My partner is on Maternity leave at the moment. She asked if she could have the last two weeks of her Maternity leave as holiday before returning to work. This was granted to her. However we found out yesterday that our childminder has been offered a job as a Manager for the local Tesco’s by her old boss. She’s accepted and is stopping childminding as of the end of the month. My partner doesn’t want to leave our 6 month with just anyone and told her boss today who didn’t take it well. Now Mrs Admiralable is worried that she’s not going to have a job to go back to. Now I know about all the tribunal routes if she doesn’t (doesn’t seem to worry the owner though he’s had a couple and just paid them off and f*cked up the futures of the employees in the process as much as he could) but whats the process for taking holiday while on Maternity leave? Can it be done or will we need to look down other avenues?

After the 26 week Statutory Maternity Pay, you can take another 26 weeks off as Additional Maternity Pay but only the first 13 weeks are with pay. There are “qualifying conditions” but I don’t know what those are, might be worth checking out the direct.gov website for that.

It would be wise to check out her company’s rules/policies/procedures as there should be a condition as to how much notice they require if you were to change the date of returning back to work – if they have stipulated a time limit which is longer than the notice you’ve given, then it may be very difficult to do anything about it.

In terms of taking holiday at the end of maternity, I think there is nothing to stop this aslong as adequate notice is given. Infact, the company I work for insist that all holiday is taken at the end of maternity leave!

If nothing else, she would be entitled to a copy of those documents for you to then use in a case against them if it did go to tribunal.