The University is committed to furthering equality, diversity and inclusivity and one aspect of this is to support staff returning to work following Maternity/Adoption/Shared Parental Leave (referred to as “parental leave”).

As part of the University’s Athena SWAN action plan, a number of focus groups with new parents took place to gain a better understanding of their experiences of going on parental leave.

Following this feedback, we’ve made some changes to our existing Parental Leave provision which are effective immediately. They include:

Carry over of annual leave:
We recognise that the current annual leave carry forward policy is causing a barrier to staff who are due to be taking parental leave over two leave years; often resulting in staff taking leave at a time which adds lesser value to them in order to take it in the year in which it accrued i.e. prior to their parental leave period.

The changes we are introducing will enable parental leave returners to carry over their remaining annual leave entitlement accrued in the first leave year to the next, where parental leave is likely to span across two annual leave years and it is impractical for the leave to be taken in the year in which it accrued due to the period of parental leave.

The aim of these changes is to allow people the flexibility to use their annual leave entitlement in the best way possible to support their planned period of parental leave absence.

The changes will apply to all those on maternity, adoption and shared parental leave.

Our Maternity Leave policy, Shared Parental and Adoption Leave policies have been updated to reflect this change.

New Parents Pack pilot
We’re piloting a ‘New Parents Pack’ to provide practical information, resources and checklists for employees and managers to support staff before, during and after a period of parental leave.

You can have a look at the New Parents Pack here. We’re welcoming any feedback about the New Parents Pack during its initial piloted roll-out, so if you have some thoughts you’d like to share, please contact hr@nottingham.ac.uk