how easy is it to find flexible childcare in rural areas?

[hatwoman]

I'm interested in particular to know how easy it is to find flexible care for school-age kids - after school and holidays - in a rural area (the Peak District to be precise, but interested in hearing experiences wider than that). we won;t need much and we might not need it regularly - which on the one hand is problematic I know, but on the plus side means we'd be flexible as to the kind of care - childminder would be good or - possibly even better - nanny-type care in our own home. I say "nanny-type" because we won;t be in a position to offer anything approaching a job - perhaps we could find a student who needs experience?

I'm currently in London which - although we still manage to complain - has lots of options - in terms of nannies, after-school clubs, holiday clubs, child-minders, au pairs etc. I haven;t lived in a rural area since I was a teenager - and don;t really have any friends that do - and I suspect things will be different from here in London. any mn wisdom?

and any indications of likely costs would be good too. I have lived too long in the south east to have my feet in the real world...

just bumping in the hope this will catch someone's eye

Hatwoman, bumping for you now, most of the other CMs are offline atm.

Try again tomorrow?

Meanwhile, have you looked at this website? Might give you something to go on.

Good luck

thanks boysarelikedogs - you're obviously a better googler than me - that was exactly what I needed. confirmed my suspicions that there's much less to choose from. pleased to see a couple of holiday clubs though.

Will try to remember to bump for you tomorrow, it's half term this week here and I may be out running the hounds through the woods, bless'em

Bump for the afternoon crew.

Have linked to CM Staffroom

Good luck

Hatwoman. We live in rural Aberdeenshire.
We have used most sorts of childcare available around here.

My impressions are: in our village, at least, few mothers work full time. This means there is limited childcare.

When we moved to the village there were nine childminders, many of which offered very flexible options. In fact, quite a few were not interested in a full-time child. These days, mainly because of increased paperwork issues, there is only one childminder.

We have had a live-out nanny, full-time (very expensive and problems when it snowed because she couldn't make it from her village to ours).

We now have a wonderful au pair. It took some time to recruit her, because most au pairs want to go somewhere a bit more lively, and you need to be upfront about the rural situation, but she is what we need now the boys are both at school. She shares my car and has made friends with several other German au pairs scattered in villages throughout Aberdeenshire (au pair websites have been a Godsend in terms of her social life).

Hope that helps.

Is there a pre-school in the area? If it is only open in the morning, one of the staff might be interested in some extra work now and again? A friend of mine did something along those lines - the person came to her house so I suppose was effectively a nanny (though it was a more permanent arrangement).

thanks for these comments and thanks for bumping boysarelikedogs. Libra - I have been wondering about an au pair and I thought too that most au pairs would like somewere lively. the area we're looking at is hardly in the sticks - 30 mins on a bus to Sheffield, 20 mins in a car. but no night buses for clubbers...

the difficulty (or rather, the unknown) is that both dh and I are looking at going self-employed - we might - between us and school - be able to manage on very little child care indeed - or even none - but it's all a big unknown really. I think we just have to make the move and see what happens.

Hatwoman. Our au pair takes the once-an-hour bus to her English classes into Aberdeen.

She uses my car for evenings and weekends out.

She comes from a busy city and says she enjoys living in the countryside for a year - we are near the beach so she can go for walks there.

There seem to be several au pairs in her situation in nearby villages, so I don't think that au pairs are only looking for a busy city life - it just takes a bit of time to find one (we need to start searching for our second soon!)

I am evangelical about the au pair idea at the moment because remember she will do other things apart from childcare. I am not saying that I work the poor girl to death, but as well as picking up DS2 from school and defending the fridge from DS1 she does my ironing and puts the hoover over the floors. Bliss.