Better Business in Childcare

Welcome to the Better Business in Childcare (BBIC) Website. An online resource dedicated to the non grant maintained childcare sector in Gloucestershire.

The sector is made up of over 580 private, voluntary and independent childcare settings operating across the county.  The majority of the BBIC service is provided free of charge by the Enterprise Partnership under contract to Gloucestershire County Council.  The service was launched in November 2008 and the current programme will run until March 2011.

The BBIC service is dedicated to supporting the growth and development of a sustainable local childcare sector.  The service employs 6 dedicated Business Advisers who are on hand to support both emerging and existing businesses with advice and guidance.  Coupled with this, there is a range of practical support tools including a dedicated telephone advice line (01242 864123), events and training opportunities, online resources and regular newsletters.

As the title suggests, the BBIC programme is designed to improve the business skills of those managing or running settings in the County. It is not able to provide advice on welfare or curriculum issues but can signpost to experts in these areas.

Latest News

Interruption to Business – Paying Employees

A number of clients have asked us to provide some clarification about their obligations to pay staff when their businesses were disrupted during the recent adverse weather conditions.

The answer, as I’m sure you are all aware, is not clear cut.

Firstly, the question is dependent on who made the decision.  Where a business opted to close due to the weather conditions, the decision is clearly out of the employees’ control.  In this case, they should receive their usual pay.  Where there is a specific clause in individual employment contracts which states that this is not required, you do obviously have a let-out.  However, you will see below that a decision not to pay may still not be in your business’ best interests.

If a business is open but the staff member was unable to get in, (they made the decision not to turn up to work), their employer is not obliged to pay, and the day would, in normal cases, be taken either as holiday or unpaid leave. However, where an employee was willing to turn up to work but was prevented because their journey to work was affected by poor weather or driving conditions, the employee still effectively had no choice.  In which case, requiring them to take holiday or unpaid leave is likely to cause considerable ill feeling, which may be counter-productive in the long run.  As an employer, you are also responsible for the safety of your staff, and by penalising their decisions not to come into work you could be pushing them to try to come into work in the future in similar conditions, and put themselves at considerable unnecessary risk.

In summary, you need to consider the cost/benefit of the potential impact of staff morale, goodwill and personal safety compared to the short-term salary savings.  The fact that this is something they could neither prevent nor prepare for means that any subsequent penalisation would be seen as unfair, even by the most understanding of employees.
 

The advice to pay covers the core contractual hours. If the employee is on flexible hours or has regular overtime, an employer should take a fair and reasonable approach. In many cases it is normally acceptable to negotiate with the employee that they cover those hours another time but obviously this would vary on a case by case basis.

In the longer term, disruption due to snow and ice could be something you build into disaster plans.  This will enable employees to be prepared in advance, it can help you to communicate decisions quickly and may help you to ensure that employees who have an enforced day at home can still be productive.  As they are normally very low priority, disaster plans tend to be overlooked until it is suddenly too late (as many business discovered during the 2007 floods).  But a bit of strategic thinking in advance can make it easier to cope when a crisis does arise, and hence minimise disruption to customers, employees, the business and the bottom line.  The Business Link website is a good source of further information: http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/layer?topicId=1074458463&r.lc=en&r.s=sl