THE first insurance policy of its kind to protect parents against bad weather school closures has been launched by a North-East broker.

Under the policy, parents will be reimbursed by £100 a day if their child’s school closes because of snow, flooding or a broken boiler.

The policy has been created by Neil Forrest, managing director of Towergate Insurance, in Newcastle and Stockton.

Parents pay £30 a year per child and the policy covers them once the school is closed for more than one day, up to a maximum of five days.

In the first week of December last year, hundreds of schools in the North-East and North Yorkshire closed as heavy snow and freezing temperatures made roads impassable and caused heating systems to fail.

Mr Forrest said more companies were introducing adverse weather policies, which meant staff lost pay for taking days off to look after their children as a result of bad weather.

He said: “This leaves many parents with the hassle of taking time off work or trying to arrange extra childcare at short notice.

“The idea for this came to me a year ago when we had a lot of bad weather. We’ve had good feedback about it so far.”

Towergate is linking up with parent teacher associations and offering to donate some of the money from policies if individual associations give leaflets to parents.

David Butler, chief executive of the National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations, said: “Not only is this a policy which many parents will welcome, but it can provide a welcome boost to the fundraising efforts of parent teacher associations too.”

Self-employed mother-oftwo Elaine Gilbert, from Low Fell, Gateshead, is considering taking out the policy after being hit hard by school closures at the end of last year.

She said: “My children are at different schools, in primary and secondary, so they closed on different days, and I couldn’t get to many of my appointments.

I don’t know how much money I lost as it’s hard to quantify, but it wasn’t good.

“Holidays are precious when you have children and you don’t want to have to take them unnecessarily."