Beyond professionalism: Classed and gendered capital in childcare work

Abstract

This article examines the value of work in childcare, and the ways this is impacted by historical schemes of value in relation to social class and gender. It critically examines the push for professionalism within the field, showing that this favours particular classed forms of cultural capital, while rendering other forms of capital invisible. Drawing on interviews with childcare workers in Australia – overwhelmingly female and with little access to symbolic capital – the data shows an ambivalence towards the professionalisation process and frustration about the lack of recognition for their work, either financially or culturally. The workers’ views highlight emotional and relational skills, which are at odds with traditional definitions of professional skills. The author argues that what is needed is a new concept of childcare expertise, which acknowledges the classed and gendered histories of workers, and the already significant worth of the work they do.

Introduction

This article explores whether professionalisation has proved to be an effective way to improve the working lives of early childhood staff, and thus the field as a whole. It looks at what constitutes professionalism for those doing the work, and how this might differ from the practices advocated by researchers and policymakers. It asks what impact these differences may have on the ways early childhood work is valued. This research specifically addresses questions of value within centre-based childcare services in Australia, although it will be relevant to the wider variety of early childhood services where professionalism is being contested. These questions around professionalisation necessitate examining the worth of childcare work within society, both economically and culturally, and the impact this has on those currently working in the field.

I argue that social class and gender dynamics must be openly addressed within the early childhood workforce, examining their impact on the daily experiences of workers. ¹ Drawing on interviews with 23 childcare workers, I show that they are aware of how others devalue what they do, but that they have found ways to resist this devaluation at a local level (Andrew, 2014). This resistance is manifested in their investment in a form of ‘community cultural wealth’ (Yosso, 2005: 76). This cultural wealth can be understood as particular expressions of expertise in regard to engaging with young children, which are shared by all committed workers, whatever their formal qualifications. As Yosso (2005) explains, it is necessary to challenge the deficit thinking that automatically positions some within society as worth less than others, and to look again at what resources may be available to those who are marginalised.

Professionalisation and the struggle for value

This research took place within the context of a widespread promotion of the need for professional standing for those working in early childhood, during the last 25 years, by researchers and policymakers within countries with well-established early childhood systems (Chalke, 2013; Cooke and Lawton, 2008; Culkin, 1999; Dalli and Urban, 2010; Douglass and Gittell, 2012; Lyons, 2012; Stonehouse, 1989; Whitington et al., 2009). This need for a change in the perception of the childcare workforce has been driven within Australia by the nationwide implementation of a succession of accreditation schemes (Ishimine, 2011), which have been designed to assess and regulate ‘quality’ within the field (Dahlberg et al., 2007). The latest version of this scheme, the National Quality Framework, implemented in the period from 2009 to 2012 (Rothman et al., 2012), now covers preschools, family day care and out-of-school-hours care, as well as childcare services. A key part of these schemes is the need for workers to become more skilled practitioners, and to demonstrate this skill through acquiring specific credentials. These expectations placed on workers have been driven by the government’s need to justify funding for the sector, and have been implemented without understanding of the classed and gendered factors that may complicate this process.

This article looks at one of the two main institutional services for young children in Australia: centre-based long day care. The other – usually called ‘sessional kindergarten’ or ‘preschool’ – is delivered by a degree-qualified teacher, accompanied by an ‘unqualified’ assistant, in two- or three-hour sessions. Kindergarten has had a substantially different history and set of power relations from those operating in centre-based childcare, which has lower legal requirements for staff qualifications and operates for full days, usually 10 hours or longer (Brennan et al., 2009). One of the aims of professionalisation within early childhood education in Australia has involved emphasising the similarities rather than differences between these two main forms of early childhood provision (e.g. Mowbray et al., 2012), although this division remains in place and is often politically sensitive. Centre-based childcare has been subject to accreditation processes since 1994, whereas preschool has been regulated only since 2012, making childcare a significant site for investigating professionalisation within early childhood.

In examining this issue, I view ‘professionalisation’ as an intervention in discursive power relations – an attempt to challenge how an occupation is categorised by those with access to symbolic power, such as researchers or policymakers. One aim of this intervention has been to improve the status of childcare work. However, the most prominent rationale is usually higher-quality services for children, rather than better working conditions, though the two are interrelated (Fenech et al., 2010). These discursive contestations become manifest in the daily lives of those working in the field as ‘professionalism’, the material work of ‘doing professional’, which, in the childcare field, has included heightened legal responsibilities, higher standards of documentation, more sophisticated theoretical knowledge and a changed sense of self (Lyons, 2012).

This sense of self is usually understood as being expressed through particular values and ethics, and a greater sense of personal autonomy (Brock, 2013), which is believed to result in a more valued workforce – the desired endpoint of professionalisation. I call this logic into question in two senses. From an economic perspective, I note that childcare wages in Australia appear to have gone backwards during this period of professionalisation (Australian Government, 2011). From the perspective of cultural measures of value – such as respect or social standing – the views of the research participants in this study appear to challenge the optimistic predictions of changing occupational value.

One of the habitual silences in the literature about professionalisation is the impact of social class. An exception is Osgood (2009), whose analysis of early childhood policy documents in the UK shows the classed assumptions that still shape the field. Tensions continue to exist in trying to delineate the roles of those working with young children in situations where staff have different levels of qualification but do essentially the same work (Chalke, 2013; Kuisma and Sandberg, 2008), and these role-recognition tensions illustrate unresolved classing processes. The traditional professions have been dominated historically by those with access to significant amounts of cultural capital (including educational capital). As Bourdieu (1984) argues, it is in the interests of the professions to remain exclusive – to retain their symbolic and economic value. Wilkinson (2005) is even more explicit, seeing professionalism as a particular strategy of power by those with class and gender privilege, which is mobilised to exclude others from those particular occupations.

Within early childhood, these strategies of professional privilege are mostly accessible to ‘teachers’ (i.e. those with a degree-level qualification). However, the apparent logic of professionalisation has become so pervasive that some argue that this logic should apply to all within the early childhood field, including family day carers (Griffin, 2008) or teaching assistants in the early years of school (Cable, 2008). These assertions of professional status seem to misunderstand fundamentally the historical schemes of value that operate to classify some sorts of people as less valuable than others, whatever the work they do (Skeggs, 2004). If ‘workers enter the labour market with different values … making them more or less amenable to the potential for exploitation’ (Skeggs, 2004: 71), then changing the status of a workforce that comprises mainly low-valued workers will require a fundamentally different strategy from that of professionalisation processes in other fields that have historically been more valued than childcare.

Some researchers have noted their concerns with professionalisation in early childhood, but this often seems to assume that this process has not yet succeeded, rather than it being flawed conceptually. For example, Sumsion (2005) correctly identifies that the gender of staff undermines the ability to professionalise, but sees the move towards a more critical professionalism as being sufficient to resolve these issues. Her focus on degree-qualified staff also tends to overlook the classed issues that permeate this debate, assuming that professionalisation processes are only impacting the most qualified members of this workforce. Work by Fenech et al. (2010) makes these classed tensions explicit, and seems to accept the need for strategies of closure on the part of degree-qualified staff to exclude those with less credentials from accessing similar benefits. Osgood (2006, 2010) is much more wary of such strategies, exploring how discourses of professionalism are constrained by the sorts of classed and gendered discourses that are addressed in this research. She advocates a critical engagement with these discourses, but nevertheless still seems to see ‘professional status’ as valuable to the early childhood community.

This study engages with this existing literature around the limits and scope of early childhood professionalisation, and seeks to suggest some ways forward within this debate. Taking as a measure of the success of professionalisation the economic and discursive impacts on workers in the field up to the present, it questions whether this process has been effective. It raises the question of whether the main impact of such a process has been an increased regulation of workers’ lives, without any increase in autonomy, agency or other aspects usually associated with professional status.

Participants and methods

This article draws on interviews with workers in six childcare services in Melbourne, Australia. These interviews were conducted in 2011 and 2012, after the introduction of the new curriculum framework (Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, 2009) and during the implementation of the new accreditation processes of the National Quality Framework (Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority, 2011). These processes have represented significant changes within the early childhood field, involving increased media attention (e.g. Ireland, 2014) as well as critical engagement from within academia (e.g. Fenech et al., 2012). During the interviews, the workers themselves expressed views and concerns about the likely impacts of these changes, such as the devaluing of one-year qualifications.

Data collection

The services were approached based on their location in neighbourhoods serving economically diverse populations, and with the aim of representing the range of ownership models within the Australian system: community-based, local government and for-profit services. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 23 workers (see Appendix 1 for details), who represented a range of backgrounds, services, levels of experience and qualifications. Interviews were conducted with all those within the six services who agreed to participate, and this research cohort therefore represents a particular selection of the workforce, in either positive ways (desire to be heard) or more negative ones (disenchantment with the workforce). The interview participants ranged in age from 19 to 62, with levels of experience ranging from 2 years to more than 40 years. All of the participants were women, reflecting the very low representation of men (less than 3%) working in long-day-care services in Australia (Australian Government, 2010: Table 1.2.1). The participants reflected closely the overall profile of the workforce nationwide in terms of age and service type (i.e. community-based, for-profit or local government services), although the group was more qualified overall than the workforce as a whole, representing the greater difficulty in engaging with less-qualified staff. They were employed in a variety of roles within the services, from ‘unqualified’ assistant work to ‘qualified’ pedagogical roles, with two in coordinator or supervisory positions.

The interviews ranged in length from 25 minutes to two and a half hours, and were conducted face to face, by telephone or via Web-based video-calling services. Given the increasing comfort with forms of digital presence (such as Skype), no differences in quality were observed in data generated by different interview processes (Deakin and Wakefield, 2014; Hanna, 2012). All of the participants were also invited to a focus group, where I presented an initial analysis of the data to the participants. This group functioned both as a form of respondent validation and a process of mutual and extended analysis of the findings in collaboration with the participants.

The research methods used reflect my position as both a sociological researcher and a former worker in childcare. Given my interest in the role played by gender and social class, the questions asked of the participants sometimes confronted and challenged them about the value of their work. For example, questions explored their own views of the distinctiveness of the work, as well as their perceptions of views within society, and asked them to analyse the emotions they felt in interactions with supervisors and parents. Despite this challenge to their views, as a former worker I was also able to show understanding of the satisfaction and the frustrations that the work involves.

Classifying and identifying the participants

When identifying the research participants, I included their age (which among this cohort reflects fairly closely their years of experience in the workplace) and the level of qualification they had reached. This latter inclusion is a way of demonstrating that a meaningful analysis of the value of this work is not restricted to those with the most formal credentials. Many workers have moved into and out of a variety of roles within childcare, and many who are now more qualified began as unqualified staff. Ondine, in this study, is a typical example. She started without a qualification and then studied part-time while working, gaining first a certificate and then a diploma, and now has completed a degree-level early childhood qualification.

There is an important point to be made here. This is not about a simplistic ‘upward’ trajectory through social space, as Bourdieu’s (1984) theories would suggest. It is about the complexities of historical schemes of value (Skeggs, 2004), not just of gender and class, but also concerning early childhood occupational categories, types of workplaces, levels of personal articulateness, and so on. Ondine was alerted to this when, during the course of the research, she moved into a new position within the same service based on her newly acquired degree qualification. In her analysis of the situation, she had assumed a seamless continuity between the work she had always been doing with children, but it was clear from the reactions of parents and colleagues that they valued her differently. While she appreciated the increased esteem in the eyes of others, she was angry to realise that, throughout the years she had already worked (in ways that she believed were already highly skilled), she had not been taken seriously because of her ‘lack’ of the right credential.

Data analysis

Drawing on Smith’s (2005) framework of institutional ethnography, the data from these interviews is conceptualised as ‘experience’ captured through dialogue, which includes the participants’ own internal dialogue (and personal analysis) about what their work means, as well as the dialogue directly involved in the interviews. This data was explored using abductive analysis (Agar, 1999; Timmermans and Tavory, 2012). This analysis process generates findings through identifying novel or unusual aspects of the data when compared with existing theoretical understandings within the field. Thus, the views of the participants concerning their professional standing were examined in relation to dominant discourses of professionalisation within the existing literature. Such a process raised many questions about whether the optimism within the literature around professionalisation was apparent in the working lives of the research participants. These questions were then further analysed with the participants in a focus group, as noted above.

Questioning a well-established truth claim within the field raises issues about the trustworthiness of the research. Its value will be measured by its relevance to those working within childcare settings (Dennis, 2009) or to other scholars whose research is generating similar findings (Gorelick, 1991; Mishler, 2010). This research was carried out within the context of centre-based childcare in one Australian state, and therefore may not be generalisable to other childcare contexts with significantly different historical schemes of value. However, there is a widespread trend across early childhood fields globally with regard to an intensification of work demands and suppression of wage levels that this work may be able to address.

Findings

In this section, I explore the childcare workers’ enactments of professionalism in response to the discursive changes being made through professionalisation processes, and the ways in which they engage with this process. I begin by showing their ambivalence towards the changes – both positive and negative – that professionalisation is bringing to the field. I then move on to show their desire for recognition, and how this is sometimes expressed through ‘doing’ professionalism. This is not a straightforward process, because professionalism is fundamentally implicated in classed structures and tends to reflect dominant class values, which can differ from the existing and historical values of childcare (Colley, 2006; Nelson and Schutz, 2007; Vincent and Braun, 2010). One of the participants in this study was explicit about these classed aspects of being a professional in her reflections on the parent-users of her service:

I do think sometimes working now in … in a suburb that’s very, sort of, well, professional, and two-parent working, and, um … they’re all very … financially secure, and, and most, you know, nearly all of our families are … are together, and those sort of things … that things just seem to be so easy, like you know, there’s, there’s not like these really … um, fundamental issues of … I don’t know, the daily struggle. (Ondine, 30s, degree)

Social class is not a widely acknowledged reality in Australian society (Connell, 2004), and discussion of class issues is often subject to emotional and moral self-censorship (Sayer, 2005). Despite this, a number of the interviewees were reflective about the social dynamics of their local areas, and their own participation within these classed cultures. Ondine’s hesitations in this quote show the difficulties in trying to articulate experience of classed relationships. These hesitations represent, I suggest, a disbelief that childcare staff will ever be recognised as professionals existing in tension with a hope that greater recognition and reward might somehow come from this process. As with other research that engages with the working lives of childcare staff (e.g. Kinos, 2010; Osgood, 2005), classed relationships and practices shape the experiences of all the workers in this study. Knowing their qualification level may give a small insight into this, but it is important to remember the intragroup differences among workers with the same qualification (as Ondine’s experience illustrates), which will affect their views in ways that may be as significant as the different experiences of those with more advantage or less advantage, educationally speaking, within the field.

Lastly, I examine the worth attributed to childcare work, and look at the actual resources that childcare workers draw on and invest in, which may represent their collective cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005). I show that they use the idea of professionalism as a starting point to articulate what is valuable about their occupation, even if this ends up being quite different from conventional notions of ‘the professional’. In particular, I examine the emotional skills and dispositions that are necessary in childcare work, and how these represent one expression of the classed and gendered values within the field.

Ambivalence towards professional practices

One of the difficulties in examining the idea of professionalism within childcare is that the term ‘professional’ has both a common-sense meaning – as skilled or effective – and a more abstract one – referencing the traditional professions. These meanings slide into one another, making it difficult always to know which one the speaker intends. Dianne, in the following example, is trying to articulate her sense of where the childcare field is at in terms of the discourses of professionalisation:

Yes, I’m not … I’m not convinced either … as I said, in theory, making us appear to be professional … but I don’t think … we’re attracting people who are professional, I think we attracted more professional people before … you know, perhaps more … maybe not professional … capable workers, before. Um … so yes, I don’t know if we’re getting better at it. (Dianne, 40s, diploma)

In this passage, the difficulties in the language around professionalism are apparent. The first time Dianne uses the term ‘professional’, it seems to be in the more abstract sense, but after that it is being used to mean ‘skilled’. Dianne is concerned that, in the drive for higher qualifications, many of those who have typically entered childcare work are feeling shut out (even if highly capable), and so the quality of those entering the field is actually diminishing.

Often this ambivalence towards professionalism focuses on the changing practices that this process has brought with it, and the impact of these. Abbie’s concerns here focus on the paperwork, with the increased requirements for documentation driven by the accreditation systems that have been at the heart of the process of professionalisation within the Australian context:

I think the paperwork takes away from the heart of … like, I feel like … I’m sitting in this windowless office, writing learning stories that I reckon parents don’t really care about – they wanna see the photos, they wanna hear the stories, they don’t wanna read through 25 of my made-up, well, observed, stories … I think the documentation side of it, that is going to make us more professional, and seen as educators, and all of that, really takes away from the joy of the job. It does. (Abbie, 20s, diploma)

Lisa has similar concerns:

I do think there’s people that think … people go into childcare because it’s an easy profession … but it’s not … And especially now, if they saw how much work we have to do … the Early Years [Learning Framework], and all these outcomes, and learning stories, and portfolios … the planning and … If they saw how much we have to do, then they would realise that we’re not far off being … primary teachers, type of thing … I think a lot of this paperwork is taking over, sometimes, people’s … conceptions of what really should be happening, and we’re supposed to be spending time with the children. (Lisa, 40s, diploma)

The difficulty for those working in childcare is that they cannot easily resist the pressures towards professionalism because they have an investment in the process (Andrew, 2014). Abbie knows that she is capable of producing meaningful documentation, but questions who benefits from this. Lisa feels that her work with infants is very similar to that of a primary teacher, with the implication that she deserves a similar level of pay or respect. This concern for recognition of the value of their work came through strongly across all the interviewees’ narratives.

Desire for recognition

The desire for recognition occurs not only at a discursive level, in contesting the language and meanings associated with childcare work, but also at a material level, with the acknowledgement that the issue of pay is inextricably interwoven with public perceptions of the value of this work. Amber discussed this matter of recognition at a number of points in her interview, and makes an explicit connection with funding:

I think the government giving us a bit of recognition would be nice. Maybe stop with the label ‘childcare worker’ … maybe ‘teacher’ would be a nicer label … ‘early childhood professional’? Um … you know, and I suppose, money-wise, if the government were willing to put in … more money to improve the programs, help supply some of the resources and … offer more … to families, and of course the teachers in the services, to do more training as well. (Amber, 20s, diploma)

Amber is accepting of the label of ‘professional’, but certainly does not feel that this has become widely accepted, even after two decades of attempts to frame early childhood work in this way. This is why many of the interviewees seemed to see the issue of pay as critical. Acknowledgement at the level of language can be important, but recognition in terms of pay is more contentious, as the recent political struggle over wage supplements for childcare staff in Australia has shown (Hermant, 2013).

Andrea, whose frustrations with the field had left her burnt out and wanting to quit this line of work, was adamant on this point:

Well, I think for a start … there needs to be more recognition of what work is involved. So there needs to be an industry, um … increase in pay … then people will maybe be looked upon as more … professionally, professional, and then the work attitude and um … the actual work itself, will be … performed more professionally. (Andrea, 30s, certificate)

Andrea’s point is an interesting one. The logic of professionalisation is that higher standards and better training will result in higher wages. Andrea suggests that perhaps the logic should work in the opposite direction, with activism for better pay driving an increase in standards, given the likelihood that a better-motivated workforce will deliver higher-quality programs (Andrew and Newman, 2012).

Andrea’s argument references the historical schemes of value that affect the political struggles of childcare work, and the impacts of occupational segregation by gender (Huppatz and Goodwin, 2013). Skeggs (2004) argues that women are always at risk of greater exploitation because of the general devaluation of female-identified issues, and this phenomenon seems to be shaping the value of childcare work in this study. Abbie articulates a similar view, based on her own experiences with parents:

The thing is they respect us as people, but I don’t think they respect the profession for some reason, because … they … I don’t know if it’s parents or … people in general but … like, I’ve been asked to babysit and I say, ‘Look, I charge twenty-five dollars an hour at a minimum, so if you want more than one kid then I will charge more’. And they’re like, ‘Oh, you’re too expensive, I can’t afford that’. And I’m like, ‘Look, I’m a professional, and I’m qualified, so if you want me to bring my qualifications and all of this’. (Abbie, 20s, diploma)

Abbie does not name this as exploitation, but it is apparent that the parents she has encountered would like to be able to take advantage of her expertise while trying to pay her at the same rate as the ‘unskilled workers’ they might usually have found as babysitters.

The result of these struggles for recognition is frustration, born out of the mismatch between what workers know to be a valuable and complex job and the lack of worth that others attribute to it (Andrew, 2014). Samantha’s feelings on the issue were clear, and her puzzlement came through strongly in her tone of voice as she said this:

One of the most frustrating things in my job is to … try and get my head around why a family or where a parent would send their children to me if they don’t think this is a worthy profession. Yeah, and that just frustrates me to no end. (Samantha, 30s, diploma)

For many of the interviewees, as Abbie’s and Samantha’s words express, there is no logic to the attitudes of parents. At one level, the parents seem to value what they do and happily send their children to childcare, but then this sense of value is not felt in support for better pay or even discursive recognition of this work as the foundation of lifelong education.

Lauren, too, was frustrated, knowing that childcare can be viewed differently:

This is part of my frustration, in Australia right now, is that we are babysitters. And I’m from America, and I was very much a teacher there. Filling in the applications, and, um … taxes and stuff, I could put ‘teacher’ as an occupation, and here it’s childminder, or childcare worker. I have a really hard time writing that, because it’s not how I see myself. And it’s starting to come round, where we’re trying to see ourselves as professionals as well, but … it’s, it’s not in the public mindset, yet, to see us like that either. So there’s a lot of education behind that as well … for the general public. (Lauren, 30s, degree)

Lauren appears to agree with the wider push for professionalism, in that she sees the language which we use to describe workers as critical. However, she has noted that this discursive shift within the field has not seemed to change ‘the public mindset’ (beyond the field) about the complexity or value of early childhood work.

Beyond ‘professional’: relational work in the field

Given that the workers feel ambivalent towards the notion of professionalism, and are passionately aware of the need for greater recognition, it may be possible to identify some ‘grass-roots’ answers to this dilemma of value. This requires looking at the forms of expertise that the workers claim for themselves, and asking whether these practices map onto ‘professionalism’ as it is currently conceived, or perhaps represent something very different. This can best be shown by looking at what those working in the field identify as important skills.

I have deliberately chosen examples where the interviewees were framing their work as ‘professional’ to explore what practices they identify with this label. Mia sees managing her own emotional responses as critical:

I think also if you’re professional, because I’ve had incidents, been in situations where I think, ‘I can’t deal with this’, but I know when I get to that point, and I can turn around to my co-worker and say, ‘You need to take over, because I just can’t do it’. So I think that’s okay, and I think that’s professional. I don’t think that being professional you have to be happy with everyone, all the time, and get along with everyone … being professional we say, you have to know … who gets on our buttons, and when we know that it’s time for someone else to take over. (Mia, 40s, diploma)

Mia has an intimate understanding of the stresses of the work, and how these stressful situations can become overwhelming. She believes that an important skill is to know when such moments are happening and to deal with them in ways that manage her own stress and minimise the disruption to children.

Some of the workers acknowledge the skills they have developed in relationships with the parent-users of their services. Abbie found a new understanding of her skills in working with parents when moving to a new job:

It’s a bit more than just a professional thing, and it’s not … I’m not saying friendship, it’s more like … we respect where each other are coming from, and it’s good in that way, I found it’s a lot more real a partnership than what I’ve had … at the other centre I was working at, where I was working before. (Abbie, 20s, diploma)

Abbie’s entire previous experience had been in one service, where she began as an unqualified staff member before gaining her diploma qualification. Moving to a new service, into a lead teacher role, has allowed her to leave behind some of the assumptions about her inexperience that were embedded in the relationships at her previous job, and so gain a new sense of her own skills.

Ruby, in contrast, feels like she has been able to develop good relationships with parents despite her initial inexperience:

I know when I first started childcare, I was really … ‘Oh my God, I can’t talk to the par … what do I talk to the parents about?’ And … it’s about … becoming comfortable in that en … in your environment, and being able to be like, ‘I can talk to a parent about this. I do have the knowledge to … you know, talk to them in a professional way about how their child’s going’. (Ruby, 20s, certificate)

Having felt constrained by her youth and inexperience initially, Ruby learnt how to relate more competently with parents. She now feels able to mobilise the knowledge she has developed about children’s needs in ways that allow this to be acknowledged by parents.

The most critical skills that the research participants talked about were in relation to their co-workers, as it is these relationships that can make the biggest different between a manageable or unmanageable job:

Dealing with co-workers as well, because you do work so closely together, and you form friendships and … at times it’s hard to … to separate … okay, well, we’re friends, but I need to talk to you about something on a professional level, and don’t … take it personally, sort of thing, that can be quite difficult … I kind of have the hope that people will, will see it as a professional thing, and not take it personally, and if they do take it personally, there’s not really a lot … you can do to change that. Um … you just have to hope that people can, can try and separate that professional … from the personal, as much as possible. (Rebecca, 30s, degree)

It’s going better than I had first anticipated, and it’s working itself out – she’s not one that just leaves stuff to … fester, which I really appreciate. We’ve been able to talk it out professionally, and move on, which is good. (Lauren, 30s, degree)

Both Rebecca and Lauren are talking about the emotional and relational entanglements that are experienced between those who work so closely together. This experience is not unique to childcare, but childcare’s long hours and frequent team-teaching make for a highly relational workplace. These relationships with co-workers must be managed effectively, because workers are already engaged in what is itself complex relational work with children, as Mia’s comment earlier acknowledges, and relationships between workers add another dimension of complexity to this.

For Samantha, talking about this same issue, it came down to when not to say something:

Whereas in other industries, sometimes um … there’d be a lot more room for saying what you think, and then that’s it, kinda thing. Whereas with us, you know, you sort of constantly … be aware that we want that relationship to continue, we don’t want it to break down. Sometimes you do need that kind of professional judgement, to know when to not say things. (Samantha, 30s, diploma)

Samantha addressed the crucial nature of relationships with colleagues in childcare because these workers rely heavily on each other during the course of long childcare shifts. The skill she is talking about (‘not say[ing] things’) is tact, and also awareness that not everything (particularly negative comments) needs to be shared.

The last type of observation that came through in the interviews was how early childhood expertise becomes embodied. As Anne observes, talking about the difficulty in shifting gears from home to work and back again:

I think you can put on a professional hat, and … you have to leave your home stuff at home, and you have to leave your … work stuff at work, in a sense, so there’s a separation of that, but it’s the same person moving to and from. (Anne, 50s, diploma)

Anne, who has decades of experience in childcare, realises that despite efforts to ‘do’ professional detachment, each of us must acknowledge that we do not leave our bodies, selves or emotions behind when we move to and from the workplace.

Discussion

Those working in childcare have a common purpose with those debating childcare issues in the public realm. All believe that work in childcare needs to be valued differently, and that such work should be considered complex and meaningful, and remunerated accordingly. However, as shown here, workers do not seem to share the same enthusiasm about the new practices associated with professionalisation as those who advocate for this process.

Much of the focus on professionalisation has been about increasing credentials within the workforce, such as the entrenchment of a minimum one-year qualification within the Australian National Quality Framework (Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority, 2013). However, it is not clear what this process of credentialism is meant to achieve. On one level, a credential is only as useful as the quality of the learning that has gone into gaining it, and many of the interviewees were sceptical about this. Dianne puts this more forcefully than most:

The training that’s going on now is crap, absolute crap, because … the, er … need for minimum training now has increased, so there’s a million companies that have just come up out of nowhere. They’re all Registered Training Organisations (RTOs) that are providing Certificate III and diploma, and they’re fast-tracking students through in six months to get a diploma, and it’s not worth the bit of paper that it’s written on. (Dianne, 40s, diploma)

From the perspective of the participants in this study, they did not see themselves as working with better-qualified colleagues as a result of this process. Instead, they have seen the devaluing of what was already an economically marginal qualification. ² From a sociological perspective, credentials serve a number of purposes, but one of these is to entrench inequality by ensuring that better jobs go to those already advantaged by family and class background within the educational system (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990; Connell et al., 1982). The risk is that such a credentialisation process, which is fundamental to professionalisation, will operate to exclude the women who have long formed the backbone of the field – a point that is not often acknowledged within this discussion (Cameron et al., 2002).

The views of the research participants reflect frustration that they have not seen any meaningful change in their status or value as childcare staff. More than 20 years after the push for professional status, they still feel as if they are treated as babysitters, and certainly have not achieved any measurable industry-wide improvement in wages, with even diploma- and degree-qualified workers earning barely half the Australian average wage (COAG Reform Council, 2013; Kun, 2013). This reflects the ambiguity in the language of professionalism. Most workers feel that they are already professional (as in skilled), and so feel aggrieved that the financial recognition which should accompany being professional (in its more formal meaning) remains elusive. The economic benefits to workers, which would be the most meaningful result of professionalisation, are often underplayed or ignored within research in this area (e.g. Brock, 2013).

I believe that there is a need to think beyond the narrowness of professionalisation as the only avenue for change. This strategy relies on particular dominant-class notions of how to accrue value (e.g. educational credentials or professional attributes like autonomy) that may not be effective in a field whose workforce is drawn from locations in social space well beyond the field of power, and which cannot access the kudos of traditional professional occupations. Warren (2013) describes how professional authority can never be simply assumed, even by those with educational capital in the field, and that such authority is complicated by the social positioning of early childhood educators. Those who work in the field are predominantly female, and predominantly from non-economically privileged backgrounds, and so will struggle to accrue legitimated forms of capital that might allow them to contest their value successfully (Skeggs, 1997).

As I have demonstrated, when workers are asked to think about their own ‘professionalism’, the answers they give are not about autonomy or other aspects that might be associated with the ‘hegemonic construction of professionalism’ (Osgood, 2012: 45). Instead, the answers they give express relational work – the complexities of dealing with their own and others’ feelings. I have argued elsewhere that this relational work and the skills necessary to do it well – ‘emotional capital’ – constitute an invaluable resource in fields such as early childhood education (Andrew, 2015). Such relational skills are not usually represented in the new skills promoted in professionalisation. When these skills do become part of certification courses, in tertiary or vocational education, they seem to be subsumed under more professional nomenclature such as ‘communication’ or ‘self-management’ (e.g. Lovat and McLeod, 2006). The danger in arguing for an emphasis on relational skills is always that these will be devalued as ‘natural’ attributes of women or those who have mothered (Cameron et al., 2002; Husso and Hirvonen, 2012).

Interestingly, emerging evidence from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children may support this perspective on professionalisation. Gialamas et al. (2014) found not only that the warmth of the relationship between childcare workers and children was important to later school outcomes, but also that qualifications and professional development appeared to have no impact on these same outcomes. I do not want to suggest that qualifications have no value, or indeed that these quantitative measures map exactly onto the idea of emotional capital. Rather, I want to draw attention to the risks of investing so much research and policy energy in just one aspect of childcare quality.

In trying to contest the low value of childcare work, arguments relying on professionalism run up against the classed and gendered assumptions of value that shape perceptions of those engaged in this work (Skeggs, 2004). The gap between discursive constructions of ‘professional’ and discursive constructions of ‘childminders’ is significant, undermining the likelihood of revaluing childcare through professionalisation. Professionalism, in being defined according to traditionally male workforce values, may never allow those working in childcare to realise any exchange value for the complex emotional work that they undertake. The result is the current situation, where work expectations in childcare have intensified, along with accompanying scrutiny (Osgood, 2012), whereas attempts to address the financial under-recognition have gone nowhere (Hermant, 2013).

Conclusion

I argue in this article for renewed attention to be paid to the existing expertise of those working in the field of childcare. This expertise, often acquired through practical experience as much as any formal study, encapsulates a variety of emotional and relational skills. It is important to be explicit that workers’ current skills remain unacknowledged, and that these must be foregrounded when making claims for better recognition of childcare work economically and culturally. These skills are not the result of professionalisation, but a historical legacy of the constitution of the field, and the commitment of workers to the needs of children and families. Claims for pay and recognition based on professionalism are always at risk of being challenged on the basis that such professional status has not yet been reached. Claims for recognition based on the existing skills and intensive efforts already being made by workers are much harder to ignore than the unrealised possibility of professionalism, as shown by a recent legal decision with regard to a similarly feminised workforce in Australia, which ruled in favour of improved pay equity for social and community services workers (Cortis and Meagher, 2012).

I am not the first to argue that professionalisation in early childhood may be problematic. As Moss suggests:

the worker … may choose not to take ‘professional’ as an identity and not to participate in the discourse of professionalisation. She may decide that the concept ‘professional’ cannot be reconceptualised and ‘washed’ of its former meanings, opening up instead a politics of occupational identity and values that moves beyond the dualistic ‘non-professional/professional’ divide. (Moss, 2006: 38)

However, such a revaluation has a greater urgency than ever before, as the pay of those in childcare continues to erode, while work expectations rise. If ‘professionalisation’ cannot deliver any greater recognition of the value of childcare work, then new strategies must be considered. Moreover, claims to professional status are premised on excluding those who fall outside those boundaries (Wilkinson, 2005), such as those with lower qualifications or unrecognised ones (e.g. migrant women with overseas educational qualifications). In contrast, a focus on the existing expertise of workers – such as their accumulated emotional capital – allows the value of all committed and experienced workers to be recognised, whatever their formal qualifications. As O’Connell (2011) found with family day-care workers in the UK, professionalisation may be as likely to damage quality programs as to improve them, from the perspectives of those working in the field.

‘Emotional capital’ may not yet be commonly used language within the early childhood field, but emotional skills are increasingly seen as important across a range of occupations (e.g. Donaldson-Feilder et al., 2011). The participants in this research recognised that such skills were a valuable resource in their work. These can be considered part of the cultural wealth of childcare work (Yosso, 2005) – a form of cultural capital that is not acknowledged in debates around professionalisation. Emotional capital functions to maintain quality childcare, reducing problems with burnout and staff turnover (Bretherton, 2010; Jovanovic, 2013). This cultural wealth of childcare is not recognised as such beyond the field, due to the schemes of value that shape judgements of the early childhood workforce, with its classed and gendered profile, as unskilled and uninteresting. I suggest that the emotional capital of workers is what most clearly expresses the value of childcare work, and enables them to do this complex job with competence and commitment. Acknowledging this and other aspects of the cultural wealth of childcare may help us move beyond the inertia of debates around professionalisation.