What is your employer doing to support you to homeschool?

[XmasSkies2020]

Just wondering what other employers are doing this time around. Potentially to go to employer with ideas.

My private sector employer is offering:

• the option to buy 1 week of annual leave and spread payments over 12 months salary

• unpaid leave

• work flexible hours outside office hours

We have timesheets and work is client facing. No furlough this time as really busy.

Private sector:
Officially I'm not sure but my boss is pretty much "as long as you get your work done" and I can take holiday at short notice if needed. To be fair, they're very much like that in normal times too - so if I wanted an afternoon off, I could juggle my hours across the other days even though we don't have that option officially. My boss has 2 children too so is pretty understanding

Nothing useful. Allowed to leave at 2 rather than 5 but expected to work from home. Need to use my own laptop sitting on my bed as no equipment will be provided and which has caused at trapped nerve so I’m now in constant pain.
Trying to homeschool two dc, one with SN.

glowing orb similar here. Start when you want to start, finish when you want to finish. Do as much as you can but recognising we are human and a day is only so long. There is no shame in saying that you can't do everything.

The message from the start has been family, friends and health come first. If they can do something to make that easier they will. Our IT has been upgraded so we can be anywhere and it is the same as being in the office even if you are in a park. Some people live in areas with patchy internet so they are paying for 2nd lines in - when one goes down you can just switch to the other. We get £7 per week for heating. Office furniture has been sent out.

Kids, pets, and other halves turn up in meetings. Pictures, homework, PJs and random stories are admired. It takes a couple of minutes and your colleagues aren't constantly stressed so are able to work more effectively.

With such a relaxed atmosphere people are more connected, work more effectively and get on better. We are about to come up to our busiest time, but we did it last year and there is no reason why we can't do it this year.

I work PT (as do two others in our team) and our Line Manager is offering us the chance to take some annual leave to reduce our hours each week, flexibility to adjust our hours and to do what we can in our hours.

One PT colleague has grown up children so she is ok. Another works FT and has two children one aged 13 and one 10. Her DH also working from home so she just gets on with it and they both alternate supporting her 10 year old between them. Fortunately both my kids are at secondary and require little input from ourselves and both DH and I are both WFH so we are ok.

But a colleague who works the same hours as me at opposite end of the week thinks our Line Managers offer is unfair she wants to save her AL and thinks she should be furloughed. She has a 17 year old, a 10 year old (both extremely bright dream children according to both parents evenings) and a DH WFH full time in exactly the same role as us but for a different organisation (so he has flexibility).

TBF my boss also works part time 20 hours a week but she has two primary school age girls who are forever at each others throats and interrupting her so in lockdown one she struggled took some annual leave each week to reduce her hours and also worked flexibly (her DH isn’t able to work from home so is no help). So if anyone needs furloughed or additional support it really should be our boss but as per usual my colleague thinks her needs trump everyone else’s and she thinks she should be furloughed or be given paid additional AL (whilst the rest of us bust a gut to cover her).

You can backdate vacation, 80 hours worth

The UK Lockdown was met with a lot of Meh in the global team meeting today.

To be fair the guys in HK have just had their kids schools closed and generally live in tiny flats because the cost of real estate is so high and the Indian team never had their kids go back to school. It’s tough everywhere.

My boss sent me a teams message this morning to ask how I was coping & then laughed when I suggested furlough (it's our busiest time of the year)
Once we get the next 2 weeks out of the way I'll come up with a flexible proposal - we're generally quite flexible as long as output is ok.

After Chris Whitty’s admission that children might not be back in school until September, I’m wondering how sustainable a lot of these options are...

The entire control strategy has always been non-sustainable.
Even Sainted New Zealand has had an unsustainable strategy.