Rohan Silva: Childcare needs more male workers for an equal balance of role models

Man power: the classic Eighties film Three Men and a Baby
Touchstone/Kobal/REX
Rohan Silva19 July 2017

Time flies. I first moved to London exactly 15 years ago — and looking back on it, those first few months in the city weren’t easy. I had no money and did some strange jobs, including a stint as an audio-typist for a Nigerian psychiatrist, which didn’t go well. Not only was I useless at typing but I could barely understand a word of what the heavily accented doctor was mumbling into his tape recorder.

A friend of mine took pity on me, and told me about a great job she thought would be perfect. She was looking after young children in a nursery, and the managers were looking for an extra pair of hands. It would be loads of fun, she said — you get to play with toddlers all day, which sounded perfect to me.

So one morning I called into the daycare centre where my mate was working, and asked to see the manager about the vacancy. I’ll never forget the look of disgust on the manager’s face when she saw I was a man — she took my CV without a smile, and didn’t even say she’d be in touch. Needless to say I never heard back, and that was the end of my budding childcare career.

It turns out that my experience wasn’t unusual. Fewer than two per cent of all staff working in nurseries or creches in the UK are men — thanks to what one academic calls a “quiet conspiracy” to keep blokes out of childcare.

This matters. As a recent report put it: “Male carers have much to offer, including acting as positive role models for boys — especially from families where the father is absent.”

No wonder 98 per cent of female nursery workers say they would like to have male colleagues, while almost 80 per cent of the public report that they would like to see more men working in childcare.

It’s depressing that this vast gender imbalance in childcare has remained, even as traditional preconceptions of “boy jobs” and “girl jobs” have broken down (except in Theresa May’s house). After all, more than half of all mothers in Britain with pre-school children now have a paid job, while fathers are spending much more time on childcare.

As one expert puts it: “Society has moved on, men are more actively engaged in caring for their children; yet the early childhood workforce seems stuck in the Seventies family model.”

It doesn’t have to be like this. In Denmark, there are tough targets for gender equality — and it’s normal for men to be working in childcare. Our government needs to follow the Danes’ lead, and fast.

But the great thing about the modern world is that we don’t have to wait around for politicians to act — we can roll up our sleeves and make change happen ourselves.

That’s why I’m opening a new Second Home workspace in London Fields this autumn — which is going to include an OFSTED-accredited creche with as close to a 50:50 male-female staff ratio as possible. We’ve partnered with an organisation called Manny and Me to make it happen, who are doing a brilliant job of getting more guys into childcare.

Our ambition isn’t just to make life easier for working parents by having childcare in the building — it’s to show that early years education ought to be a profession for both men and women. This won’t just be good for children but for society as a whole. Who knows, maybe I’ll even be able to work a few shifts at my creche. I’ve only been waiting 15 years for the opportunity.

Creativity adds meaning to our lives

“It’s time we admitted that there’s more to life than money and it’s time we focused not just on GDP but on GWB — general well-being.”

I was working as an adviser to David Cameron when he said those words — following in a long line of people from John Maynard Keynes to Bobby Kennedy who’ve pointed out that government policies should be designed to promote well-being and happiness.

Today that argument gets even stronger, with the publication of an excellent parliamentary report entitled “Creative Health: The Arts for Health and Wellbeing”, which shows how art can boost well-being, and help meet some of the big social challenges we face in health, loneliness and mental health. A great example in the report is Southwark Council’s art and craft programme for mothers in mental distress, which led to a 77 per cent reduction in depression and 86 per cent fall in stress.

As the artist Grayson Perry says: “Art, like science and religion, helps us make meaning from our lives, and to make meaning is to make us feel better.” Quite right, too.