working / have children also? They aren’t working in a crèche.

Fairly recently the 4-day working week movement was gaining some momentum, there were quite a few companies trialling it with brilliant results. It was a 4-day week with no reduction in pay. I so wish this becomes a reality in future. Working parents could perhaps flex the 4 days over 5 around school hours. A few less days to cover in half term. I know this format won’t work for everyone / every job and is far more suited to office roles etc but I’d love it if it became more of a reality!

Whattt? This is the most ignorant post I've read in a long time. This screams, 'i don't know anything about child development and frankly don't care, just care about making my own life easier!'. More and more research are coming out about the importance of free play and time in nature and time spent without organized activities. (I mean we've known it all along, but luckily research is becoming clearer) Scandinavian countries are starting school later and later (age wise, so @7 years), they are doing more unstructured schooling (less sit at a desk). The word unschooled is becoming popular. The more we understand about child development, the less we think traditional schooling is a good idea. And here your are asking that kids go to school longer than you are at work???!! A 10 hour day?? A 50 hour week? Good grief!!! And at what age do you propose these draconian measures that adults aren't even subject to, start? 4? Or maybe you'd prefer at 1, the moment your mat leave ends?
Geez, were failing our kids... All in the name of 'workplace equality eh? I mean you'd rather let your kids spend 10 hours in formal childcare per day than let John do longer hours than you. So unfair that you have to leave early to pick up the kids

Yes, you’re right, the school should only have the compulsion to allow the use of their buildings. Everything else should be taken care of by the wraparound care provider, as is the case where it happens successfully. I understand that in a rural isolated areas, private wraparound care might not be viable. But I have friends and family living in relatively populated cities, where the parents can and would pay what is required for a wraparound care option to be viable, yet it doesn’t exist at their schools, or it is very limited. I do think then that it has come down to a choice by the schools, which isn’t Ok. I know school leaders have an incredibly difficult job, I am a teacher, so the government should be supporting them with whatever they need to allow it to happen. It was a manifesto promise, it is supposed to happen.

Schools providing wrap around care (either themselves or via external company) is the ideal but it does very much depend on local demand.

we provide wrap around care but it makes a loss for the school so it’s far from ideal. No external company would come in and run it at a loss. If we increase costs (we keep it as low cost as possible) then the parents who need it wouldn’t be able to afford it.

Its not as straight forward as some would like to think!

OP how much are you willing to pay for after-school care? I understand that finances are stretched but I think the main issue here is your finances. Not the schooling system. There are things in place e.g. childminders, but are you unwilling to pay for them? School budgets are tight enough as they are.

Do you have big fancy cars? Do you have a big house with spare bedrooms? It sounds like you both have decent jobs (DH a Dr maybe?). Are you trying to 'keep up with the Jones'. Do you think you 'deserve' all the luxuries in life because you're well paid on paper?

I understand it's frustrating, but possibly you need to look at your money mindset and stop blaming schools for your mortgage/money issues

Whilst in essence you have a valid point, your approach to this thread has been completely unreasonable.

It is true that childcare options and costs are variable around the country and ,cost wise, can be completely prohibitive to some parents. This is the fault of Government and not schools. If government want more people back in the workplace full time then it needs to ensure an environment to support that.

However, throughout this thread the OP has been argumentative and belligerent. Everything is everyone else’s fault and not her own. Fell pregnant unexpectedly - not her fault! Took out an unmanageable mortgage despite the warning signs of historically low mortgage rates at completely unsustainable levels - not her fault! Picked a school with no wrap around care - not her fault! Partner can’t help with childcare - not her fault!

Adulthood comes with tough decisions and responsibilities. You know why you are in this situation, some of it circumstances and a lot of it your life decisions.

I start work at 7.30. Do these times suit your work place because they wouldn't mine?

I don't agree with OP, but this is just nonsensical.

You don't know whether there are childminders or not. That's total assumption on your part.

The comment about getting pregnant is presumably a suggestion that OP should've planned ahead? But if she has a child of or approaching school age, any planning she did before TTC would be years out of date. Carefully appraising what's on offer in your area now tells you absolutely nothing about what will still be there in years to come.

Not immediately obvious why you thought generation was relevant here either? Especially as you've so obviously failed to understand that if you did want to bring it up, what it actually means is that the choices about housing costs available to previous generations don't exist in the same way for younger people now.

The country can not just run 9 to 3. Not everyone can do work that could be done in two fewer hours a day if they just got off of Insta or whatever and got the work done. All of us who had to go out to work through 2020 for example.

Labour were about to bring in wrap around care in all primary schools when they were voted out 14 years ago, along with fixing all the buildings! both abandoned by the coalition. Who'd have thought that would lead to difficulties finding childcare and school buildings falling down?

Your op isn't very well thought out at all. I don't want my children in school for that long, I do not consider it in their best interests. This is yet another thing being shoved onto schools but as a parent you need to take some responsibility for your own situation. If your school doesn't offer wraparound care then you look to an external provider, move areas.

As for your mortgage, well I do think that the affordability tests should be more stringent but you also have to take some responsibility. We could have been approved for double the mortgage we got but we had 2 children at the time and knew we would want more and considered the need for childcare and other costs wouldn't stay static so we went for a cheaper mortgage and we're able to get it fixed. It took some forward planning from us and also being sensible about what we could afford because interest rates do rise.

I do agree that each school should provide breakfast club and afterschool club as standard. However if is provided by external companies then who pays, the parent or the government? Perhaps the government could subsidise on a sliding scale? If this is held at the school then I'm sure that will come with a ton of paperwork. Who would ultimately be responsible? The quality of provision would need to be continuously monitored, as well as uptake to make sure it gives value for money. Yes it would create jobs but how many people would want to do such hours?

I do think some holiday clubs could look at their hours and consider that they are used as childcare so more reflect the average working day and include early drop off and late pick up as standard.

Why should your problem have to be solved by someone else? You're part of a generation who feels both entitled and hard done by. You want your nice house with a high mortgage and you feel disgruntled that there isn't free/cheap childcare for you. There is childcare in the form of childminders etc but you don't want to pay a premium for it. You want teachers and schools (already underfunded to the point where they're collapsing) to solve your problem. That's not how it works. It's your problem to solve not the government, teachers and teaching staff. Getting pregnant doesn't happen by happenstance so whether it was unexpected or not it's no one else's problem that you don't have sufficient childcare. You could move to a cheaper area, move to a smaller property that needs updating, look for a more flexible job. There are solutions but you don't want the onus to fall on you, you want someone else to step in with a ready made solution to an issue of your own making.

No, I think employers need to get with the programme instead. THAT is what is causing the inequality. It’s no coincidence that the majority of flexible working requests come from women, not men.

It's unreasonable to think that before you have children you should be able to completely plan ahead for their care. Circumstances change.
You can't predict illness, redundancy, additional needs, never mind a financial crash or a pandemic!
Parents need reliable and reasonable childcare. It's not about schools being "behind the times" it's about getting a government with the will to put support mechanisms back in place that were removed, and develop them further.

You're conflating two things in this post. Schools being obliged to offer wraparound care, and be obliged to allow their buildings to be used for it. They're not the same thing at all.

And the latter is a much stronger point than the former. A school existing in an area doesn't mean a workforce is available to provide wraparound care in it, much less at a rate that would make it viable.

Contrary to the idea that school is not childcare, Matthew Walker, sleep scientist and author of 'Why we Sleep', talks about how school hours are set up for the convenience of working parents and he talks about the detrimental impact this has on children, especially teenagers. Teens sleep patterns change developmentally, and they are wired to need later morning starts. But they're shoehorned into school early with knock on consequences for all sorts of areas of health and achievement. It's a sobering read. This is a modern working life problem, and children shouldn't have to absorb adult problems, to their detriment.

Why don't you think schools should be forced to offer wraparound care? In my area the actual staff at the school have no involvement in the wrap around care. The company that provides the care handles everything, it very much seems like the only involvement the school has is in providing the buildings. Given the building exist, and there isn't anything else going on in the parts of the school where the wrap around care takes place before 8.30am and after 3pm, what exactly is the problem with all schools being forced to allow the use of their buildings in this way? I gather they also charge the wraparound care provider for the use of the buildings, so it's a win win, surely? If, for some reason the after school club companies don't exist in certain areas, it's the governments responsibility to provide the incentives for them to do so. They're all for private companies rather than the state providing solutions to society's problems after all, so if that's their chosen model, they better make damn well sure it works.

God, this thread is an absolute mumsnet bingo of people inexplicably dripping contempt for all the people working to ensure the society they enjoy keeps going, isn’t it?

It’s self evidently not ideal that the working week and school week bear no relation to each other for the vast majority of people, and that being able to organise your time to avoid the consequences of that for you/your children while not suffering financial or career penalties remains the privilege of the few (which includes me in my cooshty job, incidentally, before the brain squad inevitably trot out their “bitter” comments).

The answer to the wider issue of how we organise society in a changing economic landscape probably isn’t that your doctors, chemists, freight drivers, job centre workers, nurses, teachers, sanitation workers and social workers are all entitled shoddy parents who shouldn’t even have had children but now they have, how dare they suggest society/public services could be arranged better for them. However, I look forward to another 15 pages of the same old shite inevitably being trotted out.

It can’t pay well either. My son is frequently the only child after school. That’s a grand total of £5.50 an hour for the woman who runs it, less food and resources.

To the person who asked if parents didn’t consider this before having kids: Yes, we did, but we had a huge change in circumstances, meaning I no longer had my term-time, school-hours job. School holidays are an absolute nightmare and we still have no idea how we are going to get through the summer holidays.