Did you go to Uni/college after having kids?

[lunavix]

And how did you organise childcare? The Unis/colleges all have nurseries, but they say you have to book well before your course starts - how do you do that without a timetable???

I did, ds was at school and managed to work my studies around him.. not all lectures were 'essential' Managed good grades tho. It depends on your course. With the nursing I did have to work full time hours for placdements which got diff at times and resulted in nights om some placements. I was lucky enough to get a few community which were 9 to 5. hth. x

Book a full time place and then if once you have your timetable you don't need so many hours, cut them down.

awen - I'm hoping to do nursing too. How many days/hours were you actually at Uni for? I'm not too worried about the placements but I'm more concerned about how many hours I'll need to attend Uni for. My MIL can help out, but not five days a week...

nutty - cos I've left applying till late, I'm not going to find out if I'm accepted until August which may be too late for any nursery.

3 - 4 days a week. Usuaaly for morning or afternoon. Varied througout course as they werent very organsied. For example would get a lecture in the morning and then nothing till 3pm. NOt all like that tho. Found lecture time easier to work around. You also get to know which lectures are better to to attend as some of them they just read word for word the lecture notes so no real point in going. Before lectures you can print out the lecture from blackboard.

I did nursing qualification at uni pre children.
Want to go back though to update and maybe do midwifery...

dds are 7 and 8
Think i will give it a couple of years

you also get you timetable well in advance x

Problem with booking a full time place is that you can not cancel from one day to another so you will need to pay over £500 for the first month even if you don't need it, which IMO is not worth it. Besides, university nurseries seem to have lots of demand but an off campus nursery may be more flexible, cheaper and, at least in our case, far better.

Is this for a FT study? I was doing a MA when DS was born so basically I just paid for a couple of sesssions that covered the seminars I had to attend, and some extra time that allowed me to get books from the library, I studied after 7:00 once DS was in bed.

Ah ha I see, hmm, will you definatly be using the nursery or could you find a childminder and provisionally book a fulltime place with them ??

BTW my university didn't release timetables until the week before the term started because it had a central system for room booking which was a mess. We sometimes had one class in the morning at the main campus and another one 3 hrs later in one of the off site centers a mile away.

hmm.

No I don't want to use a childminder I am one currently, so I know most local CMs, and the only ones I'd use locally are all very very booked. MIL can help out but I can't ask her to provisionally have dd five days a week. I don't really want to attend five days a week either! Ds will have five sessions at pre-school so I can put him in whenever suits my timetable, but I'll need a mix of mil and childcare for dd. I'm already feeling terribly guilty about leaving her and I haven't even been accepted on a course

lunavix - really wasnt 5 days a week for me. Mostly 3 full days at most and 1 half day when busy x

I have a childminder who is very flexible and understanding about last minute changes to timetable.