A bit of a moan from mreyre! (Childcare facilities at/through Work)

Member Name: mreyre

Product:	Childcare facilities at/through Work
Date:	19/11/01 (70 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: there would be plenty for me, attract women back into teaching, help to reduce the teacher shortage

Disadvantages: would be cost involved, difficult for smaller schools

Childcare facilities at/through Work
I notice that, as yet, this topic has not yet received a dooyoo review, so here goes….

As regular dooyoo readers will know, I am a primary school teacher. Some may not know that my wife (alias “professoryaffle”, or to give her her proper name, “Jo”) is also a primary school teacher. The final fascinating fact is that we have a gorgeous daughter called Lucy, who, at the time of this review, has just celebrated her 3rd birthday.

Jo was fortunate enough to be granted a whole year’s maternity leave (albeit some of it with no salary!) when she first had Lucy, so she returned to work when Lucy was approximately 9 months old. As we had to move away from our relatives about 6 years ago to find work, (from the Midlands to Norfolk) we do not have the luxury of having any Grandmas to off-load our child onto for a couple of days at a time.

Therefore, when Jo returned to teaching, we had to leave Lucy with a childminder for the first time. This was such a huge wrench, and as Jo’s place of work was nearer, she had the unfortunate job of leaving Lucy with another woman as she went to work. For the first few weeks, this was murder and I don’t know how Jo got through it, but she gradually became to accept the fact that in order to keep the house and to afford to live, she had to work and leave our daughter in the care of someone else.

This was fine, for about a year. Lucy had got used to being with someone else (kind of like a second mother), and sharing a house with several other children. She had also learnt to crawl, stand and walk and say many new words in this time. These are experiences which are far distant now, perhaps because we were too busy working to share them with Lucy at the time. We then had a bombshell in that our childminder had to give up being a childminder as she had a new job.

We then had to go through the trauma of finding anot
her childminder. As Lucy was still quite young, this didn’t seem to affect her too much and she soon got to know her new carer. After about a year and a half, we had a little disagreement and parted company, thus Lucy had to get to know yet another new childminder. Three in three years, that’s not bad going! Added to this, she now attends Nursery three mornings a week and has therefore had to get to know many other adults and children.

OK, so you’ve read this far – you are now wondering where all this is leading, aren’t you? Well, over the past three years I can’t help feeling that all this trauma could have been prevented by something so simple.

Although I love my job – I couldn’t see myself doing anything else (and my wife loves it, too), something about it really grates me! What I fail to understand is that I am devoting about 30 years of my life to caring for about 30 children a year…..that’s about 900 children at least….but by working in the education sector I get no perks for looking after my own child. If Lucy is ill and I have to take a day off, unlike other professions, I can’t take a day off my holidays (as these are fixed), I have to take a days unpaid leave. (This works out at about £80 per day). I then have to also pay the childminder (about £20) as although the childminder didn’t have Lucy that day, the space could have gone to another child, leaving me £110 per day out of pocket.

I strongly believe that if you work in the education sector, there should be provision made (obviously at some sort of cost) to have teacher’s / lecturer’s children looked after on site by a qualified person (NNEB or equivalent). Obviously in places like Norfolk, this would prove difficult as schools tend to be quite small, but one suggestion could be a group of cluster schools could share the same facilities so that if your school was in say, a 5 mile radius o
f a larger school then this could be the main site. I know that in large cities, most certainly London that creches exist for teacher’s children on the same site, so why not in smaller schools.

There would be many advantages of this, not least to alleviate the stress and trauma we seem to have uneccessarily had to endure over the last three years, but also this would help to reduce the huge teacher shortage we have at present. Let’s face it, 90% or so primary school teachers will probably always be female and of course these are the ones who have to give birth, thus taking career breaks. It is often very difficult for female teachers to return to work with young children as the job is stressful enough already. If there was some sort of proper childcare facilities made available through schools, this would surely encourage more women back into teaching.

I wonder what other dooyooer’s think, and I wonder if anyone else is mad enough to be married to a teacher!!!!

Summary: