Shift work can be a massive issue for childcare and bosses seem to not give this any thought. My current unit has even made it a standing order that childcare issues do not fall under their responsibility and the serving person must be on readiness constantly and have things in place ready for last minute tasking.
Even for a standard funded pre-school place, places are booked up by 18 months or more in advance.
We didn’t choose to be posted “down south” and compared to serving members “up north” we pay close to double in childcare costs. Fair......I think not.
Childcare in London is ludicrous, forcing parents to either get into debt or giving up the partner’s job to stay at home. Childcare places have a waiting list up to 2 years at the best establishments.
If you get under 90 days’ notice for a posting (in 13 years I have never had more than 2 months) you struggle to get childcare full time as you have to go on a waiting list.
If either parent serves or you are a single parent, childcare for temporary detachments (E.g. 8 week courses mandatory for promotion) at course locations needs to be available & a balancing payment made so as not to lose place at regular nursery.
The nursery on base is inflexible in the hours it offers. Overpriced, it does not support spouses when the serving person is deployed. It is also the only nursery for 10-15 miles. So it has a monopoly and is able to charge extortionate prices.
Costs vary wildly depending on location, and many nurseries on joint service units are affiliated but have no discount. Moreover, lots of units end up taking block leave which closes the nursery. Before and after school clubs that also cater for the holiday period (and actually do something fun for the children) are like hen’s teeth.
Most people seem to forget about secondary school children.
Here, there is 1 registered childminder and a (poor) Crèche, neither of which are available during the summer holidays. There are 695 under 18s on camp - the childcare simply isn’t sufficient.
My childcare facility opens at 0730, but my job often starts at 0700…. In air traffic control this is a real issue, as you can’t ask the aircraft to land early so that we can collect our children! There is no other childcare option available to us and this one facility has a several month waiting list. How is this acceptable?
The RAF assumes that the spouse has a less important job and should sacrifice their career. This is out dated and flexible arrangements and (better) understanding need to be adopted.
The only nursery on site shuts at 1300! It’s like they’ve forgotten women serve in the military as well as men.
The Armed Forces need to be more flexible with their working hours. They are becoming a smaller organisation, relying on highly trained personnel who take a long time to train. Partners will ask them to leave the Armed Forces due to the inflexibility of the job and the failure of the organisation to move with the times and offer flexible working hours.
wwww.raf-ff.org.uk ww.raf-ff.org.uk 12
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