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

We do, we just do not get paid for it. We work beyond 1800 most evenings without pay.

I am TA.
I work from 7:45am ( breakfast club starts at 8am) to 5:15pm ( 2 hours from end of school day - After School Club finishes) I get 3/4 hour break in a day. It’s exhausting as it is, especially for the children who sometimes come to both clubs!
To pay all staff to cover those hours would cost a fortune!!! Your council tax would go up big time!
Also, if schools have shorter summer holidays or summer school ‘childcare’, you will end up with having to let school staff have their own holidays in term-time… imagine having to cover that!!

Nobody wants to be a teacher anymore it seems

Don't blame them

Children cannot sustain learning for that long. It would be barbaric.

There is a global shortage of teachers. They don’t have enough as it is.

And the vast majority of people who work in schools do so because the hours work around childcare.

There are childcare options you can access, actual childcare. Because school isn’t.

My old school used to operate an after school club. When it first started, it was run by school staff wanting extra hours, but when the numbers using it started to dwindle, it wasn’t viable, so they used an outside company to come in and do it. It was a complete pain-anything they did meant that parents came in and complained to the head about-prices, extras, changes to activities or staffing, food, late collection etc etc. they often had staff members who were unreliable and wouldn’t turn up, which screwed up the ratios. It ended up being a huge headache for the school and meant later nights for the caretaker as well, who already started work at 7. The head closed it completely in the end.

Exactly. And a relationship issue. I can see several posters saying not having automatic funded wrap around care only penalises women.

This only applies if mum is the only present parent (as opposed to single parenting - I know several families where parents separated but the parentsstill equally share the drop offs and pick ups on the days thry have custody).
Otherwise, it's a negotiation between the parents, 'you do drop offs and i will do pick ups' or ' I will do Mondays and Tuesdays, you need to do Weds, Thursdays and Fridays'.

It only penalises women disproportionately if we allow it to, unless it's literally impossible, like the husband is away with the armed forces

I always think there should be more help/incentives for schools to actually have wraparound care on site. That’s the answer.
The problem is that it still costs the school even if an outside company do it - staff time for locking up/security/heat/cleaning etc.

I worked in school which rented out its sports hall, in fact the school had been built with that in mind. However they felt like it wasn’t making them any money so they stopped. It was very sad.

My primary provided nothing and did very few activities outside of school so it was mostly sitting empty fairly early. The head encourages staff to get off site quickly as well, so it was sat mostly empty from 4pm anywya.

Sure, why don't we just give them to the state and get them back at 18.

Fathers also work.

My children's other parent...their dad.

But sure, expect schools to pick up the pieces just because some women have chosen an inept partner that is unwilling to share care for their own offspring.

The Teachers I know pay for wraparound childcare, like most working parents.

Wow

If teachers are really doing all those hours then who is looking after their children? They should have got their act together before reproducing. Imagine wasting time on classroom displays for other people’s kids when you should be at home looking after your own!

What about teacher parents? The two things are not mutually exclusive

Yes, really hard. Back then when my kids were in primary I worked in an entirely male team (other than me). I don’t remember any of them ever taking time out for a child-related problem. If I couldn’t make it in because of a child issue I was seen as letting the team down. It was like they were just waiting for me to fail and I was determined that wouldn’t happen because I wanted to be as good as everyone else. The thing is, why weren’t these men ever picking up the slack at home? It seems to me they were the ones failing.

Please show me the post where OP has said that it should be teachers doing the wraparound care? As usual on MN teachers won't miss an opportunity to tell anyone who will listen that they are the only ones who work hard.
I think it's a very good idea OP and it's practiced all over the continent. In Germany lessons for primary finish at 12 or 1, then it's play time with play workers not teachers. It's optional to attend so those parents who feel strongly about their children bring 'institutionalised' can choose to pick up earlier (and many do).

So you're proposing new roles, costing more money to schools that are already financially crippled, that only a select pool of child free applicants would be considered for? And these roles would of course be minimum wage or close to as we all know these types of jobs are the lowest paid out there.

Maybe your husband's big important job should only consider child free candidates and that would leave him free to look after his own sprogs?

Sure. But even then it's complicated. What happens when you have a work emergency? What happens if you work shifts? And where do you find the money from? And what if your child isn't happy there? It's all hard!

When I was at primary school in a small town, we were once told to bring in some cloves for THE NEXT DAY. We were going to spend a very valuable afternoon sticking them into an orange.

This was the early 00s, and cloves were only really available in the big supermarket in the next town which was a car ride away. My parents worked shifts and there was no way they could travel in that direction to buy these things.

The next day the teacher said “I know it was short notice, but I managed to buy some”, completely ignoring the fact she was a woman in her 40s with a car whereas I was an 8 year old.

You are being unreasonable imo. Extending the hours in organised group-care settings is not in children's best interests. Encouraging flexible working hours so that parents can actually look after their own children would be more worthwhile lobbying for.

You have to pay for childcare. I agree it's too expensive. But there's no magic strategy. Everyone (except for people working term time contracts) is in the same boat. It's not up to teachers to fill the gap.

This.

I think that both parents needing to work full time to be able to afford to run a home, including, ironically, to pay for all the childcare needed outside of school hours, is detrimental to everyone in society. It does not benefit children, parents, teachers, overall societal standards of behaviour and morale, or the good physical and mental health of the population in general.

The choice for both parents work part time, or to have one parent stay at home while the other works, should be a financially viable option, and for many families this just isn't the case, especially with the current COL issues.

I don't think it's a stupid idea to redesign how schools work. Why just shoot the idea down rather than consider the possibilities?

As many people have pointed out, a lot of children have to go "somewhere" to be looked after during working hours, whether that's clubs, childminder or whatever so it's not beyond the realms of possibility that this could be done in a school setting.

Obviously nobody wants them to be doing academic work for 10 hours a day, but all those other skills that would be useful - vocational or life skills that could be taught by a different set of teachers - and things like hobbies - music/dance etc. could be done there. A bit like wraparound care, but with actual focused stuff to do, rather than just effectively babysitting?

How do we fund it? Combination of subsidies for low income, key workers, parents, variable amounts depending on the class? It could be an opportunity for people who want to work only a few hours per week. One of those "hen's teeth" jobs that has to fit around timings for the rest of the family. Make it optional so that parents can use it or not as needed?

At the moment there are a lot of grandparents doing child pickup/drop off and afterschool care but our population is aging and people are having children later, meaning that the grandparents are getting older and people are working longer too.

It's not " naysaying" , it's experience. We have looked, several times, into the potential of having onsite after school childcare. But it isn't, even with 250 children in school, financially viable, the demand simply isn't there. We have looked at joining in with other schools, but the nearest is miles away and the logistics and costs of transporting children from one site to another were prohibitive. So we run breakfast club- at a small but manageable loss- but can't do more than that. Now could we find an external provider who was interested, their costs were even higher. So yes, we probably have a couple of parents bemoaning the fact that we have no wrap round care available and a business manager heaving a sigh of relief!