What happens when schools close?

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Parents will need to know what leave and pay is available to them whilst they look after their children. 

Emergency ‘dependant leave’ can give parents a short period off to look after their children or deal with an unexpected problem or emergency.  This may be unpaid or paid leave, depending on your policy but will not be sufficient to cover the length of time it is estimated schools will remain shut.

 

If employees can't work from home, then it may end up just not being feasible for the business to continue to provide pay, and then you'd need to be looking at holidays or unpaid leave to make up the shortfall.

If the situation goes on for a long time, and it becomes infeasible to cover leave with holiday pay, you may also need to consider alternatives to paid leave, for example, making loans available to employees, or lay-offs if the cost to business of staff taking time off because of childcare responsibilities becomes too much.

 

Holiday plans

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You will also need to consider how flexible you want to be about allowing employees to cancel and/or change their holidays because of coronavirus. I suggest you take a sensible approach and ask teams to re-look at resourcing and holiday plans for the next 3 months.  

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The Government has now advised against all non-essential travel worldwide due to unprecedented international border closures and other restrictions.  If an employee still wishes to go ahead with their holiday plans and they choose to travel, a duty of care still exists and it is fair for you ask any employee who is choosing to travel for personal reasons to a destination on the Home Office’s high-risk list that they would be expected to self-isolate for 14 days on return.