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 🙁

Literally no one is suggesting that.

Additional childcare, then. Provided by who? Where? Financed how?

Why are you behaving as if holiday childcare is really vastly unusual, and no one wants to run it and no one wants to pay for it?

I might sound contentious in asking that: I’m not doing so intentionally, but you’re behaving as if it’s this ridiculous thing that we’re suggesting - it isn’t. It’s fairly standard in a lot of places!

Hahahahaha you must be joking! The children and staff are all on their knees by then end of a longer 7 or 8 week term as it is. There would be no learning going on after this. As I said earlier, schools are for education…not a babysitting service.

Sorry….I must have pressed the wrong button. I was responding to the person who suggested that schools are only closed for 5 weeks of the year.

some of the replies on this thread are batshit 😂

Do you mean shorter by length or shorter overall. Because if you are suggesting the latter, it’s absolutely not going to happen.

Shorter school holidays would be a complete nightmare. The prices of a holiday would go through the roof.

Companies would end up having to go back to the 1960s and shut down for 2 weeks.
Families with keyworker parents would struggle to get the same time of as partner and kids.

We need longer holidays and summer camps and probably tie that together with afterschool wrap around care. It's really not beyond the norm for it to happen.

I think the key to making it work is to have it tied to afterschool wrap around care. There is a surprising number of people with childcare qualifications who struggle to manage their primary aged kids and a nursery job. Perk of the job, reduced cost place for your kids.

I work in education and termtime only myself; I certainly don’t think that they should be shorter! But you can believe the length of the holidays is beneficial to many whilst acknowledging that there does need to be some provision for others. For me, I’ve pretty much always worked in education settings but if I didn’t I probably wouldn’t be able to work at all and have school aged children.

Perhaps schools should move to 3 weeks in summer, 3 weeks at Easter and 3 weeks at Christmas. Long enough for children to rest, and time for families. Then with one week for each half term this would bring the holidays down to 12 weeks. Not a small reduction but sensibly spaced.

you would reduce the likelihood of children regressing between July and September that often happens.

To keep schools open longer though is going to require additional funds for schools and salaries. The extra week at Christmas, would reduce heating and lighting bills in schools.

Here in Germany the "new" coalition are planning to oblige every local authority to offer after school/kindergarten and holiday care from I think 8-5, every week of the year outside 2 weeks in the summer holidays. To prepare for this our local authority put a questionnaire round the schools asking in a really incredulous tone whether anyone would have any use for it? They seemed genuinely amazed that anyone might want that. I find it enraging that on the one hand, if you're a SAHM they pat your national insurance up to age 3 but not beyond, and you can't even save into a private pension, so if you don't want to be skint in your retirement you have to go back to work. But then there us the full expectation that you can work 40 hours a week, 47 weeks a year, and the schools are out for 13 weeks a year, so how the hell is that supposed to work? And they wonder why the fertility rate in this fucking country is through the floor.

The breakfast, after school and holiday club at the end of our road does 8am-6pm every school holiday and bank holiday, costs £38 a day and often are posting saying they still have spaces. Hopefully they are still around when DD is older, although all being well with our other set up we wouldn’t have to use them very much, I don’t understand why provision like this isn’t available everywhere.

this is hindsight and obviously not helpful but when having kids you really need to start looking for work that is conducive to having kids. yes the mortgage has to be paid but do think people go into careers not thinking how their children will be cared for. I work in schools precisely because of my kids

Perhaps schools should move to 3 weeks in summer, 3 weeks at Easter and 3 weeks at Christmas. Long enough for children to rest, and time for families. Then with one week for each half term this would bring the holidays down to 12 weeks. Not a small reduction but sensibly spaced.

We already have some of the shortest summer holidays in the world here; I don’t think this will ever happen.

Imagine the cost of summer holidays during those 3 weeks? Imagine the fight in offices/hospitals/workplaces with staff trying to get one or two of them off!

No. I started my career aged 18 (when I started my vocational degree), when I decidedly did not want children in any respect. 15 years passed before I started my career and I had my first child. But at any rate, how does that work? You are unlikely to have found the partner of your future children before you leave school, and by your logic one of you needs to choose to be in education. What if you later split/divorce? Do we even need a roughly 1:1 ratio of children to childcare workers (assuming most couple have two children)? Will people have to give up their jobs to make way for new parents, once their own kids leave school? How do you avoid this becoming a even greater stick to beat women - we all know the default will be for women to be trained in childcare roles.

Perhaps schools should move to 3 weeks in summer, 3 weeks at Easter and 3 weeks at Christmas. Long enough for children to rest, and time for families. Then with one week for each half term this would bring the holidays down to 12 weeks. Not a small reduction but sensibly spaced.

No thats just moving the problem and makes it a nightmare to get time off in summer.
It's also much more expensive to entertain kids in winter than it is in summer.
3 weeks at Christmas those who can afford it would be in Tenerife, others would be scraping the money together for a couple of hours in a soft play or the cinema.
Summer you can have a day in a park with a picnic fairly cheaply. A farm park probably costs the same as a softplay but you'd be in it all day.
Yes you can become the rainsuit brigade to get out in winter but really you'll only be out a short time, before the kids get cold or hungry, and nobody wants to be sitting in a damp park eating a picnic.

It's the same with older people's care. Stop voting Tory 🤷🏻‍♀️

*Stop voting Tory 🤷🏻‍♀️

I completely agree! When my children were small, our local children’s centre ran fabulous summer holiday clubs at really low prices. They have obviously been closed now.

I used to get a summer au pair.
For two children it was cheaper than holiday clubs and allowed me more freedom to work, no worries about being late for pick up etc.

How many men have ‘part-time, school hours, term-time only’ jobs? This is a disaster for equality and the gender pay gap.

I don’t think it would work if everyone with children worked in education. You see, we need people to work in other jobs that are not term-time. And that includes mothers.

@Anycrispsleft really interesting reading about your experience in Germany - sometimes I forget systems can be crap in other countries too. It might cost money but at least I’m lucky to have a range of childcare options where I live- and use my childcare account which U.K. government tops up by 20%. Hope the coalition government changes things for you

There are also frequent complaints when services close or run at reduced capacity over the school holidays because of parents who work there taking time off with their children.

this is hindsight and obviously not helpful but when having kids you really need to start looking for work that is conducive to having kids.

That’s ridiculous, I had 20 years of a career under my belt when I became a mum - should I have left that and retrained in education? No one is expecting men to chose a child friendly career long before becoming a parent, and what if you chose a career to facilitate children and then find you can’t get pregnant/have children? And it just so happens that many family friendly careers are poorly paid (women’s work). Maybe society needs to consider that if the cost of living is high enough to need two incomes to provide for families (often driven by high housing costs), and we need adults to be economically active, and we need children to maintain population there should be access to quality, affordable childcare to facilitate this.

We ended up booking our kids in to a Swiss holiday scheme (we live on the border) because it might be eye-wateringly expensive but at least it exists! The other alternative is residential camps which my DH is desperately trying to get the kids to agree to for next year. I would give anything for a UK style after school/holiday club...