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 🙁

I hope you include this attitude in your cv.

People really need to stop with the attitude that anyone owes their employer their commitment beyond the actual hours or tasks they are paid for whenever the employer wants/needs it without the employee also being owed some flexibility when they want/need that.
In the end even good employers only care to a limited degree. My employer is generally great. They are flexible and I go the extra mile when it’s needed and feel comfortable half arsing it when we are quiet. I don’t kid myself they care beyond what value I can offer them though. A colleague was diagnosed with a terminal illness recently and while they’ll be able to access support (financial, medical & counselling) works top priority was figuring out how to replace them so the work can still be delivered. I’m not even suggesting my employer are doing anything wrong but just that you are foolish to think that big corporations truly care about their employees as individuals.

Since lockdown managed to wfh on school holidays plus my company allows us to buy 10 extra days per year which I do then between dh and myself we juggle all holiday breaks bar summer
Luckily y7 & y8 but still not old enough to be left home alone but does mean wfh I'm not juggling. Prior to lock down it was a fortune in wrap around care and football clubs but when the hit highschool that all ends hence the wfh

I was a sahm when 3 dc were small, I don’t know how we would have covered it my dh job is very rigid. Must be a nightmare

Make use of the unpaid parental leave. You can take in 1 week blocks and then use your/your partners leave to cover the rest. This time when kids are little is tricky but before you know it they be grown up enough not to need so much childcare x

Whatkatydid2013

Where did I say that an employee owes an employer any more commitment to the time and tasks they are contracted to do? That was my actually my point. Employees are contracted to do a certain job for a certain time. If they then take time out of their day to look after their children, then it is a breach of contract unless it has been agreed in advance. Noone can do a job as well with children about as they can do it without.

And don’t get me started on the poor deal children get when their parents are trying to work from home.

https://www.gov.uk/parental-leave

Clearly there’s a lot of people out there who did not consider childcare when they made the decision to have children. It amazes me how many people decide to have children and then moan about this

Not sure that people think about childcare issues in a few years' time when they are having sex.

There’s a discussion about parental leave elsewhere on here, @vickylou78

It isn’t a magic bullet. It’s unpaid, for starters, but even if you can easily afford to take a couple of weeks out the crux is your employers have to grant it - but not when you want it. So if you need two weeks parental leave in august, it can be postponed until September which is probably of no use to you.

It keeps being pushed as the automatic solution: it really isn’t.

Kind of agree on the wfh with kids - not fair on anyone and I am very very pro wfh. But what can people do?

I'd be well up for this and I don't even have children 😃

It depends on the age of the children and how sensible/mature they are. By the time mine were eight or nine they were less likely to interrupt me than half of my colleagues.

Yes, generalisations are silly. A 12 year old and 10 year old who are capable of entertaining and looking after each other are a different world to trying to look after a toddler solo.

More than once, we have had threads on here stating that ‘teachers get too much leave’ and ‘it’s not a proper job’ - I assume that’s why they are mobbed with applications….oh

Rethinking school holidays to make them far shorter is the obvious answer, especially in the summer. The logic for these holidays, based on the agricultural calendar, fell away years ago. Let’s match school holiday provision closer to annual leave - 5.6 weeks plus bank holidays.

Plenty of us aren't up for our kids being in school that much, particularly not in order to facilitate a working world that doesn't suit many people anyway. Additionally, we already have recruitment problems in schools and one of the few perks is the long holidays. It's not just people with school aged DC who regard that as a benefit.

It doesn’t have to be the case that teachers have to sacrifice their holidays or that they have to be expected to provide childcare, any more than after school clubs rely on teachers.

But some areas provide holiday provision for working parents that’s high quality and some don’t and that as it stands is not fair .

I would imagine that very much depends on the resources available to LAs and schools. Dissecting the service into the have and have nots certainly hasn’t helped.

Sorry @riceuten I am not sure what you are saying.

It is all well and good people saying ‘your children, your responsibility’ - yes, that’s true. But if you really cannot live on one salary and that is the case for most people - or if you are a lone parent - then you will need some form of holiday childcare. And that needs providing.

I used to have an au pair for the school holidays. My boys had to share a bedroom in order to accommodate her. Generally she would take them to the beach every day. Minimal cost and dc's had lots of fun. Still in contact with some of them almost 20 years later.

Providing by who ? Cash strapped councils who have had their funding cut by up to 60%? Schools who are not exactly awash with cash?

Honestly, I am quite depressed that although the thread title is about the "mismatch", almost all comments are that there should be more childcare, rather than more holiday...

I strongly feel that most people spend too much time at work for a very large chunk of their lives.

Obviously it's not ideal for having children - we have them because we want to raise them/spend time with them. Most of us don't really want to outsource that for as much as many jobs require.

It's not great for your health either. Your mental and physical health would be better served by more time doing physical things. Gardening, casual sport. Most people I know (me included!) Get home from work, do the things that must be done in terms of getting kids to bed and doing basic housework and then collapse on the sofa. Where is the time to get outside and raise your pulse while being in contact with nature? We are an increasingly obese nation, and mental health issues are on the rise.

So many threads recently about "the village". Let's be honest, if you work full time you almost certainly aren't much involved in your local community during the week. Building up "a village" takes time at/around home. You won't be able to build up a support network without investing time in those relationships. So many people don't know their neighbours well. How can you if you are almost always out?

Wouldn't it be great if rather than needing more childcare, people pushed for greater holiday entitlement? How we live now is simply not healthy. Please don't push your children towards ever decreasing free time because that's what your employer wants from you.

I think we’ve established no one is asking schools to ‘cough up.’

If we throw our hands in the air and say that there is nothing to be done, there’s no money, then fine, but benefits also need to be paid until the child is able to be left all day.

I think the money might come from somewhere then.

Good luck cutting teachers’ annual leave by more than half

This is why I have always worked in schools or term time only nurseries. The pay is shit though. I have a degree and could train to be a teacher I guess but not sure I’d hack it.