Coping with Teacher Training days

[bacon]

I'm new to education, DS1 in reception DS2 19 months old. But this is really going to get right up my nose. Teacher training days tagged onto half terms. 1st one Friday just before the weeks break.

How do mums cope? Ive got something planned - booked months and months ago and have to leave really early and now just checked diary and DS1 is home and I'm paying for DS2 to be in nursery!

Why cant they do these training days in the evenings or even Saturday morning like the rest of us? Why has education have to be so disrupted? Surely with the number of weeks off they get it wouldnt be too much to expect a few days to be put towards training?

Struth, we are self employed here, hubby never hardly gets time off, when we were farming we worked well unto the night, expected to get up at the crack of dawn, 7 days a week, working when completely exhausted and so hanging and no paid holidays!

So many families are struggling with childcare, trying to hold onto their jobs, and then this is slapped in our faces.

Surely this doesnt happen on the continent??

In my area village schools are the norm as is the case in neighbouring LAs as it is a large rural area.

Bit [hhmm] about this thread. Not the OP, but the bickering. I don't understand it. perhaps it's just be being a bit dense.

Anyway, there are (for us) three options:

1. The company that run the breakfast, afterschool and holiday clubs at our village school (and schools in neighbouring villages and the nearest town) often runs a club on INSET days, so we use that. There's another club in a neighbouring village that often runs, too.

1. One of us takes a day's leave - this is the ideal really as it means we can visit museums and whatnot when it's not so busy. Often we'll have one of ds's friends over, too. Which leads me onto..

1. Ds goes to a friend's house - possibly the same friend we had over the previous INSET.

I'm not sure this is relevant but there is no subsidised care available. Costs £25 a day - but that's from 8.30 - 6.00 and generally includes a trip somewhere interesting, so that's very good value imo (obv. much harder if you're on a low income, I appreciate).

As an aside I don't think anything "is slapped in our faces".

Schools certainly had teacher training days when I was at school in the 70s and 80s. It's nothing new.

That's interesting, Jenai. It's so nice to hear positive stories about out of school care that are already running on INSET days as well as other times.

I think the child swapping thing can work well. I always feel duty bound to offer to look after other children during the holidays when I don't work. So we've had a day with dc1's friend and a day with dc2's friend this half term. The only thing is that a lot of my dcs' friends are onlies and they never offer to look after both of my children in return. It's still nice to be able to give more attention to just 1 child though while the other is entertained elsewhere!

Well ds is an only and it has never occured to me to invite his friends' siblings [hblush]

Although they do seem to have seperate sets of friends. So I'm not that mean [hgrin]

Hello from the continent (Belgium)! We have teacher training days too although they aren't usually announced at the start of term. We are doing well this year in that in October, we were given dates for 3 teacher training days before Christmas. However, the school does offer low cost child care for working parents; basically the 'surveillantes', ladies who patrol the playground at lunch times, look after the kids for the day. I've never lived in the UK with school-age kids so I'm interested to hear how it works.