If you work FT what do you do with kids in summer hols?

[Soundbathfan]

Hi all
My husband and I are due our first in Dec and I am thinking ahead in terms of childcare. We intend to carry on working ideally FT but have no family particularly close :(. What on earth do people do for childcare during school years in summer hols?!

That's true in most places, unless you pay a hefty premium round here it's a 3.30 holiday club finish. I'm a gran who picks up the slack, I do more over the holidays than in term time as they do a relatively inexpensive term time wraparound at the local primary school.

Sadly our local school doesn't run much in the way of holiday care, just the odd couple of weeks with no breakfast club, finishing at normal school time. Sometimes they say that they'll run more weeks of holiday care but cancel at the last minute.
Up until now my youngest GC has been in full-time nursery, but he starts part-time primary in September which will be a real pain, he'll be bored to tears without his friends all day for the first few weeks.
It seems odd to me that, with so many FT working parents, more local primaries don't run holiday clubs. They seem like pretty good money-spinners for the school.

So we split most of our annual leave across all the holidays and then use holiday clubs.

i do try and work out a rough estimate for the year to save the money each month to make it more manageable

Normally many nursery places are open all but Christmas holidays. Then once school age came we have done a combination of holiday clubs and annual leave (afraid means that family time is limited as we have taken different weeks off to cover it so we didn't need to much holiday club.

From a mathematical standpoint, 7 of the 8 bank holidays fall in school holidays, consequently one parent can cover almost 6.5 weeks of the school holidays with annual leave and the days off for the bank holidays. Assume you take some time off together with your partner, and each take some time off individually for childcare then you can likely cover 9 to 10 weeks of the school holidays between you. That would leave you needing care for 4 to 5 weeks per year. If you can afford it I recommend the unpaid government parental leave option, if you have 2 kids you can take up to 36 weeks unpaid leave, which if you took as 4 weeks unpaid per year for the time they are in primary school that near enough covers all the school holidays. It's 18 weeks per child, so if you have more kids then you can take more time off. Alternatively you have the option to spread out the days you need childcare and you can't be on leave and just put them in holiday club for a couple of days a week.
Note also that schools teach exactly 38 weeks in any academic year, and a calendar year is precisely 52 weeks and 1 day (or 2 days in a leap year). That extra day or two in the calendar year means that year on year the summer hols start date gets earlier and earlier, which obviously can't go on indefinitely, and as the 38 weeks of teaching is fixed, eventually someone adds a full extra week to the school holidays (so for that year it's 14 weeks plus 5 inset days they are at home, instead of the more usual 13 weeks plus 5 inset days).

Nearly every post says the childcare is shared with the father??!

My DH is military so I had to stop work.

Holiday club
Annual leave
Family
Swap with friend and have their child one day then they have mine

All very logical but it depends on your job and whether you get bank holidays off, really, and when you’re allowed to take the time. You can also be made to use annual leave for bank holidays rather than them being extra.

I’m lucky in that our office closes over Christmas without charging us annual leave, so it’s bonus time off. But in my last job I always had to save annual leave to cover the enforced Christmas break – obviously fine, I’d then be the one covering the time between Christmas/new year as DP is often on call in that period, but that same job wouldn’t allow leave prior to Christmas and school finishes the week before.

When I’m next job hunting I think holiday policy including whether you can buy extra days and what you’re allowed to roll over, etc, is going to be high on my list of whether I take the job!

I suspect its getting the staff. There just aren't that many people wanting this kind of work.

Holiday club and grandparents.

I have a friend who has a sister with similar age DD to her DD. Between her, her DH, sister and their mum. They get the calenders out, and work out who has the two girls when.

The other thing is having free weeks for maintenance. Many schools try to schedule maintenance works for the summer holidays.

And actually the other thing is that it doesn't bring in that much in the overall scheme of things. My son's school has great and fairly well used wraparound provision but when you look (I am a parent governor so I see this stuff) at what % of the total budget it brings in, it's miniscule.

We use annual leave, flexi and try and work flexibly as we can (I work 5am- 12 and he'll work 12.30-7.30 etc). We use a couple of holiday clubs too.

Yeah there's the maintenance too. Ours does offer some sports clubs that are basically there for childcare purposes over some of the holidays, but not all, and it's a private company doing all of it. They literally just provide the premises. I can see how it might be more trouble than it's worth otherwise, particularly trying to find suitable staff.

Yes, that's usually what they say. But the private clubs don't seem to have this problem, the sports clubs in particular have the same enthusiastic young people every holiday. I'm guessing that they pay better, though I know that some of them also work in the wraparound at the school where our local sports club is held.
I suspect that some schools just can't be bothered, it isn't part of their official remit and they will only do it if it is simple to organise. I can't say I blame them, ensuring that the staff are properly checked out and so on must be time consuming. It's a shame that the staff who normally run our primary's wraparound don't do it, they're already fully checked out but probably have other comittments in the holidays, such as looking after the children in their own families.

With ours it's sports too, and the staff seem to come from a fitness rather than childcare background. Not sure what the pay is. Could be more, as you say.

But I think it's probably significant that they're in the leisure industry, as the childcare and education sectors blatantly don't have the workers to cover this. It's very obvious that one of the few remaining perks in those roles is the holidays. I have relatives who are in school roles and there's just not a chance in hell they'd do holiday work, even the ones who no longer have kids at home. Really I think MN often overestimates the number of people who actually want to work in school holidays.

The people who run our wraparound don't seem to work in the school in any other capacity and honestly don't do much with the children other than to stop them escaping and putting out some very basic snacks.
I think you're right about the staff in sports clubs, though I can't really understand how they have free time over the summer (other than those who work in the wraparound in termtime).
I was thinking about the people who run our local weekend sports clubs which don't run over the summer. Most of the people who help there are quite young and obviously enthusiast participants (in gymnastics in our case).

Maybe they're still in education themselves?