This morning, for the first Thursday in a while I had a lie-in. Well, a relative lie-in. I set my alarm for 8.00 instead of 7.00 and then snoozed it! Quite a luxury for a Thursday morning. As a rule I have to make sure I am up and about when my daughter drops her smallest off to spend the day with me. Today teachers are on strike and so she is not dashing off to work. I suggested she might take the small boy to stand on a picket line. She took it in the semi-joking fashion it was intended. I’m not sure he could stand still for long enough.
She and her brother, by the way, were quite small when we took them to London to march in support of the miners back in the 1980s. We stood feet away from Labour’s John Smith in Hyde Park - I think it was Hyde Park. Those were the days, when top Labour politicians turned out for demonstrations and were not given instructions to stay away!
So, anyway, today I had an extra hour in bed and then got up and ran round the village. It was very grey and damp but not actually raining. We have a 50+% chance of rain today though. In fact, looking at my weather app, I see that most of the coming week promises us “light rain and a gentle breeze”. I don’t think I’ll be out in the garden doing the tidying up work that I have been telling myself I should do for the last two,or three weeks.
Yesterday we spent quite a long time listening to Jeremy Hunt droning on about his budget. (Odd facts: Jeremy Richard Streynsham Hunt is the sun of a navy admiral, and a descendant of Sir Streynsham Master, a pioneer of the East India Company. He is also a distant relative of the late Queen Elizabeth II and of Sir Oswald Mosley. Wikipedia says the Hunt family were “landed gentry”. He was president of the Oxford University Conservative Association. Well, that should make him very understanding of the concerns of ordinary working folk!) At least we only listened to it on the radio; I’m not sure I could have stood watching his face on a television broadcast. I don’t think many of us are really going to be much better off as a result of this budget.
Much has been made of proposals to improve childcare, making it feasible for more women to return to work. Terms like ‘free childcare for three-year-olds’ have been bandied around boastfully for a good while. Now there are plans to extend it downwards to babies from 9 months old. While our daughter welcomes the onset of her dose of free childcare - which does not kick in on the child’s third birthday but at a date which may be a few months later - she tells there are other nursery costs not covered by it, such as lunches and various activities. And it applies to term time only but, even though as a teacher she has school holidays, she needs to keep her little boy’s place open by sending him for at least some of that holiday time. So it’s good, but not perfect.
And today I read that student nurses do not qualify for the existing free childcare or the new extended version. Parents of children aged three and four in England are entitled to 30 hours of free childcare, provided they work at least 16 hours a week at the national living wage. Presumably the same will apply to the extended version. Student nurses have unpaid placements in hospitals which means that they simply cannot work the required number of paid hours, assuming, that is, that they have the energy to do so on top of studying and fulfilling their placement requirements. Their placements make it impossible to earn enough to meet the free childcare eligibility requirement of earning £1,976 over three months.
I can only assume that the term “student nurses” makes decision makers think that they are all university-age young people without family commitments.
Another little problem is the question of just who is going to provide all this childcare. Nurseries are having difficulties with staffing as things stand at present. So … lots of good ideas but can they be put into practice?
Oh, and I just heard a young mother on the radio news explaining how she was delighted to hear about some free childcare for her youngest child until she realised that it won’t come into effect until her child is about to start school!
Hey ho!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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