Another childcare rant - how do people do it?!

@HeyThereDelilaunpaid parental leave entitlement is one week per year up to age 18, not 4 weeks.

Don't get caught out with this!

Well sure, that particular comment wasn't advice. I did offer advice earlier, but you haven't actually been responding to anyone offering advice. You just want to moan, which is fine, but it won't help.
Join the committee, move house, move school or change jobs. Thems the options.

Edit - quoted wrong post! I meant to reply to the post about wraparound care being less viable with more people wfh, which has an impact on people who can’t wfh.

I agree - numbers dropped at my DD’s wraparound care after the lockdowns (I’m on the committee), which we assumed was due to people wfh and being able to do the school pick up, then work for another couple of hours. I can see that for smaller providers, this could mean they weren’t viable any more.

Numbers have increased in the past couple of years, which I’d guess it’s due to more people having to go back in the office

Yes, my husband is also a teacher.

We have both submitted flexible working requests which have been granted in part, but this only slightly helps.

Reception aged child so only just starting to navigate this but I don't think we can continue like this for another 10 years.

The wraparound care at my daughter’s school is run in the same way - paid staff with professional qualifications, but as it’s run as a not for profit, it is legally required to have a committee to provide oversight of the day to day operations and support the manager.

I joined the committee when we had a similar request the year after DD started school, because having wraparound care was vital to us. The committee meets once a month, in the evening, and the manager is very capable so we’re more of a sounding board for her than being involved in the day to day running. I am the treasurer so I do have more responsibility and take extra time each month to review the accounts, but an ordinary committee member wouldn’t need to do this.

Like you, we didn’t have any family nearby to help with childcare, so wraparound care was a top priority when choosing a school. Our first and second choice schools both offered wraparound care (we’re in a city so there is more provision). I’d also stayed in a lower-paid but more flexible job (local government; pre-Covid) and was able to change by working hours so I did four days over five and could finish at 3pm most of the week, meaning we only needed ASC two days a week.

If you really want to keep the wraparound care running, one of you would need to join the committee. As someone else has said, the time it takes is repaid in knowing you have secure childcare.

They need new parents to step up and join the commitee

This. If the OP wants the care to continue, they need to commit to this and see how they are able to help, not rely on others stepping up. The people who use the wraparound will be all parent who work, it's not going to be stay at home mums.

After DS was born I went down to 4 days a week; split one day off to two afternoons when he started school. No local family help. After school club 3 days a week and v occasional use of breakfast club if both DH and I are out of our home town working.

In the summer holidays I take unpaid parental leave (you're all legally entitled to this for 4 weeks a year until DC is 18, but it is unpaid) to cover school summer holidays plus annual leave. Other parents we know use holiday clubs.

DH now increasingly works away on unpredictable days, and after years of WFH my work have insisted we all go back to the office 2/3 days a week (not unreasonable of them); I can’t drop off DD at nursery, DS at breakfast club/school and still make it to my desk in London at 9am or get home on time for them, so I may end up having to quit my job - bad for me and Govt tax revenue, but we knew this might be on the cards when we left London. I’ll look for a local job but as my role is very specialist I’ll likely have to go for something lower paid.

It is really hard. I’m a single parent.

This is my arrangement over a typical fortnight:
I do 10 school runs
My ex does 5
My mum does 5

At the moment I’m only reliant on after school club one day a week because of flexible working / the above arrangement.

Ask for flexible working.

or in my case.. I quit and got a part time job at the school that means I don’t have to pay bf or any childcare anymore.. woohoo I’m free!🤣

I'm married to one and I think teaching is actually one of the worst options for flexibility around childcare, though obviously the holiday bonus is massive. Is your DH a teacher too? I honestly think it is almost impossible to juggle it if you both are.

I once got in a weird argument on MN where someone told me that DH must be able to change his working hours to do the morning school run and it was just patriarchy to say he couldn't and so I had to... Alas, I don't think it's the patriarchy that means that his form can't register themselves!

Wow that's so expensive! Ours works out £19.55 a day, and I thought that was steep!

I think anyone who has ever had children sympathises, and you are not wrong in a lot that you say. You will however not be able to reform the whole system, and you need to look at this pragmatically.

You can hope that someone else steps up, and the childcare can carry on as it is now, or you decide what is less hassle and causes you less pain...having no childcare or joining the committee. IME these roles are usually something like treasurer or secretary. Perhaps you can find out more about the roles that need to be filled and see if you could take one on.

I adjusted hours at work to accommodate drop offs and pick ups. School holidays could be a bit of a nightmare, but at least no worries around school days. Is this an option? Hybrid working now makes this sort of situation so much easier, but it all depends on your job and workplace flexibility.

WFH has made a lot of people's lives easier, it's true - but I do think it's made it actively harder for people who can't WFH. Around us there were a lot more childminders and also more things like holiday club provision when it was assumed that all working parents would need them. A lot of those never came back after COVID due to reduced demand, but I know people who can't possibly work from home and who find it a much bigger struggle now because of this.

The staff will be paid. It will be the parents committee who are unpaid.

The committee like the Op will have jobs and pay for their children who use the service. And with the nature of After school committees people want to pull out as they and their children no longer need the service.

They need new parents to step up and join the commitee I don't know how that is hard to understand.

£10 in the morning and £25 in the afternoon.

They do a £10 option in the afternoon but pick up has to be before 4.15 which is still unachievable with a commute etc.

Thankfully I wfh two days a week so it’s only three days of it. TBH I am quite happy with the arrangement as it’s good, it works, and I’m still £20k a year better off than when they were at nursery…!

I completely sympathize. This is before the constant inset days, calls to collect early because of sick, calls because of incidents in the school.

I'm also a teacher and some parents of our more difficult children must get several phone calls per day. I have no idea how they manage it

Having a child in nursery was a walk in the park compared to school.

Grandparents still work fulltime and live 300 miles away.

We are just taking it day by day but wondering how sustainable this is.

Hey @SMLSML I do see that it is not helpful for people to say that you should have done xyz. FWIW our planning for this issue started when DS1 was about three; I then worked in a senior role where the hours were inflexible so I dropped down to a different role in the same firm where I could start and finish early and dropped a day as well to give more flex. DH already worked four days starting late. That kind of planning is much more in your control and as I say, we were in a good position to ask for the flexibility, having worked for the firm for several years.

If your plan was that you both stayed in 9-5.30 roles that are inflexible as to time and workplace, while living in a village with no childminders or other care options, with a small school, and an after school club run by a volunteer committee – it’s open to disaster if the committee fails or if not enough ppl chose ASC. As you have seen. But it is what it is – you need to see what action you can take. Of course it's not as simple as moving house or jobs and this school may have been a great choice in many ways.

If I were you I would

• Offer to be on the ASC committee. Find out what it would mean and if it’s a two-hour monthly meeting, can you or DH can do that?
• Look at flexing hours – compressing into four days or stretching fewer hours over five days or dropping a day
• Consider stepping sideways into a role that can be hybrid or remote (these are all both you and DH btw)

As your DD gets older, you may find she wants to do swimming lessons, Rainbows, football club, dance class that happen at 4.30/5/5.30. Also the ASC even if you support the committee does seem to have an uncertain future.
What is your plan for the holidays? You may find you need to have a lot more flex than it sounds as tho you currently do (for example, a lot of the cheaper holiday cub options run to school hours). It’ll be a compromise – my career certainly took a hit but overall I think it was worth it.

I see @crossedlines comments that things were worse 30 years ago when they had DC – tbh they were worse than they are now 20 years ago when my DC were small. Covid has opened up wfh which would have made our lives easier. But we did what we had to do.

I don't know why you think other people don't get it. Most of us are parents, we're all doing the juggle (or have done it). It's not an issue unique to you. But whining doesn't help. Join the committee and/or prepare to do sort else. Simple it may not be, but that's life and it's common sense that villages don't have everything.

Gosh, we’d be screwed without breakfast and afterschool clubs tbh. I guess people get childminders but we live in a village so don’t imagine there are many around here. We also don’t have family close by who are able to help.

All the people saying OP should have had four different back-up plans - the problem is, like so much of parenting, you don't know what you don't know. I don't think it is particularly obvious to those who don't have primary school aged children that whether schools have any wraparound isn't a given, that if they have it the set-up varies massively across schools, and that childminder provision in an area is similarly so varied.

We looked at two schools for our oldest child, both of which said they had breakfast and afterschool clubs. I now know that I was very lucky because the one we chose runs them in-house and they're relatively cheap, incredibly flexible (you book as needed up to 24 hours before, never once has there not been availability), long hours. I now also know, through having friends whose kids go there, that the other one is always oversubscribed with long waiting lists to get a place at all and it is then a place on a fixed day that can't be changed, offered to the person at the top of the list with a 'take it or go back to the bottom of the list'. They also won't take the reception kids, which wasn't stated anywhere at all and every year comes as a shock to a lot of reception parents. The whole small town with these two schools with 90 children a year between them has three childminders, all of which have super long waiting lists, even though one of them I actively wouldn't want to use. As I say, I am currently very lucky and have great provision but no, it wasn't easy for me to plan it at the point of getting pregnant!

They may have 3 children.

Based on 3 children at 11.50 each that's £34.50 so £35 a day wouldn't be an outrageous sum.

Isn’t that better than demanding more of employers and fellow citizens, who all have their own priorities to fund?

After school club is £35 a day? Ours is £4 in the morning and £7.50 after school.