The school system is not set up for modern working lives

Op-ed by Emily Broadmore published by The Post, 28 July 2024.

The school system is not set up for modern working lives | The Post

Emily Makere Broadmore is the managing director of Heft, a nationwide communications and advocacy agency headquartered in Wellington.

OPINION: Over the past month conversations with clients and consultants have lacked their usual urgency.

The sense of progress has stalled, and phrases have been circling around lines like “let's push the meeting to end-July”, “let's kick the start of the project to end- July”, and “let's pick this up at end of July”.

Our roof is leaking. It was meant to be fixed this month. The text from a roofer a fortnight ago said he would now be “starting at the end of July”.

Reading between the lines in all these conversations I see the unspoken (because yes, we often like to pretend in our professional lives that the kids don't exist) truth, which is that three months per year of school holidays doesn't work for most households. People are struggling.

“This has to be a school holiday thing,” I said to my husband one night recently after another project stalled. “The school system is not set up for our modern working lives.” As a business owner I am suddenly very aware of the impact of the school holidays on our economy’s productivity.

Coincidentally, a day or two later the Wellbeing Economy Alliance - WEAll published a video pointing out that it's relatively recently that families required two incomes to survive. The video campaign argued that New Zealand is living within an outdated economic system, saying: “… the system has a name, it's called neoliberalism.”

Emily Makere Broadmore, managing director Heft.Supplied / Sunday Star-Times

No matter your politics, we have a school system that relies on someone being able to take a quarter of the year off work or pay for childcare over those three months of school holidays.

I wrote about this on LinkedIn, and comments were invariably from those of us lucky enough to have benefited from the remote work era bought about by the Covid pandemic. Yes, we may all be struggling with the school holiday juggle, but we have the luxury of mixing different forms of care with remote work because there is now, amongst this class of professionals, an expectation that employers provide a flexible remote working environment.

I am an employer. Heft was founded in 2020, with the idea of making remote working for communications professionals not just a possibility, but an opportunity. Groundbreaking at the time; normal now. Our team remains mostly remote and we do our best to flex around everyone's lives and family commitments. It’s at the core of our values, but we are also a business and we rely on productivity. This means striking some sort of balance requires constant negotiation. My co-director and I juggle days between us and roster additional cover from another consultant to support us over the school holidays.

This all comes at a cost. But it’s necessary. Because I am not particularly productive when working from home with children unless I neglect them all day.

‘I am not particularly productive when working from home with children unless I neglect them all day.’

What I haven't discovered is what families did prior to 2020, before those privileged enough to work from laptops could justify working from home. It certainly wasn’t the ‘done’ thing five years ago. Five years ago we would all turn up to work coughing and spluttering for fear of being seen as skiving off should we dare take a sick day let alone choose to work from home because it was convenient. Times have changed, but a significant level of inequality has come with it.

Those who commented on LinkedIn spoke of large amounts of money spent on nannies, babysitters, school holiday programmes and cobbled together care arrangements with other parents around the neighbourhood. The general vibe was, “we just got on with it because we had to”.

The unspoken reality is, there is a significant number of families who are still in this situation. They work in retail, construction or hospo. They can’t work from home and they can’t take the kids to work. These people are the ones still having to just get on with it at a time when the local cafes and stores around Cuba St are quieter than usual because so many people (economic recession aside) are working from home over school holidays because they can.

There's no easy policy solution to this issue. But speaking about it publicly struck a nerve with the community. Often, just getting the conversation started will lead to new thinking and hopefully, solutions will follow.