In 2020, I thought, my time would finally come. After four years of paying full-time nursery fees for two children, my eldest child was starting school.
No longer would I sigh wistfully as my friends spoke of monthly savings and spontaneous holidays. With only one set of nursery fees to pay, I too would finally enjoy the paycheque I had worked so hard for over the last 11 years. Heck, I was even reducing my hours to part-time for the first time in my working life.
How naïve I was. Where, I wonder, had I imagined my child would go between 7.30am and 8.50am, when I was doing the photocopying and registering my form group? What about between 3.00pm and 6.00pm when I was teaching period seven, running detentions and twilights, attending meetings or preparing for the next day?
Wraparound care, parents of older children explained to me slowly. Breakfast and after-school clubs. Oh. But these things still cost money - not quite as much as a term of nursery fees, but enough to mentally replace that summer in the Maldives with an AirBnB in Wales.
Coronavirus childcare: Confusing and overwhelming
And then came the pandemic, and lockdown, and all the adjustments to school openings and ways of operating that affected me both as a teacher and as a parent. We missed the deadline for wraparound care, argued about whose fault this was in the cabin fever of quarantine, and were then informed that, in any case, after-school care would be ad hoc and limited by year-group bubbles.
It became confusing and overwhelming. Other parents in the park spoke in a relaxed way about continuing to work from home until January and the joy of being able to do the pick up and drop off around their remote working hours. But this wasn’t an option for us, and by July we were faced with the very real possibility that, as a secondary school teacher, I would be returning to school in September and there would be nobody to look after my son.
We scrambled. We spent two weeks hunting for a new apartment with a third bedroom for an au pair. We made three different spreadsheets (and argued about them), trying to calculate overall costs. We registered for nanny agencies and childcare websites, realised we could never afford the salaries or agency fees, and resorted to near-desperate pleas on Facebook groups.
I cried a lot because, by this point, it was blindingly obvious that we were going to spend more money than we ever had on childcare, at a time when I had chosen to lose a fifth of my paycheque. I felt stupid - so bitterly stupid, and cheated by the system - a system to which I had dedicated my professional life.
Someone to feed, deposit and talk to our children
Forced into a corner, we evaluated what we really wanted from our childcare: safety, morning and afternoon hours, a French speaker for our bilingual family, a DBS check. Qualifications? Not essential. Experience? A luxury we couldn’t prioritise. Just, please, someone to feed, deposit and talk to our children.
The term “nanny” often evokes celebrity or royalty childcare, but we are a family who rent a too-small London apartment in a postcode above our budget, and invested in a milk frother because we can’t afford to keep up with our independent-café cappuccino habit.
What we needed was an au pair, but - other than the understairs cupboard - we had no room to offer this sort of set up.
And then, like a beam of ethereal light accompanied by a heavenly chorus, we began receiving messages through a French Facebook group.
Finding our golden treasure
After a few crushing false starts, we found her: the golden treasure you leap and grasp before losing your final chance in the video game of life. An 18-year-old, who speaks not a word of English, who arrived in the UK the same week I returned to school, apparently here for an adventure, but evidently sent by some higher power to save our lives.
Especially now, when childcare bubbles are so precarious, I cannot recommend one-to-one childcare more highly. A nanny allows us to leave at 7.30am and come home at 6.00pm. She potters around the children and empties the dishwasher, or simply replaces the sofa cushions after den-building has been abandoned. By the time I come home, both children have been collected and have been fed, and sometimes she even gets bored and folds the laundry.
The benefits are mutual: she uses our kitchen to make herself dinner, our wifi to study remotely, our support to set up her bank accounts, and our son to gain entry into family theme parks.
On two occasions this half term, I have found myself with an empty half-hour before bath time and no schoolwork, domestic work or parenting duties to fulfil. I can ride a bike to work because I don’t have to drag a dawdling toddler to nursery on rubbish-truck day. The transformative impact that she has had on our lives is nothing short of staggering.
There’s no avoiding the fact that we have been lucky. But, until all our options were taken away, I would never have considered a nanny as a possibility for us as a couple on a teacher and entrepreneur salary. It’s worth exploring, therefore, whether - with a bit of determination, belief and persistence - there is someone out there who can offer you conditions that will make your daily routines a little easier as a teacher-parent.
Emma Sheppard is founder of The MaternityTeacher/PaternityTeacher (MTPT) Project and a lead practitioner for English
