In her brown Norland uniform topped with a bowler hat Harriet, an Irish student nanny, often hears passers-by whisper: “There’s Mary Poppins.”
Norland College is the most British of institutions — a graduate looks after the Prince of Wales’s children. The 130-year-old school in Bath, which is credited with creating the nanny profession, and possibly inspiring PL Travers’s Poppins character, always has a few students from Ireland.
“I watched a documentary called Britain’s Poshest Nannies with my parents about ten years ago,” Harriet says. “I always wanted to work with children, and it looked like so much fun, and it was so different to everything else on offer.”
Because their work is sensitive, Norland nannies can use only their first names when speaking to the media.
“I’m from Co Down,” says the head of students, adding that there are another two Irish students in her year, one from the North and another girl from Cork. “We’ve all become quite friendly.”
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Rachel Johnson, sister of the former prime minister, spoke glowingly of the Norlander who cared for the gaggle of young Johnsons, and Mick Jagger is said to have employed them.
Graduates are known for looking after the offspring of the global elite, although the school’s principal, Dr Janet Rose, says: “We like to say, we’re elite but we’re not elitist.” She stresses that the college is a charity and gives bursaries to help students from under-represented groups afford the €17,000 (£15,000) annual tuition fees.
There are a “handful” of Norlanders caring for families across the Irish Sea, she says. “Our current head of students is Irish, which is lovely.”
Although confidentiality is sacrosanct, photographs of Prince George’s nanny wearing her “N”-emblazoned bowler hat brought the college to global attention. “We never discuss any of our clients,” Rose said, “but it is public knowledge about the royal nanny.”
Men make up about 5 per cent of Norland’s students, but Rose says the college is “very keen and interested to welcome males and students from diverse backgrounds”. The uniform is quaint, but the curriculum includes the latest childcare research and 21st-century skills such as skid pan driving, self-defence and cybersecurity.
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“Our core diploma is based around nutrition, our placements, our sewing,” the student from Co Down says. “I didn’t know how to thread a needle, but picking up all these skills is so rewarding.”
Rose insists that the intention is not to turn their graduates into bodyguards or racing drivers but that Norlanders working with “high-profile or high net-worth families” may have to deal with “activities from the press and so on”.
“We’ll have military intelligence officers in one day and another day we’ll have a baby massage therapist or someone in to alert them to the fact that some families may have an Aga,” she says. A more recent addition is classes on brain development. “That’s something that wouldn’t have happened in 1892.”
The naughty step is eschewed in favour of “emotion coaching”, she says, which is “about helping to build children’s emotional intelligence, ability to regulate their feelings, and building resilience”.
Salaries for Norlanders — and there are ten jobs for every graduate — reach £130,000 (€147,000) a year. Julia Gaskell, a former Norlander who is head of consultancy and training, says: “We’ve got first years going out and getting salaries of about £80,000.”
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These days, the trend has moved from live-in to live-out. Nannies may work 60 hours a week, but they often work a rota of a full week of 12-hour days followed by a week off.
The Irish families who hire Norland nannies tend to be from the south and can range from “hard-working professionals” to “high-profile, high net-worth families”, Gaskell says. “They’re more likely to be travelling so they might have a home in Ireland, they might have a home in London, Spain, and in America.”
Norlanders have been described as a cross between Mary Poppins and James Bond, to which Rose says: “The association is fine, but we also want to challenge the stereotype of a sort of white middle-class female at the same time. We don’t necessarily want people to think that that’s all that the nanny is or could be.”
Ultimately, though, the college is happy with the Poppins link, because, as Rose notes with a smile: “She was chosen by the children.”
