Nursery World - Letter of the Week

Children need male as well as female role models, so I hope to encourage more men to consider childcare as a career.

There are far more children nowadays who come from oneparent families and, generally speaking, those one-parent families have a female parent rather than a male parent. These children aren't getting a male role model at home or at nursery and school because of the predominantly female workforce. They aren't seeing how adult men and women behave and react towards each other.

However, unless more is done to improve the pay, working conditions, training, career development and status of nursery staff, I fear that men - and, increasingly, women - will not be attracted to childcare as a profession.

I also think that there is still work to be done to change public perceptions of what has traditionally been seen as a 'female' role. The problem is self-perpetuating. As children go through nurseries with predominantly female staff, they've grown up perceiving it as a female profession. So when young men come to choose their own career, they don't tend to think of childcare because they see it as 'female'.

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