I’m sitting in the staffroom of a primary school in West London waiting to talk to a busy Head Teacher about the impact of a parenting programme I’ve been running in his school. I’m thinking about the lady I met on my journey in this morning. She gets on the train behind me and I didn’t notice, until the little voice starts up, that she’s boarded the train with a pushchair and toddler in tow. I get up and offer my seat near the door so she can sit with her son who’s parked in the bit where the doors are. She’s overwhelmingly grateful as though no one’s ever done this for her before. I ask whether this is a one-off and she says yes, people don’t usually lift their heads to notice other people. I say I didn’t mean that – I meant her coming on the train so early with her boy. No she says, I’ve been back at work since January and we do this three times a week. So I ask her about her ‘going back to work’ story and finding childcare. She’s a nurse and she takes her son into London for subsidised childcare at the NHS creche. We talk about this being madness and not what she wants, although it does mean she sees more of her son than if she dropped him at a nursery in her home town. We joke about it hardly been quality time, them both cramped in the commuter coop but accept that you do what you have to and aren’t all us working mothers just muddling through anyway?
I’m wondering why she couldn’t use the NHS staff nursery at the hospital in her home town? It would make more sense and how hard would it be for the powers that be to authorise that change to ’the system’? One NHS, one community, working together and all that? Instead she travels 30 miles with a two-year-old at 7am to get cheaper childcare.
It makes my blood boil that things aren’t easier for working fammilies. Having kids isn’t a lifestyle choice, it’s a necessity to keep our pension system going!
The Head is here, we’re going to talk.
