To be worn out by the mismatch between annual leave & school provision

[Yellowlegobrick]

25 days. Like most people i get 25 days annual leave.

School holidays plus inset days needs 65 days cover.

There are sod all good options to cover it locally. There'll be a football camp 20 mins away for 3 days 9 - 2.30, a forest school doing an odd week 9-3. The bigger camps are massively oversubscribed, don't run for the whole holiday and you sometimes can't get a place.

Aibu to think there needs to be a formalised, centrally managed system to acknowledge the gap and provide better coverage?

Even if DH take all our annual leave separately, we can't cover it all, especially not when we lose at least a couple of days each per year of annual leave covering days the children are ill.

Its a constant annual stress, i find myself filled with dread when the letter comes from school: end of term, finish after lunch at 1.15.... there goes another half day 🙁

A baby will need some form of childcare from newborn until around 12 ish (often longer, more specialised childcare if they have disabilities or SEN)
Lots of things can change in 12 years - both personal and financial circumstances and the availability or provision of childcare, and it would be virtually impossible to plan for or mitigate against all situations (including pandemics and recessions)

i didn’t know term time provision was so bad because I had lots of friends with children and they were doing okay. That’s because their school did wraparound care. There was actual holiday clubs where they lived.
I had no reason to believe provision would be so different across the U.K. especially when there were several options for nursery, you expect it to continue.

The situation is possibly made worse by increasing the retirement age. 10 years ago more Grans were around to help out, now they are working to 66 so smaller window of being retired and fit enough to look after grandchildren.

And less inclination because of that smaller window of active retirement.

This is what we did.
you actually should get 5.6 weeks minimum a year to include bank holidays.
my husband’s work shut down over Christmas, so he’d always do that week.
I would volunteer for any weekend work so that I could toil in return to slightly increase my allowance- and take it for things like sports day etc.
i would take 5 weeks off and work over Christmas break. I would try and do this on bank holiday weeks so my allowance went further.
my husband would take 1 of his remaining weeks off.
We would take two weeks off together through the year.
I always had to take any child sickness etc as unpaid but that was better than taking a block of time unpaid.
so we used to be able to cover 8 weeks between us.
I would then do swaps with parents to cover the other weeks- so I’ll have your child 2 days this week if you could have mine days over this week// I took a teaching assistant’s to school in a morning but she then had them a day in the holidays when I needed her to etc.
I also was occasionally allowed to work a week of compressed hours- so worked my hours but in 4 days not 5.
I also used some of the clubs on occasion so I could take half days holidays and not full days.

It was a complete juggle though- and I ended up feeling like my kids were being passed from pillar to post.
School holidays were something to be endured rather than enjoyed- I felt terribly guilty that we weren’t out ‘making memories’ and having great experiences and instead were stressed, grumpy and broke.
You have my complete sympathy. I now have my older dd looking after my ds- and she now moans as she’s not allowed to look for a job or go out with her friends..

some suggestions school buildings could be used

As said up thread-this wouldn’t be possible in any primary school I’ve been in due to the maintenance, cleaning and building work that needs to be done to stop them being unsafe during term time. Use church halls, use sports halls, use community centres for childcare-but if people want primary schools in use throughout the summer it’s not going to be long before they are literally falling down.

The one I use is in a school, they have access to the hall, toilets and the playground. A section of the playground will be fenced off as an extension is being built.
And it wouldn't be beyond possible to move it to one of the other schools it picks up from. No way are all schools being worked on solidly for 6 weeks of the holidays.

I really don't see how that cannot be repeated elsewhere. The hardest thing is getting it set up and running in the first place, Which definitely needed council support.

Have you looked at local private nurseries? We offer school holiday provision 7am-6.30pm for children up at age 11 and I think may others offer similar if they do wrap around care.

@CactusDreams - Parental leave can work but if you have to split every school holiday with 2 other colleagues there is realistically no way additional 2 weeks are allowed or possible without causing resentment and severe disruption.

The same with saying you can WFH, my work specifically forbids WFH when I have a child younger than secondary school age unless it's an emergency for a day or two max and then they actually allow paid emergency leave. I have to confirm I have childcare in place if I want WFH.

This is interesting as almost every club I’ve used has been in a school.
Our school itself runs holiday club, sports camp is at another local school, etc.
Maybe some schools need the income from renting out the space?

this is what I’m wondering, are there no summer day camps?

sumner break is 10 weeks long, the kids go to what is basically day care camps all summer

This is so true. If your friends/ family have wraparound/ holiday childcare, you just assume that your child’s future school will be the same.

I only started thinking about it in advance of school applications because a colleague with an older child discovered the school in the village she’d recently moved to had very limited wraparound/ holiday care, and had to change her working hours as a result - she told me to check provision and book as early as possible when I was applying for schools for DD.

It’s a total nightmare I agree, it’s like who thought up the school day is (roughly) 8:45-3 yet the average working day is 9-5. Just a hassle every single day. My DH and I are lucky in that we can work flexible, I condensed my hours so I do 37 hours over 4 days but means I can’t do any school runs, DH works 5 shorter days but not available during school holidays. We like to take some leave in Summer together and at Christmas so then we are very short for the 13 weeks school holidays we have to cover. It’s a no win situation.

Also a lot are mentioning WFH, we both are lucky to do this, however many employers would be unhappy to know this is with the intention of doing childcare at the same time. Some employers have started writing in the contracts that you must not be responsible for children whilst WFH

There's a gap of at least 5 or 6 years if not more between TTC and needing childcare in school holidays. If you use a private nursery for toddler and preschool years they're often open 52 weeks of the year (only closing on bank holidays) so it's a lot easier and consistent care.

Some of us did plan for what we'd do once our children started school but the options that were there 5 or 6 years ago no longer exist because of the pandemic, provision changing, CoLing crisis etc.

So you want to cheat your employer by doing two jobs - working from home and looking after the children. No wonder the country is in the mess it is in.

Are you proposing employers provide us all with 65 days fully paid annual leave?

You just do manage though! You don't know what support network will be around when your kid is in school and worse case there's sick leave! Not ideally but you'll figure it out when the kid is here but it's almost impossible to play years ahead for as looks very bleak!

Yes, please think about these poor CEOs and shareholders! They are only getting paid millions, while regular people struggle to afford their mortgages. Honestly, stop with this serf mentality, employers don't care about you at all.

It’s a societal design flaw.

If we as a society voted against immigration in 2016, and then voted the conservatives back in with their hostile environment, then we must make it easier for people who already live here to have children, so there’s someone to look after our elderly, harvest our food, etc.

Instead, we make it as difficult as possible. The people giving snippy answers about this need to wake up and look at the big picture.

I imagine that most schools in the UK would rent out the space to holiday Clubs. Presumably people don't want to run them though. There may be not be enough money in it given that it is school holiday time only and perhaps not so much demand nowadays, given many people can work at home perfectly effectively if their children are over 8 or 9 years.

Generally, independent schools offer holiday clubs that are quite high quality, I suppose the presumption there is that parents do work. I do think we need to shift that presumption into the state sector as well.

So you want to cheat your employer by doing two jobs - working from home and looking after the children. No wonder the country is in the mess it is in.

^

Yes, that's the reason why.

Women's fault

Honestly, stop with this serf mentality, employers don't care about you at all.

^

This. Especially pertinent in the UK. Until this attitude changes, the UK will be forever under the kosh of the lord and Manor

Any holiday clubs at private schools round here are run by outside agencies and are open to children from other schools as well. The school rents out halls/ courts/pools/fields etc.

It's getting worse not better. When my DC were primary or even older, most women I knew didn't work 5 full days, and so we managed school holidays by swapping around children, I'd often have 3 or 4 extra kids on my days off. A few dads were shift workers or were able to take odd days leave too, and they would muck in as well But the organisation was always really stressful..

Now it seems like most families need 2 fulltime working parents to stay afloat, there's less flexibility. And how single parents manage it without family support, I don't know.
You have my sympathy, it's tough.