NHS/Term-time contract

[JokerOfTwo]

Hello,

Has anyone successfully been given a term time only contract from the NHS?

Background: currently on my 2nd Maternity leave, will return in October (officially ends 3rd week of August but using leave to extend) I work in a specialist role as a band 6 - the team is made up of 6’s/7’s/8’s. I currently work full time (37.5) but would like to drop to 31.5 (this isn’t a problem) it’s a Monday - Friday job.

My eldest DC will start school in September, and my leave will just not cover the school holidays, my husband works for the police (he’s not a police officer) but due to strict operational requirements, chronic staffing shortages, him having “on call” shifts and high demand during peak times leave requests can easily/often be declined.

My mum works full time (lives 3+ hours an away) and In-laws have made it politely clear they don’t not want to be child care for several weeks a year.

I’ve looked at/asked about holiday camps for the top 3 schools I’ve applied & they all just seem a bit flimsy, they start at 9am finish at 3, only run Mon - Thurs, not available every break & the waiting lists are long, this just seems like a disaster waiting to happen to rely on these when I just don’t have the back up if it falls through.

On top of this even though I’ll have to take this time off work my youngest will be in private nursery (contracted to 51 weeks a year) so I’ll be paying for him to attend even when he doesn’t need to (because I’ll be off work) whereas if I put him the school nursery he’ll have the same time off as eldest & it’ll save me £400 a month, this is my average bill currently with a child in nursery even with “30 hours free”

Please note I’ve not spoken to my ward manager/matron about this, so really looking for advice on approaching the situation.

And as tempting as it is to say things like “work it out between you and other mums” or “I made it work back in the day” I’m really just wanting advice on if people have been granted it & what were the circumstances.

Not everybody has the same support systems or local/community support in place as others.

Hello.
I did every Saturday and Sunday 12 hour shifts and 2 evening shifts to make up almost full time hours for 3 years so until my youngest started school. I had a glorious year off for maternity leave to begin with.
Husband was off every weekend and each evening so we did a car handover in the car park of my work!

Then I moved back into a clinical role that was daytime compressed hours, we used after school club and dh picking up when he finished work.
luckily he worked in education so had most school holidays off but not all, so we used holiday clubs.

We had zero family help.

Thanks, yes unpaid parental leave is probably what I will end up doing, what I was trying to avoid though is springing it on my employee term by term and having to go through the process of requesting when I have no paid leave left, if they grant me a term time contract (no one else in my team has school age children, so people don’t request those times off currently) at least they can plan the service accordingly.

I think it’s just people are reluctant to give out term time contracts cause they’re worried everyone will ask for them, which I do kind of get.

Just to clarify my DH doesn’t think (nor do I) think he’s more busier or important than me, just out of the two of us his employer is more strict with regards to granting leave requests, I don’t do “on calls” where as his contract requires them, and I like being off with my children.

Loads of good ideas here. Also worth checking if your Trust has an annual leave purchase scheme, they usually limit additional leave to two weeks but it's something.

I managed to get an annualised contract. I work my hours over 4 days in term time and then work 4hrs less each week and the rest over 2 x 9 hour days in school holidays. But I don’t work with inpatients and I organise my own working schedule. I don’t suppose this would help you though as you still wouldn’t have childcare for the 2 days unless they could be guaranteed on your DH or your mums days off.

Ive known school nurses with term time contracts and a speech therapist who worked mainly in special schools. Whether you have a hope in hell in getting this very much depends on your area of work and whether you have a real shortage skill and they know they’ll find it hard to replace you.

As pp said you can get up to 4 weeks parental leave every year but, although they can’t refuse this, they can make you move it by a few weeks for operational reasons so it can be difficult to get in times like August or the October week.

If it’s turned down could you have a plan to try and move into an area where it could work? Or if you really cannot get childcare the other option is to resign and work term time in the staff Bank

I am obviously part time to start with

Nothing in my circumstances, but I'm a speech therapist and work mainly in schools. They don't like giving these contracts now, but I have some colleagues on annualised hours, which my Trust seem happier to approve, so that could be worth looking into? Good luck!

I have seriously thought about bank work, as I did this for a year when I moved Trusts to help decide what department I would like to work in, several things worry me: I routinely had shifts cancelled, the shifts offered were often OOH/unsocial & honestly I don’t want that, this isn’t a short term problem and it would mean banking for 10+ years, there was no learning opportunity whatsoever when I did it, and how the pay works and me taking school holidays off there would be periods with no pay - whereas a term time contract would split my salary over 12 months.

It is something I will consider though if we start the school journey and it’s just not working - kind of last ditch attempt though.

Thank you, I didn’t know annualised hours was a thing. This may be something that I can negotiate with when the likelihood of term time request is declined.

I know people keep mentioning unpaid parental leave, I find it odd that they won’t grant term time contracts but allow staff to use 6 weeks of their paid leave for the school holidays & then request unpaid parental leave for rest of the school holidays, again I know I sound like a broken record but it really just seems like “six of one and half a dozen of the other” they may as well give me a term time contract so they can plan accordingly if I’m going to request the time off anyway

Mine definitely does as I bought a week the year I got married, it’s capped at 2 weeks in my Trust.

Also does your job offer overtime oppurtunities? Could you drop your hours lower than 31.5 but then work overtime in term time and school holidays as and when it works for you and TOIL the time off you need.

I've got a colleague who has taken 3 month off same time every year to do a hobby using leave, TOIL and shift swap policies to his advantage, he has been doing it every year for a decade!!

Either transfer to a school health team or marry a teacher instead (obviously joking). It’s so difficult to juggle school holidays, it took all my creative skills and I would start planning for summer about now. There such a stampede for school holiday annual leave it was a nightmare and most people would only get about 50% of it granted due to service pressures. I left in the end.

It’s preferable for them to get you to put in annual leave requests or unpaid leave requests because (a) they can choose each time whether to grant them or not (lots of people will want some of the school holidays off) and (b) it’s less of a precedent for other staff requests.

You keep saying you'll request all the school holidays. Surely there are other nurses in your department wanting school holidays off? Requesting annual leave doesn't guarantee you'll get it.

It's actually in our trusts HR policy that term time only is not permitted. Might be worth looking at your trust HR flexible working policy to see what it says?

Indeed . In our dept, some school holiday annual leave requests have to be rejected every year because too many staff members want them. Unpaid leave requests during school holidays are also rejected. They are always full.

Where did OP state that she is a Nurse? The NHS employs a whole lot of staff who are not nurses!

Hi Op,

I got term-time only in a hospital setting for a year after I returned from maternity leave and my eldest started school and then they took it away so I went into school nursing instead now have a term-time only contract band 6 . They won’t give term-time for band 7s or 8s unfortunately

I’m not willing to leave nursing

From the OP.

Honestly I joked about this to a friend as her DH is a teacher (their children are nearly out of the school system now) she dead panned me and said “why do you think I’ve never left him” pretty sure she was being serious 😆

I am a nurse, I work is small ish team (for NHS standards) however 1/4 of the team are childfree (by choice) 1/4 children are older than 16 so although they still do request some holidays it’s few and far between, 1/4 are much older and children are grown & the 1/4 with young children are non clinical so our leave can be taken at the same time…we have separate rotas

Ive been there a few years we are routinely well staffed/have no staff off during the school breaks throughout the year.

I'm not trying to derail your thread but this about the police is shocking! So essentially, no one doing his job can have a day off at home with their child because they will always be on call. How can they justify someone getting paid for 4 days is on call more than someone getting paid for 5 days? And how do you live your life always being on call when not at work - does it mean you can't go away for weekends etc.?

I was told no for set days working many years ago as ‘the needs of the service come first’. NHS. So I left and went into general practice on less money, annual leave and sickness pay but a better work life balance.
Don’t hold your breath.

Even people who are child free or have older children might want time off during holidays at times (Christmas, Easter, booking holidays to make the most of BHs, happens to be their birthday, family member who is a teacher, + people come and go from teams etc.). If you are booking A/L then yes potentially you could book every holiday off but they would always have the option to say no if it doesn't work.

If you are requesting term time hours it would be helpful to say how that might work for the service, what impact it would have on colleagues workloads or patient wait times and how that could maybe be mitigated. In a small service one person significantly reducing hours might have a huge impact.

Where I work, I wouldn't be able to agree term time only (despite being really flexible about people taking leave whenever - I'm also not able to grant 3+ weeks off consecutively, needs senior management sign off), due to the nature of the role I couldn't cover with short term bank, and having a staff member gone for 6 weeks over summer would be detrimental to service delivery in a way I couldn't mitigate. I'd actually struggle to agree for someone to drop a day a week, wouldn't be able to get someone else in on a 7.5 hour contract and wouldn't get it past our vacancy panel - we wpuld just lose the funding for those 7.5 hours. It would be easier if someone wanted to drop to 2-3 days a week because that would possibly create another role for the other 2-3 days so we wouldn't end up losing service capacity.

Me and my partner take it in turns with leave, we both get 5 weeks off a year and can take off the majority of school holidays between us, it’s only 6 weeks holiday we struggle with and have 3/4 weeks to cover, I do have family to use which I appreciate you said your mom can’t help but I also utilise other holiday clubs outside the school as my dc school actually don’t have a holiday club which is so annoying.

on your flexible working form put in 3 options

1. term time only
2. annualised hours
3. working 9.30-14.30 during the school holidays so you are able to drop your dc to school and get to work.

Also the May half term and Easter half term will use 12 days leave and not 15 due to bank holidays.

Hi, are you dual trained? Or is that not required?