WANTED: adult males willing to hang out with infants all day. Interest in finger painting essential. Experience with projectile vomiters an advantage.
The Government has promised to provide more childcare. By 2008, it needs to increase the childcare workforce by over 50 per cent. It seems optimistic, as we already have a shortage of good-quality carers in this country. Since your cleaner or gardener is probably paid more than most nursery workers, low pay is the obvious explanation.
Government researchers have another idea: 99 per cent of pre-school childcare workers are women. Let’s address the recruitment problem, they cry, by wooing all the men out there who are desperate for more opportunity to look after babies and toddlers, but who are inhibited by their minority status.
Six months ago the Government launched a campaign to attract new childcare workers — especially men, ethnic minorities and the disabled. It commended local authorities for finding creative ways of targeting male workers, for example through ads at football grounds. Just one small step from chanting “Ere we go” to singing “Humpty Dumpty”?
Of course caring men make good role models, but how many nice guys with the right skills will be persuaded to work for peanuts because local authorities tell them that it’s “Cool2Care” (the name of a campaign advertised by Wandsworth in the Chelsea Football Club Community Development brochure)? A DfES sample advertisement for getting the men into childcare campaign begins: “Danny worked as a blacksmith, sandwich maker and labourer before becoming unemployed. He then started a career in childcare. . .”
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The idea, presumably, is to illustrate that a man can be both rugged and caring. But, to a mum, 28-year-old Danny’s CV reflects a progressive lowering of aspirations; and it’s an alarming thought that we are desperately seeking football fans, or unemployed blokes who have no other options, to raise the next generation while mothers get on with being economically productive.
And if you’re a mum sorrowfully leaving your baby in a noisy nursery, you’d probably prefer to hand her to a soothing replica of yourself. There is also, of course, that other unspoken fear about the category of men most obviously attracted to a low-paid job looking after small children. . .
We won’t know how successful the campaign is until spring, but the auguries for the new scheme are not good. In 2001, there was a government campaign — unsuccessful — to make 6 per cent of early years staff male by 2004. Even the most “progressive” countries in childcare terms, such as Denmark and Sweden, have a small minority of men in their childcare workforce. Although a ten-year programme in Norway managed to push up the proportion of male childcare workers to 20 per cent in 2001, as soon as the campaign stopped the figure collapsed back to 6 per cent. Constant campaigning is an artificial exercise, a little like trying to bribe schoolchildren with iPods; either people want to do the work or they don’t, yet we pour funding into those who don’t.
Childcare is open to men already — it’s just that men are, generally, less accepting than women of the sort of low-paid jobs where you can reach the top at a young age with no further promotion prospects. The other reason why there are fewer men than women in nursery care is that, generally speaking, cooing over babies interests men less. It’s biological: try asking chaps if they want to work in nurseries and many will think you are talking about herbaceous borders.
Affinity with small children, not gender, is the key criterion. To attract the kind of people whom mums would trust with their tots the Government needs to offer something other than low wages and a spot of image-tweaking. So where will the Government find compassionate, energetic people who would make good parent substitutes? Step forward those early retirees who want to give something back, or parents of teenagers who want to return to the workplace.