Employing an Assistant

[cleverchick]

I'm thinking of employing an assistant to work with and any advice would be much appreciated. I'm a registered childminder and I have 2 rooms that I use for childminding.

Hi,

You would need to look at whether your assistant would be employed by you or self employed. If you employ your assistant you would need to register as an employer on the hmrc website and you would also need to pay employers NI which I believe is 13.8% on anything they earn over £153 a week.
Roughly working out if you were to pay them £8 an hour, 8 hours a week for 3 days it'll be just over £5 a week or just under 25p an hour, more per hour if they work more. You would also need to pay holiday pay which would be pro-rats depending on the number of hours they work. If you employ someone 3 days a week then you will need to pay 16.8 days holiday pay which includes bank holidays.
You will also need to consider the additional insurance premiums, such as employers liability, membership fees, costs of looking after children, heating, lighting etc.

If they were self employed then obviously this would be slightly different, they would need to calculate their own NI etc.

You would also need to make sure they are CRB checked, first aid trained and also receive a suitability letter from Ofsted to say they are suitable to work with children.

I'm not an expert on it but these are all the things I had to do when I was becoming an assistant.

I hope this helps a little.

I am in the process of employing a second assistant (I'm a CM). I've just paid out £150 for first aid course for her and £50 for dbs check. The employer's liability insurance is included in my CM insurance so there is no extra cost. I will employ her but she'll be earning under a threshold for tax and NI contributions so there's nothing for me to do there. Her accrued holiday pay will be paid straight away with each pay packet as she'll be employed on term time only basis and that's what she prefers.
Be careful about taking anybody on as self employed. Read up the rules to check if they can be self employed. In a normal CM setting where assistant is required on same days each week they have to be your employee as you dictate where they work, when they work and how they work.

Do you have a local Child Minders network? They might be able to offer advice or know of someone looking to work with someone.

There are lots of legal things you need to consider - such as insurance, registering for PAYE with HMRC, contracts and the whole payroll/HR side of things etc.

HMRC have their own youtube channel which is actually pretty helpful! Have a look at this video about getting started as an Employer: www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxAqbtWRiPI

Hope that's helpful. :-)

Found this PDF from LearningTrust that mentions that by having an assistant a childminder may be able to care for more children.

Has anyone taken on an assistant and then been able to care for more children?

What are the rules with regard to leaving an assistant alone with children? Can they do the school run (with written parental consent)?

Thank you everyone for all your good advice (cake)

Yes, you can increase the number of children you can look after providing your house/flat is big enough. You can leave the children alone with an assistant for short periods of time (I think they specified it as up to two hours) providing the assistant is first aid trained.