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 🙁

Yes it’s a nightmare!! I have recently managed to find the only kids club for literally miles around and got DS in for 2 days per week over the summer. They don’t advertise and don’t come up on Google so it was pure luck I found them by word of mouth. I’m doing a rota with 2 other mums for one day of every week. MIL is doing one day a week (minus 2 she can’t do so DH will cover) and my mum is doing one day per week. All this just so we can spare enough leave to have the last week off together as a family. Looking at my calendar for the next 6 weeks gives me a headache! Holiday clubs are expensive even if they are available so using all other resources to cobble together some kind of plan is preferable. There will be other parents in your position, get a rota going!

You need to badger your school to provide a holiday club. Get pestering the Head, and get other parents to pester them too. Ours has one that is open whenever the school isn't pretty much.
I can't lie that it is one of the benefits of being a teacher. But it was a factor in my decision to re-train as a teacher, as my previous career wasn't family friendly at all. My teaching career has only been family friendly during term time as I'm part time, but part-time teaching jobs are not that difficult to come by, at least compared to other jobs. It's a great time to retrain, as there's a massive recruitment and retention crisis, which means that in many parts of the country, secondary teachers can have the pick of the jobs!

I also suspect the “man up and sort it brigade” will be the same ones moaning that their chiropodist has taken most of the summer off or that there is no vet available to do their health certificate to get their pet on holiday for example.

Good childcare and holiday provision benefits everyone. It enables competent, experienced workers (who parents of school age children tend to be by their age/career stage) to be in work, supplying skills and services that people need. It reduces stress/competition for time off and means that parents can book holidays genuinely for that reason, a needed holiday… not just a childcare swap looking after other people’s children as well as your own.

we went to local authority play schemes when we were children, they were great and mainly staffed by students. I’m sure there would be money to be made doing this.

You are entitled to take unpaid leave to spend time with your children.

This just isn't realistic for so many people - tradespeople, shop workers, manufacturing, jobs like carers and nursing, social work - even a manager in this role, yes they could work from home doing a lot of their work via teams, but would you want your 6 year old overhearing discussion about child abuse? Or if your child was in care, how would you feel having a meeting with a manager where their kid kept popping up asking for snacks?

Great if you're in a position you can do this, but don't you think people would have thought of that for themselves if it was realistic?!

But society has changed - it's a real luxury to afford to have a stay at home parent in the current climate, whereas it was the norm in previous generations.

Dh and I worked the holidays between us.
my company is very generous with holiday and I get 7.6 weeks a year and DH gets 6 weeks.
I always take the 3 half terms, the first 2 weeks and the last week of summer plus the 5 inset days, DH covers Christmas, Easter and 2 weeks of summer. And the rest is covered by grandparents.

Covid was great because DH became permanent WFH so it’s so much easier to cover holidays.
Mine are now all at high school and don’t need childcare thank goodness.

Are you sure you have exhausted all options available locally?
Maybe I'm fortunate but DC have used a childminder, a private holiday club and are now in the holiday club run by their after-school provider - all 8am to 5pm.
Further afield there are forest day camps and the local private school offers holiday club for everyone.
Try childcare.com. You might be able to find a holiday nanny/childminder.

Agree it's really difficult. I worked pt until youngest DS was about 10 but even then it was hard to arrange/afford childcare for the holidays. But that's not possible for everyone.
We did a mixture of holiday clubs, swaps with other parents, part-day clubs where one parent dropped off and other parent picked up, occassionally paid a student for the day, and very occassionally grandparents had them for a day or 2.

But it's not just school holidays because there are inset days, occassional days, sports days, assemblies, parent teacher meetings, and other events which require a full or half day off. I'm not begrudging any of these - they are fun events for kids - and as a working parent you often have to compromise on the events that are most important to your child, but it seems a bit simplistic to think that standard days off will cover all that (as well as kids illness and ones own potential appointments that might happen in the working day)

But if the government won't fund education properly I can't imagine there will be the money/motivation to subsidise holiday clubs. (And it might be difficult to appropriately staff them - what would those people do during term time when there was no demand for holiday clubs?)

I was very lucky. I only worked 3 days, years ago there was a holiday club at their school every day for at least 6 weeks of the summer and all other eg Easter holidays, all inset, half terms, partly funded by the council and also GlaxoSmithKline, so incredibly cheap. My boys loved it. It was fab.

Agree with @Hayliebells about holiday clubs in schools. Ours had a fantastic wrap around but would not consider a holiday club. There were other holiday clubs in the area but they had to be booked up in advance for the early or later hours provision. Some costs were covered under WFTC though as long as they were Ofsted approved. It seemed to me that every other parent I knew worked only term time or had retired family to help, or worked part time so could use the other 10am to 3pm clubs. The hardest part was having to wake them up in the holidays as early as a school day. Lots of bribes of maccies for tea were needed.

My children were at the childcare needing age before covid, so things could have changed, but there were "holiday club" options which ran 7.30-6, whose main purpose was to provide childcare for working parents, quite separate from "Camps" (foodtball/drama/watersports/dance etc) which tended to run for half days or 9-3 and were more about keeping the children entertained and letting them progress in activities that they love, than providing childcare as such. Both were expensive, but just part of the costs of having children (and I think you could use childcare vouchers towards them).

There were also children who had before and afterschool childminders, who'd go full day to their childminders in the holidays. There were plenty of childminders who were happy to do just morning/evening and holidays, and who only minded school age children. I'm guessing with more people working from home, less use the before and afterschool childminders, so there may be less people offering this now.

YANBU…there should be adequate provision that covers full working hours and it shouldn’t be based around sports either. Not all kids are sporty.

We use a combo of annual leave and a fantastic childminder who offers school holiday cover for 8 out of the 12 weeks holidays across the year. We then take our holidays/family time at home when she’s shut. It’s not cheap so that’s an added expense during the holidays as well. I personally feel as though the holidays should be spread out across the year more evenly as well so we don’t have to cover 6 whole weeks each year

Try being a single parent. Under pressure from the DWP to take a job that won't allow you to be there for your kids in the 'holiday's.

I have one younger child (term time only nursery) and one older child, so they can’t attend the same provision. We have a real patchwork of childcare, including grandparents (lucky I know) … it’s like a military operation planning it all!

Women who have children perform a vital public function for the country by creating new citizens. If you have no new citizens, you end up with no country, which why both rape (causing gynecological or psychological injury that prevents future births) and forced sterilisation are used as forms of genocide.

We know from Romania's Decree 770 what the State will do to women if it thinks insufficient children are being born, and from China's One Child Policy what the State will do if it thinks too many children are being born. Having children is hence not a simple matter of individuals making free choices; to an extent, women as a class are coerced into childbearing (think of what would the Govt would do if we all stopped having kids one day?) and it is only because other women "pick up my slack" by having several children that I am able to have none.

It's therefore illogical and unfair to suggest that women should have thought about it first when they complain that childcare provision is inadequate. Women deserve State support when bearing and raising new citizens.

I do work some days from home but DC are infant age, company policy is you are not allowed to wfh without childcare for children under 11, and in any case my job is intense and demanding involving lots of calls, i cannot do it properly with young DC at home & this would be very clear to my boss & my team. Its completely unacceptable in my workplace to be routinely "wfh" while caring for young children, because you cannot do the job well doing it.

Childcare swaps: i find sahp & friends with family support etc understandably aren't keen to do this as don't need holiday childcare. I manage a odd day here and there but its unreliable and piecemeal. 2 neighbours have DC with SEN who can't manage childcare with me & their parents cant manage my DC as well as their own (understandable).

I book what i can as far ahead as possible with clubs but 9- 2.30 with 15 min drive there and back (school is much closer and 8.40 - 3.20 plus wraparound) just doesn't cover a normal 9 - 5.30 job

DH and i would like to both:

• be off over christmas at the same time as a family- in fact both our employers have mandated office closures during this period so we have no choice
• take one week family summer holiday together. This is not unreasonable and honestly i will ignore anyone who claims it is.

The school ASC doesn't even run on a friday and certainly doesn't run in holidays.

You’re absolutely right. At the moment I have 1 in school and a small toddler. I am just scraping by through the holidays by using grandparents (which will stop soon due to deteriorating health), annual leave between my partner and I and some paid childcare. I absolutely won’t be able to pay for childcare for 2 children, especially as it doesn’t run for the whole of my working day. I will be looking to get a term time only job for my youngest starting school. It will mean a fairly large pay drop (maybe £10k and I only earn just under £30k) but I don’t see I have many other options

I don’t think it has been the norm for many generations, except maybe in certain socio-economic groups.

@TileMeSomeMore

There needs to be some sort of overhaul of the whole childcare system, we need to facilitate people being able to work and affording childcare. It is completely shit.

This. I’m better off NOT having a job & staring at home with my two kids than putting them both into childcare/camps each day. In fact, I’m actually losing money by working. What craziness

I don’t think it has been the norm for many generations, except maybe in certain socio-economic groups.

I grew up in the 90s and only a couple of children in my class had mums who worked full time.

Most children were picked up by their mums everyday by their mums who were either SAHMs or they worked part time. This was not in a rich area, maybe lower middle/upper working class families.

Can you take some unpaid parental leave?

I used to work 3 days a week for this reason. I also worked for local government so I got a very generous leave amount and the ability to purchased more, plus flexi time (I was lucky my manager would let me used 2 days together eg no flexi day Jan,Feb but could have 2 days in March)

Dh & I never managed to have some leave at the same time.

it’s a lot better now they are older

YANBU.
I’m a SAHM desperately wanting to get back into work now my youngest is in nursery but I don’t know where to begin due to this 🤦🏼‍♀️ term time only jobs are few and far between. As are WFH jobs. Add on to that how remote it is where I live I just feel like I’ll be jobless for the next 10 years at this rate and who will hire me then 😩