‘I think a lot of it is common sense. …’ Early years students, professionalism and the development of a ‘vocational habitus’

Abstract

This paper reports on research from a small-scale project investigating the vocational training of students in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) in England. We draw on data from interviews with 42 students and five tutors in order to explore the students’ understandings of professionalism in early years. In the paper, we discuss first, the then Labour Government’s drive to ‘professionalise’ the workforce and second, critically analyse the concept of professionalism, drawing on sociological literature. We then turn to the data, and argue that students’ understandings of professionalism are limited to generic understandings of ‘professional’ behaviour (reliability, politeness, punctuality and so on). The idea of their occupation being a repository of a particular knowledge and skills set is undercut by the students’ emphasis on work with young children being largely a matter of ‘common sense’. Our fourth point is to highlight the processes by which students are inducted into a respectable and responsible carer identity, as illustrated by an emphasis on clothes and appearance. We conclude that the version of professionalism offered to students training at this level is highly constrained, and discuss the implications of this.

Keywords:

• gender
• class
• early years

Notes

1. Level 2 qualifications are equivalent to GCSE grades at A∗–C, level 3 qualifications are equivalent to A-level.

2. Two out of nine partners were in NS-SEC 2, and the other 7 in NS-SEC 4 or below, maintaining the working-class identity of the majority of the sample.

3. It is worth noting that the meaning of ‘good quality’ in ECEC is contested (see e.g. Moss (2008))

4. Workers in ECEC do not have a clear professional regulatory body, and are thereby lacking another key feature of a profession (Urban 2008, 140; Moyles 2001, 86). The Labour Government was considering whether one should be established before their defeat in the 2010 election (DCFS 2009).

5. Jayne Osgood asserts in her research that staff grew to appreciate more theoretical/pedagogical knowledge as they accumulated experience. It may be that the students’ emphasis on practical experience and ‘commonsense’ knowledge might therefore be bound up with their age and inexperience.

6. It should be noted that ‘peers’, Tretheway’s word, does not quite fit here, as it was women tutors and managers who provided the disciplining gaze.