Full time to 0.8 over 5 days

[butterflycatcher]

I would like to reduce my hours to be able to pick up my children from school more often, rather than relying on after school clubs. I am a little concerned about how to work it out though as I am thinking about stretching 4 days over 5.

If I am reducing 37.5 hours to 30 hours do I do something like 9-5.30 x 2 days a week and 9-3 x 3 days a week. I need to finish at 3 at the latest in order to make it to the school on time and want to obviously do this over as many days as I can without dropping too many hours hence the 0.8 suggestion. I couldn't afford to drop more hours.

What do other people do and how does lunch hour impact this? Would love to hear suggestions on how to make this work. I can't start earlier than 9 unfortunately as I am doing school and nursery drop off.

I do 0.8, I work 9-3 mon to fri. I can use flexi time to do say 9-5 one day and 9-1 another if I want to. I do both school runs as I'm working from home - I have half hour lunch.

If you work 9-3 each day that's 6 hours per day and 30 hours per week. Working 6 hours means you don't need to have a break ( a legal requirement if you work more than 6 hrs).

OK that's very interesting to hear about break requirements as that makes a huge difference. I was thinking I would still need to work at least two full days and still pay for after school clubs on those days. Financially 9-3 would make this a much more feasible option. Now to convince my employer!

@Rebootnecessary how does your holiday allowance work? If I was working 30 hours over 4 days I would take a day off and only work 3 days that week (22.5), but if I'm working 30 hours over 5 days and take a day off I'm still working 4 days (24 hours) and effectively losing out on time off.

I work a v similar pattern to you. On my 9-3 days I have a half hour lunch break but an hour on my 9-5.30 days.

Annual leave is based upon days rather than hours because it is just easier (I'm happy with this).

I do two full days (9-5 with half hour lunch) and two half days (9-1) so those two days I have a but of time to myself and then pick up kids. DH has the same pattern so 4 days a week one of us is there. On the remaining day we used after school club or Flexi time to finish early - which we can make up on our shorter days if needed. Works brilliantly for us.

Just offering it as an alternative if your employer says no to every day and also if you have a partner or DH who can also do it so you share the impact.

I do 0.8, two days 8.30-5 and two 8.30-3 with half hour lunch. It means I do the pick up 3 days a week (DH does drop off), and I get to keep my day off which feels a nice balance.

Typically PT annual leave is measured in hours not days to accommodate varied working patterns. You'd get whatever number of hours you'd normally work in a week x the number of weeks holiday you'd get as a full timer plus hours to cover bank holidays. So taking a full week off work "costs" you the same proportion of your a/l in hours as taking 5 days off work would from a FT holiday allowance. I also had to book bank holidays off separately when I was PT but my leave budget included hours for this.

I do this. I work 9:15-2:30ish 3 days a week and 9:00-5:00 or 9:15-5:30 on the other 2 days (one day a week I don’t do drop off in the morning). It works really well and teatimes and running about to clubs in the evening is far less stressful now as we have much more breathing space.

I only take a lunch break once a week, the other days I work through lunch whether it’s a short day or full day anyway.

I was worried beforehand about whether it would be more problematic for scheduling work meetings but it’s fine, no worse than my previous pattern which was 0.8 with a full day off.

Good to know. I've put in a flexible working request and haven't yet heard back. Realised that I hadn't actually considered how time off would work. Thanks for the responses.

remember that in part time working you’ll also only get a proportion of bank holidays off not the full day, so may need to use some AL to take them off depending how they fall