Every single survey, report, enquiry, commission I have seen on women’s workforce participation has completely missed the elephant in the room, the reason balancing work and childcare is so logistically difficult and single most important factor that keeps women out of full time work.
Women’s workplace participation is utterly choked by the school structure in Australia. Until we start asking the right questions we will never get even close to useful answers.
Childcare is a band-aid on a broken leg, no wonder every attempt to stick it on at a different angle doesn’t work. Fixing childcare is a good idea, but only covers the first few years of a child’s life. Then they hit 12 long years of school and life as a working parent really goes pear-shaped.
Most public schools have, at most, 40 contact weeks per year, six hours per day, and that’s before every all-day excursion, sports day, swimming day, arts day, assembly and learning journey – ALL of which school expects a parent to appear at. Let alone the five professional development days, which are of course pupil free, and, in Western Australia at least, they don’t have to coordinate them across schools. So next year I will have four children in three different public schools, and could potentially have 15 pupil free days a year to navigate for the next 5 years. And that before holidays even start.
Most workplaces have 48 contact weeks and eight hours per day. It simply does not add up. And in senior school, after exams, even if there is a week or more when your child doesn’t have exams, schools appear to simply stop.
Every workplace I know of and have worked in has flexed and been accommodating and understanding and yet 100% of the time it is workplaces, not schools that are targeted to do more and try harder to help women keep working.
Workplace reform, targets, and the entire parental leave and childcare discussion, the whole box and dice, has been a red herring and is the reason not much has changed. And it won’t until we all turn around and face the direction where reform needs to start. School.
I have worked almost the whole time I have had children, and they are now entering their teen years. The idea of leaving them unsupervised for long periods seems like a bad one; I know, because I was a teenager once too!
Post daycare years are just ignored in any public debate and yet most kids have had enough of it well before the age of 12 and most, given a choice, would not ever go; another inconvenient truth however we gild the lily.
I have watched countless smart, talented and hard working women gear down and out of the workplace, and, if they do step back in, they go into roles well below their ability and capacity to contribute and earn, because it’s the only way they can make their daily lives and families function.
School hours and structure are what needs change if anyone is serious about women fully participating in the workplace (ie paying tax, earning super so they are less dependent on the pension, paying back their HECs and helping their families’ finances and mortgages, presumably all things we would like to see as a community).
Let’s start with less summer holidays. Those holidays were invented in the 19th Century so children could bring in the harvest. True. Think about it.
Our kids are not exhausted, and it is only ones from affluent families who do interesting, expensive activities over the holidays. The rest are parked wherever parents can manage it. And where we park them in all the gaps between school and work hours is another very good, since even formal daycare ends at age 12. TV? Gaming? Risky experimenting of any variation you can think of? Few people in Australian have the luxury of extended family, so grandparents holding the fort is not a policy plan, even if we did try to work out a way of paying them.
I am fully supportive of in-home nannies being eligible for government support. As children get older, it is actually the only option if you don’t want to leave them to their own creative devices. If we’re going to home audit because we thinking mothers are rorting the scheme, why not audit investment properties that are negatively geared for all the so-called improvements? I’m all for audit when other people’s money is being spent (including mine), but I do not think retirees are magically more honest than mothers.
Women making the contribution so many want to make, after working hard get into the workplace, often paying a great deal for their qualifications, is good not only for them but also for the economy that should not need to fund their retirement. To achieve that we need to change the way schools operate.
The concept of principals being responsible for childcare is a nonsense. School could have another hour a day, and include daily physical education class, which, in terms of taxpayers health return, would be easy to calculate and of substantial value. They could also implement a maximum of eight to ten weeks holidays per year.
I work in the energy industry so I am well familiar with rent seeking behaviour. I can hear the teachers’ union from my lounge room. If we need to pay teachers or extra staff more, so be it. The sums of additional tax, superannuation saved to reduce future pension payments, less government benefits, etc, would be easily quantifiable.
Why not have selected schools trial it? Maybe starting in disadvantaged areas, where many single mums are under so much pressure to find employment, and see if parents vote with their feet and head off to work knowing their children are safe and learning more?
My mother-in-law reminded me recently that when the men went to war in Britain in WW2 they changed school hours so women could fill their places in the workforce. Interesting. No confusion there. No policies, longwinded enquiries or workplace targets, just action. When women could work, they did. Then when they wanted those spots vacated so returned servicemen could find a job, school hours changed back. When it really mattered, government knew perfectly well what to do.
We subsidise babies to go into long hour daycare 48 weeks a year, up to 12 hours a day. We are actively encouraging this with the ill-conceived parenting leave plan, presumably this is what they expect to happen when the mums do go back to work. But new mums, you have another 18 years to go!
These babies and toddlers we have determined can be away from their home and parents for all this time, supposedly morph into fragile children who can only bear, at the most, six hours school a day and need 14 odd weeks holiday a year? Where is the thought process in this?
And it gets better. There’s two more weeks holiday the teachers somehow negotiated in when we went from three terms to four, as was the way in my school years.
My view is that overall, babies and toddlers are best supported by the community to be at home with their mothers and families as far as possible. This is a short window in a working woman’s life, and a pivotal time for the pre-schoolers development. Government supported day-care nannies and home help has a real role to play in helping women retain a level of workplace connection.
And then, when children are older, more independent and ready to learn, for the next 12 years of school life let’s look at more closely aligning school and work.
Until his happens, any change that does occur will be at the margin, and at the direct expense of the children, left unsupervised or in poor quality care, highly costly to the taxpayer, and stressful for parents, especially mothers, who continue to make one and one add up to three every single day.