Term time only employment contracts - non education

[Hann376]

Has anyone in a sector other than education taken on a term time only contract where you get the school holidays off?

how does this work , i.e. what does this work out pro rata’d in terms of salary? Do you still get your standard holiday allowance on top of this?

thanks :)

Civil service, local government and charities may offer this. The annual leave is usually factored into the 13 weeks off so not available to use in addition. Your pay may be annualised so you get the same each month.

I know quite a few people who worked in retail who managed to swing term time only - the company - think large high street chemists - seemingly was fine with it since they knew they’d have plenty of students who wanted holiday work so it worked out well for everyone

It’s much easier though when it’s unskilled work like retail though where there is no workload as such to hand over to the next person

I worked in banking and one of my colleagues had a term time contract so she had 13 weeks off and her pay was annualised. The rest of us just managed to work around the school holidays with part time hours/switching days and lots of give and take from our very nice teams.
Colleague really struggled with inset days and child sickness because she had no back up and often had to take time off unpaid.

I had this in the civil service with annual leave on top. I then increased my hours so my unpaid time off added to my annual leave roughly equalled the 13 weeks, however I had to fall into the normal process for AL requests, so AL in the school holidays was not guaranteed (luckily at the time no one else in my team put in requests for the school holidays). I’ve subsequently increased my hours again, so now only have 5 weeks unpaid off a year. I chose annualised pay as a pp mentioned, so my pay is the same each month.
I should probably ask to increase again, but I kinda like the extra time off, and as my son needs me less, my mum needs me more. So am pondering.

I knew a few NHS admin who had term time only. But was quite a low banding so don’t know if that would fit for you. I think once you get into the realms of significant responsibilities I’m not sure it would be feasible (so I’ve never known PAs or secretaries to be term time only).

I think a lot of places (unlike already mentioned retail or hospitality where there are students ready to work the holidays) won’t consider it. I know in my office based environment it’s just not feasible and not fair on the other parents who are then limited on the annual leave they can have in the holidays as you’re already one person down.
The other holidays aren’t too bad, but trying to cover 6 weeks in the summer is a nightmare.

I imagine the availability of term-time working in the civil service will vary by team and department - it is fairly freely available where I am though. I don't work term-time, but I'm reasonably confident that it would be granted if I requested it.

We’ve done it in my workplace, it was a junior-ish policy development role. Private sector financial services.

We worked it by making sure that her expertise was in stuff that wasn’t particularly time-sensitive, and by giving her things with shortish deadlines when she was working so they could be completed before the next holiday.

In contract terms, the way we worked it was to allow her to buy extra holiday which had to be used at set times, at a rate that meant that she was ending up with her pro rata pay.

It wasn’t a total success and I don’t think we’d rush to do it again. It was a lot of HR and management time and the output wasn’t great enough to justify that.