Summer is here, and with the promise of sun, sea and sand often comes a good deal of stress for working families. With children off school, many of your employees will be grappling with how to balance their work and childcare commitments.

Below, we look at the Government’s plans to reform the family‑leave system to better support working families. We also explore how you can help your staff in the meantime to navigate the challenges of busy school‑holiday periods like the long summer holidays. 

Review of the family‑leave system

On 1 July 2025, the Government launched a full review of all current statutory family‑leave and pay entitlements. The review, expected to run for 18 months, will examine the entire framework to see how the system could work better for parents/carers and employers. To read more about the Government’s objectives, see this ministerial statement. Make UK will be responding to the call for evidence – please contact us with any comments by 15 August 2025. 

Changes under the Employment Rights Bill 

The Government also plans to make the following family leave-related changes under the Employment Rights Bill (which are due to take effect in April 2026): 

  • Statutory paternity leave and unpaid parental leave will become available from day one of employment. Currently, these entitlements are only available once an individual has been continuously employed for 26 weeks or one year respectively.
  • A parent will be able to choose to take shared parental leave before paternity leave (currently paternity leave must be taken first or is lost), which will give employees more flexibility as to which type of leave they take (and when) to care for their child.

In addition, the Government is proposing to strengthen the right to request flexible working (see below), and will in due course consult on new rights to bereavement leave and miscarriage leave, and increased protections for pregnant women and new parents. Such changes would not come into force however until 2027. 

How can you support employees now?

The Government’s detailed review and modernisation of the existing statutory framework on family-related entitlements will take time. In the meantime, what can employers be doing to better support staff with childcare responsibilities through busy holiday periods like the summer holidays? Here are some suggested action points:

Communicate your policies on holiday and family-related entitlements clearly. The importance of clear and consistent communication in relation to staff entitlements to time off work cannot be overstated. Your employment contracts and HR policies should set out the rules applicable to time off, including the eligibility and notice requirements for the various forms of leave, rules around pay etc. Subject to eligibility requirements, working parents/carers may make use of some or all of the following during school holidays:

  • Unpaid parental leave (eligible employees are entitled to a total of 18 weeks' unpaid statutory parental leave in respect of each qualifying child for whom they have responsibility, and can take up to four weeks per child in any year).
  • Annual holiday entitlement.
  • Right to request flexible working.
  • Time off for dependants (eligible employees have the right to reasonable unpaid time off to arrange for care of a dependant child (where there has been an unexpected disruption of their care arrangements), but not for them to provide the care themselves).
  • Carer’s leave (if the dependant child has a ‘long-term care need’, employees have a statutory right to one week of unpaid leave in a rolling 12-month period to provide or arrange care for that dependant). 

Employers may of course choose to offer more generous benefits than the statutory entitlements (including, for example, paying for time off for dependants, providing more paid holiday than the 5.6 weeks statutory minimum and allowing employees to “buy” more holiday at the start of the year). 

Train managers to apply your HR polices. In addition to ensuring you have clear and robust rules setting out how requests for time off will be handled, managers should be trained on how to apply the rules in practice, including how to manage competing requests for time off and how to talk to staff about their outstanding entitlements. Managers need to know, for example, what system should be applied for approving leave requests fairly: for example, should they be offered on a first-come-first-served basis, or based on rotating priority? In some cases, employers may prioritise leave requests from working parents during school holidays, with a view to fostering a family-friendly workplace and avoiding potential claims such as for discrimination or breach of trust and confidence. This may however give rise to difficult issues, as may the sometimes complex interaction between holiday and family leave entitlements, so seek specialist legal advice on individual circumstances as needed. 

Offer flexible work models where possible, including remote and hybrid working opportunities. According to the Modern Family Index 2025, 73% of the 3,000 families surveyed said they would consider an employer’s support for family life before accepting/applying for a promotion or a new job, so taking active steps to support staff to navigate the challenges of modern family life can reap significant benefits. For many employees, the ability to work flexibly, both in terms of timing and location, can significantly boost their work-life balance (for example, cutting down on time spent commuting, allowing them to drop-off/pick-up their children from childcare etc). That said, one size does not fit all (indeed, some staff might prefer to use the office as an “escape from the chaos” of home), so avoid making assumptions and offer options where you can. 

Employees with children tend to particularly value the ability to work flexibility during the school holidays, and some employers do for this reason take a different, more generous approach to working hours and location of work during these periods. In addition, note that employees have the right to make a statutory request for flexible working on a temporary basis (as well as on a permanent one), if for example they just need the flexibility to cover a particular summer holiday. Keep in mind too that, once proposed changes in the Employment Rights Bill come into force, you will only be able to refuse flexible working requests if doing so is reasonable, and you will need to explain why the refusal is reasonable. With a likely increase in flexible working requests on the horizon, it is worth reviewing the types of flexibility you can accommodate and ensuring that managers are up to speed on how to handle requests under the current regime, as this may make it easier to adapt when the bar is raised by the new legislation. 

Review your staff wellbeing package. Recent research by the Coram Family and Childcare charity found that families in the UK pay on average £1,076 for six weeks at a holiday childcare club for a school-age child, which is £677 more than they would pay for six weeks in an after-school club during term time. These additional holiday costs can place a significant strain on working parents and carers. Could you better support staff from a financial perspective? For example, do your staff know how to make use of childcare vouchers/tax free childcare entitlements? Could you forge links with childcare facilities/holiday camps to help staff access the support they need? 

Given that the holiday juggle can increase pressure on working parents, it is important to support your employees’ mental wellbeing too, so remind them of existing initiatives such as mental health first aiders and employee assistance programmes.

Conduct surveys to better understand your workforce. Surveys, coupled with careful data analysis, can be highly effective tools to help you gain a better understanding of your workforce, in turn helping you to better tailor the HR support you provide.

If you understand specific pressures that certain groups within your organisation could be facing at different stages of their lives and careers, you can adapt your HR offering accordingly. Repeating a survey – for example, a year after the initial survey – can help you to understand whether the measures you have adopted internally to drive change have been effective.

Be prepared to update your HR polices in due course. As noted previously, various changes to the family leave system are on the horizon (some as early as April 2026), so keep your HR policies under close review and be ready to update them once changes to the law come into force. 

Conclusion

There is no doubt that the school holidays can be a stressful time of year for working parents and carers. We wrote recently about the importance of supporting staff through the full employee lifecycle and how doing so can help your business attract and retain talent: see Promoting generational diversity at work. Taking proactive steps to enable employees to balance their work and home lives should help you to comply with your legal obligations and maintain workforce morale and wellbeing, while ensuring business continuity during the busy holiday period.

How we can help

If this is an area in which your organisation would benefit from support, Make UK can provide further advice. We have a suite of products including general awareness training for employees and specific training for your HR and leadership teams. 

If you are a Make UK subscriber, you can speak to your regular adviser with any queries you may have and/or to request further consultancy support (including pulse surveys). Make UK subscribers can also access guidance on a wide range of employment law topics including template policies and drafting guidance in the HR & Legal Resources section of our website (see specific sections on Family rights and flexible working and ⁣Types of leave and time off).

If you are not a Make UK subscriber, you can contact us for further support. Please click here for information on how we can help your business.