The school holidays are a great time – for kids. For parents, they can sometimes cause a few challenges.
During term time you can go to work, knowing your child is being well looked after at school, or nursery.
But in the summer, or at Christmas, or at Easter (kids get a lot of holidays, don’t they?), you might need another plan.
If your child not yet of school age, there shouldn’t be any problems. Shine offers childcare services for 51 weeks out of the year.
But if your child is of reception age, or older, you need to find an alternative to their daily routine.
It’s not possible for everyone to just drop work and look after their children.
So, what can you do? Well, we’ve got a few suggestions that will hopefully help you out a little.
Shine Childcare – Holiday Options
The most obvious solution is to find a local after-school or holiday club that will look after your child during the holidays.
With Shine, you don’t need to worry at all.
We offer our own holiday club for school age children.
It varies a little depending on the nursery itself, but we’re generally in a position to look after your child for the full day 7:30-6:00.
And it’s typically more affordable than a normal day.
You’ll find the full details on each nurseries individual page. We have locations in Leeds, Huddersfield, Halifax and Oldham.
And they’re all of a very high standard. Three have been rated outstanding by Ofsted, with one currently awaiting its first inspection.
We’re very flexible, and able to work around your schedule. Pick and choose which days you need to look after your children.
You may also be interested to know we have connections with local schools, which allows us to look after children before school, and then drop them off ourselves.
Then, we can pick up and look after them until the parents can pick them up.
The site manager at each nursery will have a list of schools we have this arrangement with. Speak to them for further details.
Can Your Work Schedule Be Changed?
You can’t forget about work completely – but is there the potential for your schedule to change a bit?
It won’t solve all your problems, you might need a variety of solutions to get through the holidays.
For example, you might have family who can help out a couple of days every week.
The other times you may be able to switch up your current work schedule – possibly even working part-time for a short period.
None of this is perfect, and it might require you making plans on a week-by-week basis. But it’s certainly the cheapest option.
Take Your Annual Leave and Go on Holiday
Now is as good a time as any to take that annual leave you’ve been saving up.
And as your kids are off, you get to spend it with them.
Use this moment to go on holiday, if you can. Obviously the school holidays are the most expensive time to go away – but this can’t really be avoided.
Of course, this likely won’t cover all the time off kids have throughout the year. But like I said before, you need to mix a few solutions together.
Otherwise you’re just delaying the issue until another time.
Can You Get Creative?
There are other solutions available, if you’re willing to get a bit creative.
One idea is to make an arrangement with other parents, where you take turns looking after a group of kids whenever you have free time.
That’s if you can handle looking after multiple children at once.
Another suggestion, if you get into a difficult spot, is to see if you could take your child to work on a couple of occasions.
Obviously this depends on how flexible your employer is.
Finally, some parents have taken to sending their children away over the summer – either to some sort of camp, or to relatives who don’t live locally.
It’s not something that would suit everyone. But it’s worth thinking about.
But before you make any decisions – consider Shine’s after-school club. Suitable for kids of reception age above, and available at a very reasonable rate.