... Morning all!
Sorry I had to post and run last night, a rare evening spent with dh. I didn't expect so many replies. My first thread of over 100 posts!
Just to clarify a few things: the pre-school is a community playgroup (not allowed to use that p-word any more apparently). There are three qualified staff employed and it is run by a committee of volunteer parents. It runs three days a week offering two 2.5 hour sessions plus a lunch club in the middle. The pre-school is described in all the literature and advertising as being run by parents for parents, and it is heavily stressed that without the support of parents the pre-school will have to close. If parents don't want to do the support bit, then they are welcome to take their children elsewhere, but I know for a fact that the two nearest pre-schools in neighbouring villages also run parent rotas and at least one has a fine system: they charge £15 for a missed rota to pay for a replacement, we charge £5. One of the fundamental principles behind the pre-school is that the fees could be kept low because parents helped (we charge £4 for a 2.5 hour session to non-funded children). Maybe those were different times when parents had more time but less money, but I doubt it's changed so much that we could impose a dramatic hike in fees without losing everyone. Every year we have a nightmare getting committee members: at one point we only had four which wasn't enough in relation to the number of parents (under the consitution) but you can't make people join. It is really clear what the situation is, but the majority of parents don't want to know. And it does get up my nose that people don't want to help and it's always the same small group of reliable but increasingly fed-up people who get called upon. And I'm not for a minute thinking of working mothers, or those with dependants they can't bring. (Btw we don't rota pg women and those with small babies, though younger children are welcome.) In practice, we don't have these sorts of parents: working parents use nurseries; as we are sessional care only three days a week we tend to have part-time parents or non-working parents. I think the fine came in out of frustration not with parents who couldn't help, but those who won't. This is a village where everyone knows everyone's business, so we know the difference.
I first joined the pre-school committee about 4.5 years ago and the parent rota was in place then, but not the fine. The fine was instituted a year or so later because we had such a problem with no-shows. As far as I remember, there was only one incident when it should have been enforced, but when it came to it, we (the committee) didn't. About 18 months ago the pre-school was pretty much full for all sessions and the playleaders that we had at the time wanted to disband the parent rota because they felt that coercing parents was of no benefit to either the staff or (particularly) the children and wanted to encourage volunteers. In the four terms that followed there was a calendar for volunteers, parents were asked to volunteer both verbally and in newsletters. A grand total of one parent came in voluntarily. Now, numbers of funded children (which account for the bulk of our funding) have fallen dramatically, which is why we have reinstated the parent rota. We used to have four paid staff, now we have three plus a parent. We are legal to run with three staff, but it doesn't give the staff the opportunity to a lot of the things they would like to: small-group activities, rising fives, trips to the library, plus all the bureacracy that Ofsted obliges them to do: observations, scrapbooks etc etc.
I would love to know what the alternative might be. I'm not comfortable with the fine concept (it wasn't my idea, honest!) and I suspect it's unenforceable but I don't know how we get parents to support us. We need them there. At our last committee meeting where we confirmed new staffing arrangements, our pre-school leader was going to resign if we didn't allow three staff plus a parent, and if she goes we really are up a certain creek without a certain implement.
I hope this is coherent: I suspect it's a bit stream-of-consciousness, sorry . I've tried to cover all the points that were raised in the thread and will try and stay on top of it now. Thank you to all those who posted, it's given plenty of food for thought and thanks too for the few who were in support and made me feel less lonely!