Childcare in holiday and Au Pair

[PeskyPiskie]

I have an au pair who is lovely and looks after my two primary school children after school. What do you do about the holidays? With half term coming up is it reasonable to ask her to look after them both all day (for 3 of the 5 days)? There is a holiday club they could go to and she could pick them up from there. If she does look after them all day what should I do about pay? Sorry first au pair and the first time I may need her to help with holidays.

Assuming she's legally allowed to (basically not an A2 national), competent and happy to do so for appropriate compensation I don't see a problem. Do be aware she might still have English class etc though and it would be unfair to ask her to miss them if you haven't agreed holiday care in advance in your contract.

In terms of pay work out how many extra hours she's doing and pay her at least whatever rate she usually gets per hour for those hours if you don't have a fixed overtime rate. So if she's paid £75 for a 25 hour week and you need her to do 25 extra hours double her pay.

I agree with what GoldFrakkincenseAndMyrrh (time for a new name now - 12th night was a while ago?) says, except the pay.

You don't pay her £75 for a 25 hour week, you pay her £75 plus board and lodging for a 25 hour week. If you want her to do another 25 hours, you can't pay her double board and lodging so you need to make up for this with additional cash.

If she is paid £75 for 25 hours, so £15 for a 5 hour day I suggest an additional £25-£35 a day for 10-12 hour days.

So at the moment she works 3.5 hours a day (4 days a week) for £70 plus board and lodging. If I go with Gold then I should pay her £5 per hour over and above the 14 hours she works at the moment or if I go with mranchovy I should go for perhaps £10 per hour when she works more than the 14 hours? I might, therefore, see about holiday clubs and have her work her usual hours, as it will be more expensive I think to have her work all day. I need to get out the old calculator!

Hold on, the examples both of us gave were £75 for 25 hours. Frakk suggested £3 per hour for additional work and I suggested £5 per hour.

Only 14 hours for £70 a week is very low, If that was my term-time requirement I would expect the AP to cover full time in holidays for NO extra pay - this would still average out at around 25 hours a week which is the norm. It might be a bit late to discuss this now though :(

Thanks mranchovy if it is too late this time (maybe just because I'll be too embarrassed to bring it up) then at least I'll know for the next one. Its all a big learning experience

IMO (and as I said) you need to pay 'at least' the usual weekly pay (and then used a typical number as an example of what the baseline would be, assuming an overtime rate wasn't agreed) but that rather depends what the pay arrangements are for the amount of hours/actual work done. In your case as she does 14 hours for £70 you'd be fine doubling that.

I'm undecided about whether it should be significantly more though - the likelihood is that au pair will, in exchange for working, have various activities paid for. It depends what they do together - for example an au pair taking children to a theme park is working, yes, so their time should be compensated but also going there for free. Same for other tourist attractions, which can represent a significant saving for them and be construed as a benefit.

I would, in the absence of an agreed rate, go by the typical hourly rate and see what activities they did. If it's sticking around the local area playing taxi pay slightly more but discretion is important. I wouldn't want to be in the position where there was an expectation of a 66% increase for any overtime!

And yes, I need a new name! I'm just stuck for ideas currently.

I pay my AP £75 per week for 25 hour week in the holidays I pay £90 for a 35 hour plus I provide a kitty for buses and drinks. I also pay for one activity at least during that time like the cinema so no one goes crazy at home. As I also get home for lunch each day I also deliver them to the library etc. Sometimes I also meet them in town for lunch. So as well as extra pay they get a few extra treats.

Most au pairs understand that they will have a lot less to do for 10 weeks at a stretch amd then will have one or two weeks of longer hours at Easter and half-terms.

I'm sure a good au pair relationship is one where there is a bit of give and take. All of our au pairs know/knew that we have always gone out of the way to make things easier for them for the majority of their time - just like the OP we often only needed less than 20 hours a week during school weeks. We would also give them extra days on top of this if we knew in advance that one of us was around and we didn't need the help as much. Picking them up & dropping them off at the station etc if they wanted to go into town and not have the car with them.

They knew in exchange - just like with Lizcat we need them to do more during the school holidays. However they were not always just paid more for this additional time because they were usually happy to spend this extra time doing some fun activities, seeing a few sights or going to places where we would treat them as well as the kids by giving them money to cover admission fees, lunches out etc.

So a museum or two, a day at the swimming baths with an afternoon at the cinema, long cycle rides and picnics in the better weather etc.. We paid for their activities and lunches out and they were happy to do this and knew from the beginning this was to be part of the deal.

I'm not for exploiting my au pair and always err in the au pair's favour overall, but I think if you reduce the relationship to more of a 'transaction' and start counting the hours clocking on and off shift then you lose the spirit of it all..

That's the problem with grey areas - one person's 'give and take' is another person's 'exploitation'.

That's why it is important to set out from the beginning, in writing, expectations of how much money is going to be paid and how many hours are going to be worked. If you want to make any changes to that (for instance an unexpected need for full-time cover in holidays), that gives you a baseline to work from.

Frakkin, I'm afraid that in my view £3 an hour as an overtime rate for active child care is exploitation. My 15 year old daughter gets more than that for babysitting sleeping children.

On the other hand, Lizcat your arrangament (provided everyone understood it in advance) may work well - your 'full' days are quite short and I assume your au pair doesn't work the whole summer holiday so the average hours only work out at 27 a week or so, for which the average £77 plus room and board is reasonable.

Clearly I got exploited when I was younger then! Although I suppose 7/8 years ago things may have been different.

That said 3 years ago my wage worked out to something like £2.50/hour for one job because I agreed to effectively work 24/6 for £300 a week as a holiday nanny and the children kept waking in the night.

In principle I think the minimum should be what the hourly rate is normally, no matter what extras they get and wouldn't want to set up the expectation for there being hugely more. But if I were footing the bill for them to do things that I wouldn't necessarily have put in place (like theme parks/the cinema) and the au pair chose those activities or at least had a hand in drawing up the itinerary I wouldn't be paying hugely more for their time IYSWIM. In this kind of situation it should be discretionary but it's never fair to pay less than their time is worth on an hourly basis in a typical week.

But then I have an overtime rate I plan to pay which effectively incentivises extra work should I need it! No-one I've been in contact with has complained so far.