The job title of 'nursery nurse' should be changed to 'early years worker' in order to attract more men to the job, delegates at a national conference on men in childcare were told last week.
Kenny Spence, manager of the Edinburgh-based organisation Men in Childcare (Scotland), said the name change was one of several important steps that could be taken to persuade more men to enter the early years sector as a career. Others included ensuring that schools gave 'positive' careers advice to boys about childcare, improving pay, and having settings introduce a policy that supported the employment of men as childcarers.
Mr Spence also highlighted the isolation men felt when training for a career in childcare. He said that in 2002-03, out of 2,331 childcare students in Scotland, only 37 students - 1.5 per cent - were men, whereas 61 men were being trained in Edinburgh through his organisation. He said this success was due to a combination of factors such as aiming advertising directly at men, responding quickly to any inquiries by men, speaking to them at each stage of their training, supporting them throughout it and by building a good relationship with the colleges running the courses. 'Campaign exclusively for men and men will come in,' Mr Spence said.
At the start of the conference, organised by the Daycare Trust as part of National Childcare Week, Julie Mellor, chair of the Equal Opportunities Commission, said, 'Caring is underpaid because women do it. The relative pay of a particular job goes down the more women do it.'
Julian Grenier, headteacher of Woodlands Early Years Centre, quoted Greater Manchester Low Pay Unit figures showing qualified nursery nurses earning 5.32 per hour compared with 5.68 an hour for unskilled workers at Walker Crisps. But he said the early years sector should be better paid not in order to attract men to work in it, but because childcarers 'do a good and very important job'.
Mr Grenier added, 'We want a well-paid and well-respected workforce. The levels of pay being offered at the moment are not acceptable.'
Matt Hutt, a playworker with Wandsworth Play and Community Service in London, said the sector needed to follow the example of the NHS over the past decade in the way that it had persuaded more men to become nurses through a combination of better pay, employing graduates and encouraging men to change careers.
