Rachel Kaye of Brand Recruitment writes:
Recruitment is known for being a pressurised environment to work in and is a career which does demand long hours when needed; this is not too dissimilar from the environment working parents in marketing jobs and other roles find themselves in.
The stress of juggling childrearing responsibilities with the demands of work takes a toll on many parents’ personal and professional lives; so is there enough being done to help parents that want to carry on working?
We have seen a baby boom at Brand Recruitment over the last 12 months, with four Brand employees becoming first-time parents, so we certainly have some first-hand knowledge of what it can be like to be a working parent.
Brand employees were looking forward to the introduction of the Governments tax free childcare scheme which was originally due to be launched in the Autumn of 2015, so it came as a disappointment to learn that a Supreme Court judgement in July meant that the new scheme wouldn’t be starting this year and we would now have to wait until 2017 for it to be introduced.
The judgement was the result of two providers of the current childcare voucher schemes raising concerns about how it would be delivered and the effect on parents needing childcare. When brought in, the scheme will be available to around 1.9 million working families who have children under the age of 12.
Depending on an employee’s family situation, they will either gain more with the new tax free childcare scheme, or will be better off with the current voucher schemes we have at present. So whilst some parents will be disappointed, there will be others that will benefit as they will be able to continue to use the current scheme until it is replaced in 2017.
Shared Parental Leave was introduced in April 2015 which means that new mums take the first two weeks of work off after the birth of the child, but the remaining 50 weeks of leave can be shared between both parents. This new policy is a really good step towards making it easier for working families and means that career minded women now have more options available to them – but it does still lead us to ask if enough is being done to support and encourage working families?
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