Is being a registered nursen a working class occupation

I would say it’s a professional occupation and in the traditional classes I’d say it’s middle class. It may start as a rubbish wage but people progress up the bands and you need a university degree. Deffo not working class, I think working class people who become nurses would be upwardly mobile

Being a nurse is not any class, why is this even a question ?

I think nursing was one of the few careers open to women in the past. It was probably a role that ‘clever girls’ did instead of university.

so I’d say it was a mixed background. I think most of the nurses I know are working class, but some very posh women would also have been nurses. A bit like secretaries and typists of my mother’s generation.

Princess Diana was a nanny, but would say Nannie’s are working class! So just shows it’s very complicated!

Why does it matter to you?

Genuinely interested

Thats an attitude of privilege. I experience class prejudice almost daily (I work in a very MC area). Class disadvantage is real.

I would say working class. It was the doctors who were middle. But I’ve met lots of nicely spoken nurses who were clearly from middle class families. They were the ones who married the doctors and fulfilled their family’s aspirations.

Who cares? What on earth is class anyway?

When I trained at a prestigious London teaching hospital back in the late 1970's it was very definitely (mostly) resolutely middle class. We had girls (no boys back then) in my set who had been to private schools, convent schools etc and one at least whose family lived in a stately home! There were a few from working class backgrounds but not many. This was long before the training became a degree course and at a time when very few people went to university at all. I don't think it was necessarily like this at other non-teaching hospitals though, when I moved back home afterwards and worked at our local hospital the demographic was very different.

Well that's one way of looking at it.

But say there's a profession that traditionally attracted working class people and had no degree. But now you have to do a degree - however it remains a low paid, long hours profession that attracts people from predominately working class backgrounds - like nursing.

Is that a middle class profession - really?

I mean it's a incredibly skilled profession, for sure. But if most people doing it are working class and the wages aren't such that it's an aspirational job, then why are we saying it's middle class?

If you can get a traditional degree in it, it's not a working class job.

I would hazard a guess you're educated middle class with socialist / marxist leanings - am I close? (This describes me FWIW).

It's only ever middle class people who try to merge working and middle class into one group, disctinct from upper class IME.

I mean, I get it from a Marxist standpoint if we're talking the means of production etc - but in real life this makes me uncomfortable as class disctinctions are also cultural.

Personally I grew up solidly middle class but in a very mixed area of London, class-wise, and many of my friends were working class. I'd never dream of trying to claim I'm working class - on a surface level, my working class friends would take the piss out of me for trying to pretend this! Working class and middle class culture is different. It gives Pulp "common people" vibes to try to pretend differently IMO.

But also, it's insulting to working class people when middle class people claim they're also working class IMO. My middleclass upbringing was different to my working class friends' upbringing socially in ways that class did define and it ran deep. Neither being better or worse, just different. I would feel it was overstepping a line to deny all of that.

Define "matter".

It's obviously of interest to many people othrwise these thread wouldn't exist.

And I'd say it does matter for various reasons not least that people in professions deemed working class are often underpaid.

Nurses are definitely underpaid. The question "does the perception that nursing is a working class job affect pay and conditions" is a reasonable one IMO. Just preternding everyone is the same harms those with leat priviledge IME.

I think if you are forced to sell your time / your labour in order to have the resources to support yourself in this capitalist society of ours, then yes, you are working class. You work, to survive. You may have a degree, you may be a doctor, airline pilot, chartered accountant for example, but if you’re selling yourself, your time, for wages, then you’re working class. Middle class is something invented by working class people who aspire not to be seen as working class. But they are. Most of us are. Upper class is people who do not have to sell their time in order to survive.

Does it matter ?

I’d say it’s largely ‘classless’ in the sense that anybody can, and does, pursue this as a vocation. I do know people with very different backgrounds who are nurses. Most nurses that I’ve ever interacted with have been working class though.

It's a weird munsnet thing if you are essentially living a middle class life style i eye roll when people insist on being described as working class it's all supposed to be background but it's all so blurred together

At the risk of sounding disingenuous, how do you decide if a colleague is from a working class or middle class background, assuming they haven't announced that themselves....accent? Taste in clothes or TV? Area or type of house they live in? I find this a bit baffling,

I had a very privileged upbringing ,privately educated and most definitely MC .
I qualified in late 80s and would say the majority of my cohort came from similar backgrounds.

Lots of WC people have degrees.

Nursing and teacher are both lower middle class by income. But class is measured by attitude, not income, so some nurses and some teachers will be middle-class, some lower middle-class and some upper working-class (skilled workers).

Almost all of the nurses I know are working class except for a few that became Advanced nurse practitioners or managers.

It depends what newspaper they read and what media they interact with really.

Back in pre second world war times I believe in order to become a nurse you had to have finished secondary school and passed the School Certificate.
This is very much a middle class thing as working class children didn't get to go to secondary school unless they passed the scholarship and their parents could afford the uniform.
In WW1 it was considered "better" to become a volunteer nurse than working in a munitions factory - so again it was middle/upper class women who did that. The working class ones were down the factories.
Obviously that's back then.
No idea what people think these days.

I'm a Mental Health Nurse. Everyone I know pretty much is from a working class background, but that might be because I live in a Midlands Ex mining town who haven't forgotten about Margaret Thatcher! You get people from all walks of life doing nursing, but I've defo never met anyone from an upper class background in my profession.

Class imo is more about your background/education, and attitudes, than it is your job. My brother is very well off now, but still comes across very working class.