Unlocking the Power of Digital Signature Licitness for Pregnancy Leave Policy in United Kingdom

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in this video i'm going to be giving a summary and overview of the shared parental leave policy which is something that i've taken advantage of uh via my employer over the past six to nine months after we had our second child i won't be going into the really specifics of the policy but i'll leave a lot of links in the description below uh with all the details of the information that you'll need if you're looking to explore this in more detail so what is shared parental leave well we'll first start off with what is statutory maternity leave so statutory maternity leave is when a woman has a child and she is eligible to take off 52 weeks of leave from her employer so shared parental leave was introduced in 2015 to allow men to also share the parenting responsibilities with women so the policy itself then allows the two parents to share the 52 weeks of leave that the woman would be eligible for and they're able to choose how they wish to share those 52 weeks between them both so it could all go towards the man to the woman or they could split it half half or whatever other type of split they want now when i started looking into this myself i realized that it was very very complicated and there's so much terminology to work through so um i'll go through the main things now but again there'll be much more details in the description and the links below the first thing is to distinguish between leave and pay so leave is i mentioned the 52 weeks earlier not all of that would typically be paid in fact it's probably very rarely all paid so that's a big distinguishing factor to start with whenever you see leave just think time away from the employer but then if you're thinking about actual pay you need to focus on the word pay so there are different types of pay that you can receive when you're on um maternity leave or shared parental leave so you can be eligible for statutory maternity pay which is i think around 150 pounds a week that's given by the government to um [Music] women or men who are on the shed parental leave there's maternity allowance which is something that's available for women who are self-employed and that's another form of pay and then there's occupational pay which is the pay that your employer will give you typically more than statutory pay and different people will have different benefits packages ing to where they work so some employers will be a lot more generous than others and lastly there's the differences between maternity which relates to the woman eternity which usually relates to the man and then parental which can be either the man or the woman so when i was thinking about taking shared parental leave i had two goals in mind the first goal is finding a balance between leave and pay which maximizes your family's income and still gives you enough time of work to look after your new child the second goal is using the flexibility available to benefit your family so there may be things that you want to do in the first year of your child's life that you need time away from work for or you might might both need to be off at the same time for example if you decided to travel which is then an option with shared parental leave if you both take it at the same time so those were the two things i had in mind there are eligibility criteria for shared parental leave and both the mother and the father have to be eligible for it to work i won't go through the exact details but essentially what it is is that you need to have been working for your employers for a certain amount of time or be self-employed um and you have to have earned over a certain amount for a certain period of time before the baby's born so again you can look at the description for more details if you are both eligible what it means then is that you can decide how you split 52 weeks off parental leave between you both so the woman will have to take two weeks off after she gives birth and those two weeks are mandatory so what i decided to do because it made a lot of sense for me in my particular circumstance was to take um the majority of the remaining 50 weeks once my wife had taken two weeks off maternity leave to start with so one of the reasons for this is because my employer offered a more generous package than her employer so i was eligible for 26 weeks of full pay and then some statutory parental pay and then the remaining unpaid whereas her employer i think was only around eight weeks full pay and then some weeks half pay and things like that so it made a lot of sense for me to take um all off the shared parental leave especially because we were able to or my wife was able to take unpaid leave as well so we would still manage to spend some time together after she gave birth off those 52 weeks you'll be eligible for 39 weeks statutory pay or statutory maternity pay as a minimum so as i said that's about 150 pounds per week but this is assuming that your employer doesn't offer uh a parental leave package so you can see how it makes things a lot more flexible you can decide whether or not you want to take time off together and you could both potentially be getting paid if one parent earns more than the other you might also decide for one to be off rather than the other so that might make more sense financially for your family so that's one of the reasons i think somebody might be looking into shared parental leave another circumstance where i think it would make a lot of sense um for for parents to think about shared parental leave is if the mother is self-employed she would receive maternity allowance which i believe is roughly around the same as statutory maternity pay because she doesn't work for an employer she won't be eligible for their occupational maternity package which could be quite generous so in this case she could forfeit her statutory maternity allowance and allow her partner to get a shared parental leave and take his occupational parental package which would be offered by his employer another circumstance is where one parent's job is more flexible than other in terms of taking unpaid leave so like was the case with myself my wife was able to take unpaid leave while i took the shared parental leave which meant that we could both be off for a good period of time together there are a few things to consider when taking shared parental leave so one of them is that if you both take a good period of time off together at the start after you've given birth to your child then um just say you both split the 52 weeks equally then around six months time you're both going to be having to go back to work and you'll run into child care issues then because you have to decide whether or not you put your child at six months into childcare which might not be an issue for some people but might be an issue for others being away from work for extended periods of time as i've found is actually quite challenging and i've been doing things to keep up my skills including creating videos and blogging and developing and things like that but i can see how spending a lot of time away from work um would deteriorate your skills and you know you'd be a bit rusty if i'm being honest so um a lot of employers and i think this might be statutory as well which means this might be mandatory for employers is to offer keep in touch days they're called kit days where you can go back for a week or two and it would be paid and you can work just to keep your skills um up to date especially in some professions where you know it's probably um more important to keep your skills up to date like working in hospitals for example you can combine shared parental leave with annual leave so while you take time off for parental leave your annual leave should still be accruing so you can also use a bit of both if you want if it made things a bit more flexible and allows you to extend your parental leave periods for whatever reason lastly technically if you've been away for more than 26 weeks on parental leave then your employer doesn't have to offer you the exact same role when you return but it has to be an equivalent role at the same grade and that just might be something to consider um of course a lot of employers will be more flexible than that and they'll find cover for the whole of the maternity period of 52 weeks but um if it's less than 26 weeks you don't have anything to worry about you know you're guaranteed to get your own your same role and you could raise that if there was any issues so one of the main reasons why i made this video is because i've really really enjoyed my time on shared parental leave i've i would i've had no regrets in taking shared parental leave i've learned so much from being around and helping to raise my second child it's really given me an opportunity to step back and think about where my career is heading the types of things i want to do and it led me down the path of starting the education journey channel and my blog and i've really enjoyed doing that and it's something i want to pursue and continue to do in the future when i go back to work so these are the benefits that you can get from taking some time off even if it's on parental leave you know it's one job to another but there are times during the day where you do get um a bit of a bit of loan time to think about things which you might not even get in your in your day job if it's just full-on nine-to-five that was my experience of shared parental leave it can be really difficult to navigate all the terminology uh all the different things related to this policy so if you have any questions just drop them in the comments below i'll try my best to answer them or point you towards resources that can do a better job than myself in explaining all the details if you have taken shared parental leave yourself why don't you drop a comment below tell us what your experience was of share parental leave did you enjoy it did you benefit from it and would you recommend it to others cool okay well thumbs up if you like this one and i'll catch you in the next one bye