Beards, razors and “jaggy” facial hair: this scene cannot have played out in too many nurseries over the years. Craig Robertson is a team leader at Silverdale Nursery in Glasgow, and is recounting some of his favourite stories from his time there - including when he let a bunch of preschoolers shave his beard.

“We talked about being safe, not touching the plugs, how to hold the razor. There was great language coming from them - ‘It feels bumpy’, ‘It’s noisy’ - and they were talking about how my face was ‘jaggy’.”

He paints an amusing scene of razor-wielding wannabe barbers crowding round him - with patchy results. But there’s a serious point here: Robertson’s mere presence, as a male staff member in a nursery, is clearly adding to the richness of the children’s experience.

Robertson, however, is just as keen to confound as to meet expectations about masculinity. He’s been known to turn up in a pink T-shirt, with his hair tied up in a bobble, invariably producing an indignant reaction.

“This always gets the boys - they’ll say, ‘You can’t wear a bobble!’”

To which Robertson invokes a Norse god well known to the boys from the Marvel superhero films: “What about Thor? He wears a bobble.”

Each time, the boys’ jaws drop and they go silent as they recalibrate their expectations about what it is to be a man.

The lack of men in early years

Experts have long bemoaned the lack of men in the early years and childcare workforce - in Scotland, they make up less than 5 per cent of workers. But the largely pedagogical drive to achieve greater gender balance has gained added impetus from one of the Scottish government’s flagship policies, to almost double the amount of free nursery hours for families by August 2020 (see box, page 19).

This target, according to a Glasgow City Council progress report in November, requires a scale of change in the sector that is “unprecedented”, and the “single biggest resource” needed to make the policy a reality is “additional workforce”: around 1,000 in Glasgow, Scotland’s biggest city, and 12,000 across the country overall.

Silverdale is one of eight pilot nurseries in the city that has been asked to forge ahead with a staffing model to deliver the 1,140 hours of free early years and childcare that will be mandatory across Scotland from 2020 (up from 600 hours currently) for all three- and four-year-olds and some two-year-olds.

Glasgow has doubled the number of males in the sector in the past couple of years - admittedly from a very low base - and has had some eye-catching success stories, such as the 50-year-old parking attendant who decided it was time for a career change.

Silverdale has three male staff members out of 38 full and part-time staff, but that is a high number in a country where many nurseries have no male staff at all.

Staff have got used to such change quicker than some families, says head Margaret Anne MacKinnon. She had to have several conversations with one grandmother, who objected strongly to her granddaughter’s nappy being changed by a man. But MacKinnon held her line and made it clear that all staff should be performing the exact same role, regardless of gender.

“She was quite surprised because I think when she took her concerns to me, she thought I would say, ‘No, it’s OK, I’ll get a female member of staff to do that’.”

Curiously, men are often depicted as heroic figures in primary schools, where a universal expectation is that they will act as role models for boys and bring in different skills. The reaction to men in nurseries, however, has tended to be far more qualified, perhaps, says MacKinnon, because of a persistent societal unease about men performing caring tasks such as nappy-changing.

Researching this feature, I heard from one male early years worker in Scotland who, when starting out in London a number of years ago, was told by an education director that it would be difficult to place him, because half of the schools would not accept a man as an infant teacher and the other half did not have a male toilet.

Could it be that some nurseries, even today, pass over job applications from men simply to sidestep any hassle it might create with parents? “Possibly, [although] I would like to think that’s not happening,” says MacKinnon.

Robertson is 39 and has not always worked in nurseries. He did a series of jobs he did not enjoy, from retail to the civil service, then had an “epiphany” in his mid-20s and decided, “I need to change my life”.

He had enjoyed voluntary work with teenagers, and decided to apply for any courses he could find that involved working with children. One of these turned out to involve preschool children - he had mistakenly thought it involved “pre-teens” instead. So, by luck rather than design, he found himself bound for a career in nurseries, despite having “literally never held a nappy in my life”.

His first placement was a “complete culture shock” and he felt like “a deer in the headlights”, but he has come to “love” working with young children.

“The things they find amazing, we find quite funny, and their personalities are starting to develop. There’s absolutely no filter - the kids tell me that I have a big tummy and a big nose,” he says.

“It’s absolutely amazing to be in a working environment like that where you can see these personalities developing, and they can make you laugh. The children make the job.”

Silverdale colleague Graham Steven, 40, is a child development officer. He used to be a training manager in sales, with Norwich Union, but found it a “boring, monotonous job” and he did not want to go back to “sitting in a glass box” after he spent several years as a stay-at-home dad.

He has a Pied Piper appeal at Silverdale: the children look for him any time they venture out of the nursery, since they know how much he loves outdoor activities; he also has a penchant for bringing in power tools for intrigued children to try.

Like Robertson, however, his route into the sector was somewhat haphazard, and both agree that the pathway towards a career in early years “wasn’t obvious”.

That remains true for teenage boys weighing up potential careers, fear Robertson and Steven, as girls of that age are more likely to be told at school that the early years are an option. Robertson says that if you get boys in a one-to-one situation, they warm to the idea of a career with “a great salary now comparable with teaching, and a lot less stress than teaching”. But it is an entirely different scenario with a group of boys. “It’s the pack mentality, isn’t it? ‘You don’t want to do that job - that’s for women.’ And that just shuts it down. There are young guys who aren’t even aware that this [sector] is an option.”

Robertson says it is not uncommon to encounter the stubborn belief that, “That’s just playing with weans - that’s for wummin”. He says he once witnessed a two-year-old boy merrily pushing a pram at nursery, only for the grandfather to turn up and say: “No, don’t do that! Boys don’t push prams!”

Steven has encountered a small minority of families who “just don’t feel comfortable with a guy changing nappies - dare I say it, I’ve even been asked questions, in quite a hostile way, about my sexuality”.

Supportive bosses become essential in such situations. Robertson ruled out taking one job when the nursery head requested one last meeting to discuss how to tackle parents’ misgivings about having a male member of staff. “If you, as a boss, can’t immediately dismiss that, I can’t take the job,” says Robertson, who has now become an ambassador for the sector and goes out to talk to potential recruits.

“The reason I’m so passionate about getting men into early years is not because I think men are better but because I believe absolutely that children need balanced role models - people from different countries, different income backgrounds, with different colours of skin, different religions, different genders. The tapestry needs to be as varied as possible.”

Robertson remembers a school project in P5 on ancient Egypt that was so inspiring that he retains a passion for the topic to this day, but he believes that the potential for lifelong impact is even greater with younger children.

“They might not remember it, but the experiences they have will feed into everything else that they’ll do,” he says.

Robertson tries to inspire potential recruits by conveying the sheer joy of witnessing and enabling early discoveries in life, such as the time he carved a pumpkin surrounded by several children who had never seen inside one before and made all sorts of outlandish predictions about what they would find.

“To see that on someone’s face, and that’s your job - that’s phenomenal. To create these experiences for these children that will feed into their later life is incredible.”

However, this is not how many men perceive the sector: enduring terminology such as “nursery nurse” creates a “very Edwardian” image of the sector that suggests it is about health, not education. And, says Robertson, as long as the terms and conditions for the job are so disjointed nationally - it is possible to earn £3,000 more in one place than someone doing the same job in a neighbouring authority - he fears that recruitment will remain a problem.

Brian Kiernan was recently appointed head of Lamlash Nursery, also in Glasgow, having previously been a P1 teacher, a role which provoked suspicion in one mother.

“Should a male be getting a child ready for gym? The answer is absolutely yes [and I told her], ‘I’m absolutely going to be changing your child, and it’s important that your child sees that - that I’m his teacher and I’m doing the exact same role as all the other teachers in the school’.”

For Kiernan, however, the issue of men in the early years is a red herring that distracts from a bigger problem: the status of the sector more generally.

“I think early years isn’t valued, and is seen as a kind of poor relation to primary education [and] that is more of a deterrent to the job than the whole gender thing.”

Kiernan wants more support from secondary schools, believing that they do not do enough to show that the sector is more than a fallback or “bare minimum” employment option for those who do not do well at school. That image is harder to tackle, however, when confronted with the reality that, despite improvements, the sector still falls short of the standards in other education sectors. “It seems ironic that the most important ages and stages of a child’s development have the least-paid and the least-qualified staff,” says Kiernan.

For Justin Beck, a University of Strathclyde teaching associate in early years and initial teacher education, the problem is simple: “What is stopping men from entering the sector? In my honest opinion, money.”

Beck, who has worked in the early years sector for 15 years, says the myriad confusing titles for nursery-based jobs (see box, page 16) is a symptom of bigger problems: a sector that has no coherent identity and no national pay scale.

But he also has concerns that the wrong messages are sometimes being sent out about the need for more men - for example, the hope is that they are more likely to encourage “rough and tumble play” than female colleagues. “This line of thought is rooted in traditional, heteronormative and cisnormative gender roles. It is also sending a clear message that if you are a man interested in early learning and childcare, then you have to be this ‘type’ of man.”

Aline-Wendy Dunlop, one of Scotland’s leading experts on the early years, has similar concerns: that it is not enough simply to recruit more men to the early years, and that more must be done to make staff - male and female - aware of how they perpetuate a gender divide without even meaning to.

“Gender, as a research field in education, has grown hugely in recent years and new terms such as ‘gender-flexible pedagogy’, which embraces different ways of being for men and women working in early childhood, are an interesting example of new developments,” says Dunlop, a University of Strathclyde emeritus professor and vice-president of the charity Early Education.

“This calls for a much increased self-awareness about how practitioners and teachers play out their own traditionally differentiated gender roles…The literature asserts that until we are each aware of such fixed behaviours, we can’t tackle the perpetuation of gender stereotypes in work with young children.”

Jean Carwood-Edwards, chief executive of Early Years Scotland, an organisation that provides support to the sector, says the lack of men has “always been one of those thorny issues that we’ve never quite got to grips with”. The national expansion of free hours could, finally, she adds, “make the sector more representative of real life”, if it results in attracting more men, ethnic minorities and people with disabilities.

“Children establish so many habits, perceptions and views in the earliest years of their lives, so if [the early years] looks like it’s a woman’s setting or job, that’s giving very strong messages…that looking after young children is a woman’s domain.”

She adds: “I’m absolutely convinced that there are many, many males who would enter the world of early years as a career if they felt more welcome and more represented there.”

However, Carwood-Edwards fears that the perception of the early years as “babysitting” is proving hard to shift, and that a “heightened focus on child protection” in the media is making some men “worry that parents might have concerns that they have another agenda”.

There is a widespread ignorance, she adds, about how well paid a career it can be and about the wide-ranging places and organisations it can encompass, including social work, prisons, hospitals, the Care Inspectorate and further education colleges.

So what’s the solution? In the longer term, Carwood-Edwards wants a concerted effort to remove the “mystique” with which boys view the sector - perhaps by creating many more opportunities for schoolboys to spend time with nursery children.

“If boys were used to playing with wee children, I think that would make a big difference,” she says.

More immediately, on 31 January, an information event will be held in Glasgow for anyone who might be considering the early years as a career (further details can be found at bit.ly/EYSevent).

Whatever is done to try to improve the gender balance in the sector, Carwood-Edwards is clear about why it should be a national priority to attract a far broader mix of people to the early years.

“When you think about it, it is actually the most important job in the world,” she says. “Because what happens in those years truly, truly is such a strong predictor of what happens thereafter.”

Henry Hepburn is news editor for Tes Scotland. He tweets @Henry_Hepburn

The ambitious policy behind the drive for more men in early years

The Scottish government’s drive to nearly double free early years and childcare hours is one of its flagship policies. However, while many laud the focus on this crucial stage of a child’s development, there are widespread fears that Scotland simply does not have the resources to deliver it.

Those fears came to a head with the publication in February of a report by public spending watchdog Audit Scotland, which found that the government had underestimated the cost of its pledge - which would increase the annual entitlement from 600 hours to 1,140 hours by August 2020 - by £160 million per year. The increase in free hours - for all three- and four-year-olds and some two-year-olds - would cost £1 billion a year, according to the watchdog, which warned that there was a “significant risk” that local authorities would not be able to deliver the promise on time.

The report also raised concerns about the difficulties associated with expanding the infrastructure and workforce to the required levels in the limited time available.

Meanwhile, some national organisations, such as primary school leaders’ body AHDS, have opposed the policy, arguing that it will lead to “no better gains for children” and that it “prioritises quantity over quality”. The longitudinal survey Growing Up in Scotland suggested that increasing free nursery hours to 1,140 per year was unlikely to improve children’s outcomes by the time they entered school.

In October, with only 4 per cent of the current daycare of children workforce being male, the government announced a funding drive aimed at encouraging more men into the sector.

Colleges across Scotland were invited to bid for two funding awards to run pilot projects to support men in childcare. The £50,000 fund will aim to increase the number of men enrolling on NC (National Certificate) and HNC (Higher National Certificate) childhood practice courses.

What’s in a name?

While a teacher is a teacher, wherever they go, there is a dizzying array of job titles in the early learning and childcare sector. Not only is this confusing and potentially off-putting for people - male or otherwise - who might think of working with young children, it also reflects the lack of standardisation in pay and the status of the job across Scotland.

Job titles include: nursery nurse; early childhood educator; early years worker; early years practitioner; early years officer; early years support worker; early years assistant; nursery support worker; child development officer; nursery officer; early learning and childcare practitioner; and early learning and childcare officer.