To wonder why my job is so low paid and feel frustrated by it?

[eggsontoast9]

I’m a nursery nurse and I earn £8.72 an hour (minimum wage for over 25’s, I’m 26).
I’ve been in this job for the last three years and do enjoy it apart from the odd day but I’ve always wondered why it’s so low paid. It’s a hard job. I know a lot of people assume we just sit on our bums all day and play with children but that’s really not the case. I work in the baby unit and we can have anywhere up to 15 babies on a busy day, which in itself is bloody hard work. We have to deal with sick, poo, unhappy/unwell children, difficult parents etc. We have to complete paperwork now, normally whilst looking after the children because we’re short staffed and can’t always have time away from the room. We work long hours not because we want to but because we have to as the wages are so low (I work 7:30-6:00 four days a week and 7:30-5:00 another day). Holidays aren’t very generous. I guess the only bonus is we have weekends off unless we have training. I suppose it’s the same as health care jobs such as care assistants.

I like the job and work with a good team but can’t see myself staying here long term just because of the money which is a shame as it’s really hard to find a job that you enjoy sometimes. I was speaking to my younger cousin who’s 18 and she told me she’s just started a job in Asda earning £9.20 an hour and whilst I’m extremely happy for her and proud of her, it has made me realise my job is incredibly low paid and not very well respected in terms of how hard we all work. Before anyone jumps on me, I’m not saying my cousin shouldn’t earn that amount as I appreciate working in a supermarket is hard work to and any job should be paid a fair wage.

What is more frustrating is that we have to complete training each year and work towards gaining qualifications yet our wages are based on our age, so IMO there isn’t any progression available.

AIBU?

I think it is similar to a lot of jobs. If you work 10 hours a day that's about £22,672 a year surely (8.72 x 10 hours x 5 days x 52 days). Lots of jobs pay that. My son as s postman full time PAYE got that in SE of England and now as a full time grocery delivery driver although he has to work until mid night so perhaps his hours are worse and weekends of course.

I think that the real problem is that the government don't give a toss about women, education or children. If they did they would properly fund nurseries and schools tor make it so that women could always afford to work if they had children.

I agree with you op. Something is clearly wrong with a system where vital and indispensable roles like yours and healthcare workers get paid pittance, yet some people get paid 250-300k a week to kick a fecking ball around. The whole system is messed up.

@Xenia my point was that the pay doesn't really reflect the responsibility that we have, not so much the hours. We have to work full time because the wages are so low

It's been really interesting reading all of your comments @EYProvider and seeing it from a nursery owners point of view to. I don't doubt that a lot of owners are struggling. I've made comments in regards to the nurseries that I've worked in such as the owners driving around in flashy cars etc but I appreciate that isn't the case for every nursery owner.

I don't agree with this comment though ... "Nursery workers are not that badly paid either".
Sorry. We are literally paid the bare minimum.

@eggsontoast9 - I think I mentioned further up that agencies tend to be asking for about 25K now for term time only Level 3 candidates.

3 terms = 38 weeks, but if you factor in 5 weeks holiday, that’s 43 weeks.

£25000 / 43 = £581 per week = £116 per day = £14.50 per hour.

That’s not fantastic, but it’s not minimum wage either. It’s more than I can afford to pay myself in fact.

The nursery owners driving round in flashy cars have rich husbands obviously.

@EYProvider I don't know any nursery nurses who earn that. Definitely in the minority from what I can see.

@EYProvider just to clarify I'm level 3 qualified myself with 8 yrs experience and I don't earn that and neither do the other nursery workers who I know.

@eggsontoast9 - I don’t know where you are based, of course. These are London agencies asking for 25-30K.

It might be easier for a nursery to make money in Scotland, for example, where rent is cheaper and there are no business rates. But even paying out minimum wage is a struggle in London.

By the way, I completely sympathise with you. It’s a ridiculously hard job to do for the money on offer, especially when you factor in the grief you get from parents and the insane expectations that Ofsted have. The observations alone are a full time job.

But the low pay is not the fault of the nursery owners. It’s the government’s fault for allocating an unrealistic amount of funding in the first place and then the local authority’s fault for taking more or less a quarter of it for ‘administration’. I don’t know about other places, but there are too many staff in the Early Years department of my local authority - 10 of them doing a job that one person in the private sector could probably do on a part time basis. Years ago, they used to offer ‘free’ training, but that all stopped when they realised they could charge vast amounts for training as a sideline. It’s amazing the number of former Early Years/Family Support workers who branch out into training, using all the contacts they made when they worked for the council.

The whole thing stinks.

Yanbu. Government should subsidise it way more than they do. It’s such an important job.

Bankers make millions 😔 Society is such a mess.

I don't think it is unreasonable that the pay is the same as postmen and delivery drivers, was my point - on a par with those jobs and requiring similar qualifications. I agree you are responsible for making sure babies aren't hurt or die but my son driving a van has to be careful not to run people over, get the foods to the right house and when a post man all those rules for the postal service about responsibility for getting the post to the right place etc.

By the way they are hiring van drivers where he works in the South East if any nursery nurses have a driving licence and would not mind shift hours. It is full time PAYE and similar pay.

I really don’t understand why your job is so poorly paid. It’s the same as TA’s in a way, you need both qualifications and a wide range of skills it doesn’t seem fair at all.

I think you've been unfortunate. I worked in childcare until a couple of years ago and was never on minimum wage. Although I was always a bit peeved that we are basically teachers but don't get the wages.
I agree it's hard work and many people don't realise just how much paper work is involved. Or how exhausting it is to be with children for 9 hours a day.
I loved working with children and would love to go back but it's a very undervalued job.

It's so undersupported in the UK. We are in Germany and nursery staff here are called "pedagogical specialists" and it's a highly trained and highly respected career. Entry rate is about €30k and with experience more like €36k. That's £27k / £32.5k. That's much more reasonable IMO, although the training is longer - something like 2 years plus a year's placement/internship (which is paid, but at a lower amount).

Of course UK nurseries could never afford to pay their staff that much and still be affordable for parents. But because German nurseries are state subsidised, we don't pay a huge amount for it either. We currently pay about €460 (£420) a month for a full time place, including food, for a child under 3. It goes down to about €300 (£270) a month once he's 3. One difference is you can't get a reduced bill for doing fewer days here, but can for doing half days if your nursery offers it. But it doesn't matter, it's extremely affordable and means even a low wage or trainee job is worth it. If you have multiple children in childcare the sibling discount is massive as well. Again, all state subsidised.

In return - loads more parents in the workforce, paying taxes, contributing to the country. (Actually I wonder if this is true?? Maybe there are stats somewhere. I know I would definitely have worked more in the UK if childcare was as affordable.)

For the people saying that parents are inherently the problem - what's the solution if you don't want to be? I would pay more if I knew the money would go to staff. I've looked for a nursery twice, and both times a) I've put a lot of weight on their answer to my question about staff turnover and b) we haven't gone for the cheapest option. I avoided the chains because in every case the staff just seemed quite miserable. But I don't know what the staff are paid at DS's nursery, I'm sure it's too little (almost certainly including the manager, who seems to work constantly), we will happily pay the top-up when he turns 3, but what can I realistically do about nursery wages short of starting to give DS's keyworker cash in an envelope?!

Which part of my post where I explained that I’m on a low salary too and therefore can’t realistically afford to pay out any more did you not understand?

I understood, thanks. Why do you think that because you are (you say) on a low salary, somebody else should be paid an even lower salary to look after your children, because that’s what you can ‘realistically’ afford?

It’s terrible, it really is, but unless government subsidises childcare extensively, most people can’t afford to pay more for childcare

I’m not sure that I believe that MOST people could not afford to pay more for childcare. What’s your source for this statement?

@Hardbackwriter - The solution is for parents to understand that the ‘free’ hours generously gifted to them by the government do not cover the basic running costs of a nursery, and to start demanding that the government funds nurseries properly.

[quote EYProvider]@Hardbackwriter - The solution is for parents to understand that the ‘free’ hours generously gifted to them by the government do not cover the basic running costs of a nursery, and to start demanding that the government funds nurseries properly.[/quote]
I do understand that, and will happily pay the top-up for DS's nursery when he turns 3. His nursery charges a lot more than many other local ones for the top-up and also makes it very hard to only use 'funded' hours and I get why that is, and that it pays for a lot of the things that made me choose the nursery in the first place. I posted on the thread MN had going about early years the other day saying I didn't think there should be any extension to funded hours unless they completely revised how funding works so it pays full costs. But I can't really see what else I could do - perhaps write to my MP? He won't give a toss (and has never acknowledged my emails when I've written before - it's the sort of seat where a pig in a blue rosette would win, so I don't think he feels he needs to bother), but I suppose it would feel like I'd tried...

@BertieBotts German nurseries sound great! I would love to live in Germany (don’t speak it though, and too lazy to learn). But I just have to mention that out of all Europe Germany has the lowest percentage of couples where both parents work full time. So not sure the great childcare is increasing the amount of working mothers, they actually have a much lower percentage of working mothers than UK. Their culture is apparently quite anti working mum too 🤷‍♀️ www.workingmother.com/germans-name-for-working-moms-raven-mother

Yes, Germany has a real culture problem worg working mums, but they are trying to change that. Perhaps that's why nurseries are well funded - maybe it didn't used to be the case?

I think the Ravenmother thing is a bit out of date, most people I know work, but it's definitely common to be part time, and schools just seem to have this assumption that someone is at home twiddling their thumbs every day with the kinds of requests they make!

@missbunnyrabbit

So for £8,000 pa (working in school every day 9 - 3), I should organise the work for my 1:1s? Those children are part of the teacher's class too, a fact which many (not all) teachers conveniently seem to forget.

I'll just give up the shirt on my back while I'm at it!