Hi Natalie, have you contacted our Employment Law free members' helpline? I'd be interested in what their advice is: www.cipd.org/.../

My understanding is the contract can stipulate that annual leave is taken outside term time. But I'm not sure whether you need to explicitly say how many days are paid holidays in the contract.

On the subject of term-time contracts, there've been a few interesting discussions on how the new holiday rules apply:
community.cipd.co.uk/.../new-holiday-rules---do-they-apply-to-annualised-term-time-contracts

community.cipd.co.uk/.../term-time-working-holiday-harpur-trust-and-christmas-shutdown

How much annual leave do you offer? Term time working usually implies about 13 weeks off per year. So are you giving 13 weeks annual leave per year? And if not, are you providing them with work for the weeks outside of term time that are not annual leave?

I would be really clear on what you're offering and find out if you can do "rolled up" holiday, where you pay a % extra on salary in place of giving actual days off and it's up to the employee to budget for their unpaid time. It sounds like you are working on a form of annualised hours, where the working time per month may vary but the salary doesn't. If so, work out how much annual leave you are actually giving and you can stipulate when that annual leave must be taken (without this being named in contracts usually).

Hi Natalie

In schools we use "paid weeks" which is working weeks + pro-rated holiday e.g. 38 working weeks + 5.5 weeks holiday.

Salary is then pro-rated based on paid weeks (e.g. 43.5 / 52) and this is then paid across the 12 months equally.

Our annual leave policy states that leave is allocated during school holiday periods.

Hope this helps!

In reply to Kimberly:

Hello Kimberly,

Thankyou all for the helpful answers. I was wondering please if you could describe how you handle leavers who leave part way through the holiday/school year?

Many thanks!

In reply to Charlotte:

Hi Charlotte

We look at how many working weeks the person has worked in the year, calculate what pay they should have received vs what they have received, and then pay the difference in their final pay as banked salary and holiday pay.

In 99.9% of cases the employee will be owed pay.