School’s nearly out for summer … and for work?

Although the weather hasn’t yet caught up, it will soon be time for schools to break up for the summer, our offices will be a little quieter and for some of your employees, the work and childcare juggle will begin. Most people will have saved up statutory annual leave to cover some of this time, but it’s often not enough and most employers wouldn’t allow the full allocation of holiday entitlement to be taken in one go for all sorts of business reasons.

It doesn’t seem to be widely known about and even less widely used, but Parental Leave (which is also sometimes referred to as ‘childcare leave’) may offer a solution to employees with family commitments. Distinct from shared parental leave after the birth of a child, Parental Leave is statutory unpaid leave designed for an eligible employee to look after their child’s welfare (to include simply spending more time with their children) and it allows 18 weeks’ leave, per parent, per child, up to the child’s 18th birthday. The leave is taken in blocks of not less than one week and not more than one month at a time and the allowance extends across the child’s life to the age of 18 (not across the employee’s engagement with their employer).

Although allocating parental leave requires business planning to manage workload across teams, it’s usually preferable to employees trying to work and manage childcare at the same time, which can lead to issues around reduced productivity and presenteeism.

It’s not just childcare that requires additional time off, of course, and Carers’ leave is a relatively new statutory right to up to one week (i.e., five working days) of unpaid leave for carers. Employees who have a spouse, partner, civil partner, child, parent, household member or someone who reasonably relies on them for care (i.e., a dependant) are eligible to exercise their right to statutory carers’ leave from day one of their employment.

Best practice employers will do their best to grant unpaid time off as appropriate, supporting their people in managing life outside of work to retain and attract talent and maintain engagement and offer genuine support. It is also worth considering that paid and unpaid leave can be enhanced, and you may wish to offer more than the statutory entitlements to your employees to boost your employee benefits.

Get in touch with hrteam@theinkgroup.co.uk if you’d like help with your policies around paid and unpaid leave.