WWYD If Your Son Said He Wants To Work In A Nursery When He Grows Up?

By Natasha Hinde

I’ve never met a male nursery worker – and chances are, you haven’t either. Figures show just 3% of staff working in early years education in England and Wales are male. In Scotland this rises ever so slightly to 4%.

And it’s a global trend.

This week, at the Festival of Education, held at Wellington College in Berkshire, Robin Macpherson will open up conversation around how boys are put off careers in health and early years education because of gender stereotyping – and why this must change.

The headteacher of Robert Gordon’s College in Aberdeen believes promoting careers that bring greater balance to the workforce will help shift the narrative on modern masculinity, as well as boy’s and men’s mental health.

“There is a natural suspicion about men that want to work with young children, hence the incredibly low representation of male practitioners in early years and primary schools and in areas of the healthcare system,” he said.

“This is a really deep-seated societal problem which means it’s going to need significant and long-term interventions.”

What’s the answer?

Macpherson believes promoting HEAL (health, education, administration and literacy) careers for boys could bring meaningful change in the same way promoting STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) careers did for girls. The number of women in STEM occupations has doubled in the past decade.

“I am going to ask the audience: if you’ve got a son, and they came home from a careers day at school and said, ‘I would love to be a nursery practitioner’, how would you feel as a parent? Would you be happy with that?” said Macpherson.

While parents can obviously play a part, the education expert believes the only way to make positive changes is to start promoting these careers in schools. “It’s amazing to think how few boys will have anyone suggest that HEAL professions might be for them,” he said.

“It seems that many young men drift into STEM because it is a natural expectation – it fits the stereotypes that men build things or are good at maths. If we change up this default position by diversifying our careers messaging, then we can also create more room for girls going into STEM.”

Macpherson suggested schools need to do more to lead this change. “I also believe that we need to have higher expectations of boys around nurture, service and emotional intelligence,” he said. “If we expect them to show these qualities, they will start to exhibit them more.

“This is part of a wider reframing of masculinity that needs to take place.”

He added that for more boys to consider and enter HEAL careers, “it needs positive reinforcement, and strong role modelling, for the change to take place”.

As part of this, he suggested schools should be encouraging men who work in HEAL professions to come and speak to students.

“Thats where I think if we’re going to change masculinity, we need people working in these roles to shape a childhood and it’s going to be a generation-long fight to do that,” he said, “as we just simply are not pushing or advertising these kinds of careers for young men.”

A 2018 survey of 13,000 UK primary pupils revealed children’s aspirations are shaped from a young age – 36% of children based their career aspirations on people they knew, while 45% stated that TV, film and radio were the biggest factors influencing their choice.

Gender stereotypes also influenced children’s choices: 34.1% of boys wanted to be sportsmen, while 18.6% of girls wanted to be teachers.

At the time, the study’s author, Professor Becky Francis, Director of UCL Institute of Education, noted that while girls’ occupational aspirations were already far more diverse than in the 1970s and ’80s, some trends “remain stubbornly entrenched to this day”.

“Especially, the tendency for boys to be attracted to technical and physical occupations, and girls to be attracted to caring and creative jobs, remains evident,” she said.

Discussing why more men are needed in the early years sector specifically, Dr Jeremy Davies from MITEY (Men in the The Early Years), highlighted the early years recruitment crisis as an obvious starting point, but also noted that it builds a more “representative workforce”.

“Just as we should care about whether the early years workforce draws its staff from minority ethnic groups, we should care about whether it is open to, and inclusive of, men as well as women,” he added.

And for David Wright, former nursery owner, the absence of men in these settings “restricts the possibility of challenging gender stereotypes, discriminatory and misogynistic biases that children might experience or be inculcated with elsewhere”.

“In most UK settings, we are currently limiting the spectrum of character types for children to interact with, to a single gender,” he said.

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