This study is an on-going, qualitative piece of research focusing on the vocational training of UK students in ECEC (Early Childhood Education and Care). The degree of interest in many European countries in defining and developing ‘professionalism’ in the early years workforce is indicated by the recent dedicated issue of European Early Childhood Education Research Journal (see Urban & Dalli 2008). This paper seeks to contribute to the on-going debate. Our study overall focuses upon the processes by which students on childcare courses acquire, interpret and inhabit a ‘vocational habitus’ (Colley et al. 2003). Vocational habitus refers to ‘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). In this paper we consider what version, if any, of professionalism contributes to the students’ vocational habitus. The focus of our study on students, rather than experienced workers, serves to differentiate it from much of the existing research on practitioners’ understandings of professionalism (e.g. Osgood 2008). The increasing regulation of early childhood services and practices can be discerned in countries both within and outside Europe (Kinos 2008, Oberheumer 2005). In the UK, the state is currently highly visible in early years, and is concerned to increase the credentials of the workforce. There are three main points we consider here as relevant to our enquiry into the characteristics of the type of professionalism open to the trainees in our study. First, increasing professionalism holds out the promise of increased status and respect (and possibly financial reward). However, the current version of professionalism has been criticised as imposing a centrally defined agenda which is deeply inscribed by performativity and managerialism (Urban 2008, Osgood 2006, Moyles 2001). Such control results in the carer being repositioned as a ‘technician’, applying a ‘defined set of technologies through regulated processes to produce pre-specified and measurable outcomes.’ (Moss 2006 p.35). Second, the UK childcare workforce is traditionally composed of poorly paid, minimally trained working class women, and the work itself understood to be of low status and an extension of mothering work (Vincent & Ball 2006). Third, many of our respondents have fragile learner identities (Ball et al 2000) and struggle with the academic requirement of the courses. All these dimensions mediate the version of professionalism which students come to see as appropriate for them.

This is a small-scale qualitative study. The data on which we are drawing comes from interviews with 41 level 2 and level 3 students at two different Further Education (FE) colleges. One, Westbrook is an inner London FE college, the second, Cedar Park, is located in a dormitory town, just outside Greater London. We conducted our initial interviews in most cases with pairs of students, who volunteered to speak to us, and chose their own partner. Thirty eight out of 41 respondents were women, three were men. Twenty seven were White British and the rest from a range of other ethnic groups We also conducted follow-up interviews with 18 students and five tutors (full details in the paper). All interviews were fully recorded and transcribed and we are analysing them by hand, building up a portfolio of themes and issues which are subject to continuing review and revision.

We conclude that the version of professionalism adopted by the students is highly constrained. At this level of training, tutors and course texts emphasise practical competencies, the adoption of government guidelines, and the regulation of students’ behaviour and appearances (relating to points one and three above). The students prioritised common sense knowledge around caring for children (also Skeggs 1997), and being the ‘right person for the job’ alluded to possessing apparently innate – but also highly gendered characteristics – being warm, ‘bubbly’, responsive and even child-like (point two above, also Miller 2008). We conclude by reflecting on the danger of the development of a divided workforce, split between those who have degree level qualifications and whose education has offered them opportunities for critical reflection on practice, and those who have been trained at a much lower level to carry out tasks, with little room for autonomy or professional judgement.