PARENTAL LEAVE POLICY

If you have at least one years continuous service with us and:

  • you are the parent of a child born after 15 December 1999 who is under 5 years old; or
  • you are the parent of a disabled child born after 15 December 1999 who is under 18 years old; or
  • you have acquired formal parental responsibility for a child born after 15 December 1999 who is under five years old;

You are entitled to parental leave.

If you have at least one year’s continuous service and you have adopted, after 15 December 1999, a child under the age of 18, you are entitled to parental leave for a period of 13 weeks in total during the five years from the date on which the child is placed for adoption or until the child’s eighteenth birthday, whichever is sooner.

Unless you are a parent of a disabled child, the amount of parental leave to which you are entitled is thirteen weeks leave for each child born after 15 December 1999 under five years old. If you are the parent of a disabled child, you are entitled to thirteen weeks leave until the child’s eighteenth birthday. If you work part time, the leave will be in proportion to the time that you work.

Unless you are the parent of a disabled child, leave must be taken in blocks of one week upwards with a maximum of 4 weeks in any year. If you take part of a week as parental leave, even one day, this will be treated as one week. If you are the parent of a disabled child, you may take your parental leave in blocks of one day or multiples of a day if the leave is to care for a disabled child, up to a maximum of 4 weeks in any year.

You must give the Organisation at least twenty one days’ notice of taking leave. NWA are entitled to postpone leave where the needs of the business or the quality of a service make it necessary. Any postponement shall be for no more than six months from the date that you wished to start parental leave.

You must give your manager notice of the exact day on which you wish parental leave to start, except if you are a father wanting to take leave straight after the baby is born or prospective adoptive parents who want to take leave straight after the child is placed with them for adoption. In these circumstances, you are required to give 21 days notice before the week in which the birth or adoption is expected and the employer cannot postpone the dates of the leave.

If you have already taken parental leave with a previous employer, you must notify us of that fact and how much you have taken at the commencement of your employment.

We are entitled to request evidence of your child’s age and date of birth to establish your entitlement to parental leave. If you behave dishonestly, by informing us that you have a child who falls within the requirements for parental leave which does not in fact do so; this will be dealt with under the disciplinary procedure.

For the purposes of this parental leave policy, a disabled child is a child for whom disability living allowance is awarded.

Reviewed: / January 2016
Next Review: / January 2017
Signed: Christine Starmer
Joint Chief Executive /

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