The Leaving Cert results are in, first round offers are out and the soon-to-be undergraduates and their parents are grappling with such life decisions as “does my child really need a beer pong set in their uni survival kit?” (An actual question posed recently in this house, as we surveyed the university’s list of “essentials”.)
But for families at the other end of the educational spectrum – or those who, like mine, have one student leaving for university at the other end of the island, another in secondary and one still in primary – the annual task of trying to solve a maths equation that would stump Alan Turing has only just begun.
I’m talking about the exercise in quantum field theory every primary school parent must pass in order to progress into the autumn term.
Sample questions include: if school finishes at 2.05pm, but I have to be at my desk until at least 5.30pm, and we can avail of a place in after school care, how do I get her to gymnastics at 4pm on Tuesdays and swimming on Fridays at 3pm?
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Or this: if I work from home, how do I manage to reconcile the school pick up with a Zoom meeting at 2pm? Who will supervise homework? Can someone else get him to hurling at 6pm? Will he develop a dopamine addiction if I let him spend the afternoon watching YouTube Shorts? And how do occasional play dates and birthday parties and haircuts fit into the equation?
Or this: does the phenomenon of a childminder who can drive but who only wants to work part-time between 2pm and 6pm actually exist and, if so, can she also bi-locate to collect a child in one place at 2.05pm and another 4km away at 2.10pm?
Spoiler alert: the solution, in many cases, is “granny” or, perhaps less often, “granddad”. More than one in three primary schoolchildren are in a creche, after-school or similar facility. This is a significant increase since a Eurofound study in 2020, which reported that Ireland had the lowest proportion of children in formal after-school care of any EU country, at 8 per cent. But one third continue to rely on “an unpaid relative or family member”, according to the 2022 Census. No, women, you don’t get a break from doing it all, even in retirement.
At the heart of this is the fallacy that still underpins the entire Irish educational system: the belief that every primary schoolchild has a parent – we are, of course, talking here about a mother – at home full-time.
[ The childcare scramble in Ireland’s growing townsOpens in new window ]
Our domestic and professional lives have changed beyond recognition, and yet the school timetable continues to be structured more or less as it was when Charles Haughey and Garret FitzGerald were battling it out for Taoiseach and contraception was illegal.
In 1986, when I was the age my youngest child is now, I finished school at 3pm. Then, only 16 per cent of couples had two incomes. Now, in nearly two thirds of cases, both members of the couple work – and yet the school day finishes even earlier, at around 2.15pm.
After-school care is more sophisticated than it was in 1986 – when “after-school enrichment” tended to mean “go outside and don’t come back here until dinner time” – but it’s also eye-wateringly expensive.
Figures released by the CSO in March of this year show that the number of women in employment has more than doubled in the last 26 years. Women whose primary job was “home duties” plummeted by 60 per cent in just 14 years, from 520,500 in 2010 to 208,200 in 2024. On the face of it, that’s good news: more women are getting to fulfil their professional aspirations, helping the economy to surge ahead.
But women still earn less overall and are disproportionately represented at the bottom of the earnings table. And, there’s reams of data to show that they still take on the greater share of domestic duties. It doesn’t seem a wild stretch to deduce there may be a connection here.
A straw poll of primary school parents in my WhatsApp groups revealed that most will once again be patching their after school arrangements together with the engineering skills of a junior infant let loose with the sellotape and a pile of used toilet rolls. A few have a coveted place in a privately-run after school facility.
Of the 900 after-schools around the country, there are now more than 500 on school premises, mostly run by private operators – meaning roughly one in six primary schools has an after-school option on site. The median cost for this kind of care is €190 a week. The National Childcare Scheme subsidy has reduced this by anywhere between €40 and €90 a week, depending on the hours you need and your income. But these facilities are heavily over-subscribed and typically less than flexible – some won’t even do homework with younger children, for example.
Other parents come to a private arrangement with a teacher or childcare worker – but there’s no subsidy available if you’re paying cash. Some – particularly those whose children need to be driven to activities – are forking out the wages of a full-time nanny, despite only needing care for four hours a day.
Some opt for live-in au pairs or professional childminders. And others (I’m raising a hand here) will be relying on a patchwork that may involve some or all of the following: grannycare, siblingcare, childminder and shared care arrangements with other families. Single parents, of course, have it toughest of all.
How to close the gap between the length of the working day and the primary school day is one of the great unsolved mathematical problems. Don’t expect a Fields Medal or $1 million award from the Clay Mathematics Institute if you do somehow manage to crack it – the prize is merely that you get to keep your job.
