For years, nannies and the agencies that help them get work have wanted a form of registration to enhance their professional status. But both have voiced concerns that the voluntary Childcare Approval Scheme (CAS), which started operating in April 2005, and its successor, the Voluntary Ofsted Childcare Register (VOCR), may not be the answer.
According to Sally Thatcher, of the Better Regulations Team at the DCSF, 7,703 carers have registered under the CAS, some of them childminders but mostly nannies - and only a fraction of the estimated 115,000 nannies in the UK.
So far applications to the VOCR, which was launched in April this year, have numbered 1,150, not all nannies. So, why is there what may seem a lacklustre response to registration which the industry had been demanding for years?
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