This paper is reporting on findings from an ongoing ESRC-funded (Economic and Social Research Council) qualitative research project investigating the ‘vocational habitus’ of childcare work as understood by students currently training as childcare practitioners in England. Such training is a key part of the UK Government’s plans for improving and extending childcare for young children (with a particular focus here on the under-fives). The British New Labour government has presided over an unprecedented expansion of childcare services, creating 525,000 childcare places since 1997, and promising to move towards a universal offering of childcare through Children’s Centres by 2010. As a result of this expansion of services, childcare practitioners now find themselves in the policy spotlight with their recruitment, retention and training all issues for policy proposals. The professional status of childcare practitioners, however, is far from established. Until recently, care of the under-fives in particular has been seen as a ‘natural’ working-out of women’s innate caring instincts, and an occupation where many workers have only a tenuous relationship to an established body of knowledge (around child development for example). This theoretical absence is apparently compensated for by common-sense knowledge around caring for children, and by displays of maternal love and affection (Hochschild 2003, Skeggs 1997). How then do students understand what it is to be a good childcare practitioner? Colley has used the term ‘Vocational habitus’ to describe ‘a powerful aspect of the vocational culture: the combination of idealized and realised dispositions to which students must orient themselves in order to become “the right person for the job” (Colley 2006 p.25). The idealized disposition for caring occupations, she argues, is one of emotional dedication, which in practice is tempered by a realised habitus that allows some detachment (Colley et al. 2003). In this paper we interrogate different interpretations of becoming the ‘right’ person, we set students’ interpretations of the characteristics and skills needed by practitioners, alongside the discourses emanating from course tutors and the state (via course materials and key policy texts). Thus we are exploring how students on childcare courses acquire and interpret a ‘vocational habitus’ for their chosen occupation. What do students understand as the factors that constitute the ‘right person for the job’? We discuss how students come to inhabit such a ‘vocational habitus’ and what changes, tensions, reconciliations, or realisations this involves for them personally.

This qualitative study involves interviews with two different types of students (school leavers and those already working in childcare) in two Further Education colleges within Greater London (one in inner London and one in outer London). Data collection for the project is ongoing. This paper uses data from initial in-depth pair interviews with 40 students which allowed us to get a broad sense of students’ histories, concerns, perceptions and experiences. Data analysis, using hand- and NVivo-coding, draws on literature on professionalism (e.g. Perkin 2002), students’ ‘learner identities’ and induction into occupational cultures (e.g. Lave & Wenger 1991), and work by Bourdieu on habitus and capitals (including emotional capital). These diverse bodies of literature aid our understanding of students’ induction into the occupational culture of childcare, how they respond to and seek to reform that culture, and what costs and opportunities the process of induction incurs for them.

Initial findings from the research project suggest that interviewees – mainly young working-class women – see their suitability for the job as central in their understandings of themselves not just as learners, but as individuals. Whilst they feel suitable for the course because their academic qualifications allow them to enrol (in contrast to other qualifications/subject areas which may demand higher grades), there is also a sense that they are utilising their ‘innate’ capacities to care. For some of the interviewees, this capacity has been mobilised by their attendance on the course and they report a transformation from ‘bad’ (failing and/or naughty) school pupil to ‘good’ (patient, reformed) childcare practitioner, doing ‘worthwhile’ work. Childcare’s highly gendered and classed work contexts with its discourses of worthiness and suitability are ignored by a policy focus on improving the credentials of childcare work that emphasises the academic content of courses for practitioners. As feminist researchers, we want to critically examine how a policy desire to create a ‘neutral’ professional and learner environment and a failure to engage with these issues may ultimately defeat the objective of reforming the profession into the highly qualified, professional childcare workforce that is the stated policy aim.