Expert Comment: What the school run reveals about modern work and family life
Adam Webster, full-time father and part-time Associate Professor in Law and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, argues that Andy Burnham’s government must rethink how Britain conceives work, care and family life if it is serious about setting families up for success.
At 3:27pm, a parent sits in their parked car – laptop wedged between stomach and steering wheel – wrapping up a Teams meeting before the school gates open. We have built a world where parents are expected to be simultaneously working and present for family.
With schools now out for the summer, the school holidays – typically around 13 weeks per year in the UK – also need to be covered. For two full-time working parents, each with only 28 days of annual leave, the maths does not add up. These logistics become even more challenging for single parents.
While modern family life depends increasingly on two full-time incomes, there is still an underlying assumption that one parent is permanently available.
“At his first Cabinet meeting, the UK’s new Prime Minister Andy Burnham said he wants to lead a 'cost-of-living government' and urged ministers to consider what could be done to take pressure off people's shoulders. The measures swirling in the media – rent controls, energy bill support, bus fare caps – would ease the financial pressure, but they stop at the household budget. Even with that relief, the school day and the working day still don't line up. If Burnham truly wants to set families up for success and good growth in every postcode, he needs to embark on a more radical rethink of how work, education and care are organised in modern Britain.”
How did we end up here?
For much of last century, the school day and working day did not need to align because one parent – usually the mother – was not in paid full-time employment. In the 1950s, 80% of mothers in the UK stayed at home and the school run was part of their domestic routine. However since then we have seen a steady rise in mothers in paid work, and today 80% of mothers are in employment. Similarly, in the USA, two-thirds of families with children have both parents working, and since 2020, the predominant family setup is for both parents to be working full-time.
Over the same period, we’ve seen housing and childcare costs rise sharply. In the 1990s, the average house in England cost less than 5 times the average salary. Since 2014, the average house price in England has been over 7 times average earnings, peaking at 9 times average earnings in 2021.
Childcare costs have also risen over the past 25 years, at a rate 30% above inflation. This, combined with rising house prices – and the accompanying larger mortgage repayments – makes dual incomes a necessity for many families.
Meanwhile, school hours remain unchanged.
Technology: the double-edged sword
The other significant force has been technology. Today, employees bring home a mobile office: phone, tablet, laptop. Technology is a double-edged sword. It gives greater flexibility over where you work, but it has also blurred the lines around when you work. More than half of all employees feel obligated to respond to work emails after hours. A recent Microsoft study found 40% of employees check their emails before 6am, and the frequency of online meetings after 8pm has grown 16% year-on-year.
There is now a tension that exist in the structure of modern family life: school hours, work hours, childcare gaps and family emergencies. Someone must absorb the disruption when these things collide. Families have been left to plaster over the cracks. However, the reality is that no amount of diary management can solve the mismatch. While households try to solve the problem themselves, it is fundamentally a policy design problem.
A policy response for modern family life
The policy response needs to be a complete rethink of how we conceive work, care and family life starting from the moment a child is born. This starts with providing all parents with sufficient parental leave and pay. In the UK, fathers still only get two weeks.
The benefits of fathers taking meaningful parental leave extend beyond relieving pressures for new families. Fathers who take parental leave are more likely to remain involved later in their child’s life. A substantial period of parental leave, where they are primarily responsible, also allows them to experience the mental load for themselves and challenge some of the hidden assumptions that housework and childcare is ‘women’s work’.
A slight uptick in fathers’ engagement in housework and childcare during the pandemic showed us we can quickly upend the status quo if we want to. As we came out of the pandemic, however, this soon reverted to the cultural norm of women still doing more domestic work and care.
We missed an opportunity to rethink the way we work. We failed to think systematically which aspects of flexible work we needed to retain and how these could be developed further to support modern family life.
Each year families try to make it work, but the challenges they face cannot be solved by better time management or technology. These are structural problems around how we design our work and education systems that must be solved at a societal level. Do we need to rethink school and/or work hours? Do we need to – as the German Government is doing – expand childcare for school-aged children? If we do, how do we make this care an enriching experience?
In July 2025, the UK Government launched a review into the parental leave and pay system – Andy Burnham must use this if he truly wants to set families up for success.
Over the past 50 years, we’ve transformed the way we work. However, we have not modernised the relationship between work and care. We need big, bold solutions.
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