To ask about your experience with male nursery staff

[GloMum]

My daughter will be starting pre-reception and her key worker at the nursery is male. As a whole, the class will be overseen by this teacher plus two more female members of staff. Does anyone have experience with male nursery staff, especially in regards to caring for girls.

You clearly missed this very recent one then.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg4rr2g3072o

Though there have been others.

What instincts and how is she suppressing them?

I don't generally follow Australian news closely, no.

But considering that in the UK, only this year, there's been female nursery workers convicted of physical abuse and manslaughter, we can either say that no one of any gender is trustworthy with children or that the vetting processes usually work and that we need to ensure nursery staff can raise safeguarding concerns about their co workers without fear.

The only person my DS (now 18) remembers from nursery was the male member of staff. He was so gentle and kind.
It's hard to know and only you can know how you feel. If you are very uncomfortable maybe you can ask for a change ?

Dd1 had a male member of staff, along with a female, when she was 3 in nursery. They both were absolutely brilliant, a great double act and the kids absolutely adored both of them. The male was probably in his 60s so had loads of experience and just had such a kind, funny way about him. I would sometimes stay for rhyme time and he was just so entertaining with his funny songs. The kids would literally climb all over him 🤣. I was really disappointed that by the time dd2 went to nursery he'd retired abd she was now working in the kitchen. I credit them both with helping with dd1's confidence

Neither do I but it was on the BBC World news front page which is where I saw it.

And yes I absolutely agree that safeguarding in nurseries is not good enough and that children are constantly being failed but it’s still true that men as a class are much higher risk of committing sexual abuse than women even if there are far more female childcare workers than men. 98% of sexual crimes are committed by men. The difference in risk is enormous.

Beyond the anecdotal, we have to have trust in a professional to do their job properly or we get nowhere. There is some astonishing bigotry expressed here, as well as some welcome enlightenment. I've worked with babies, male and female, so did my father, mother, sister, 2 brothers, several uncles and aunties, and we all managed it without doing anything wrong.
If you don't trust someone to do those jobs simply because they are a man, you need to give your head a wobble 😀

It’s not bigotry, it’s reality and you need to give “your head a wobble” (I really detest that phrase) if you think that men as a class are not far more likely to commit sexual abuse than women. They are a much higher risk in terms of violent offences too. Of course we need safeguarding precautions for all adults who’ll come into contact with children in childcare settings and I think that more precautions are needed but men absolutely are more of a risk. (And I have a completely clean record but I’ve never got upset and claimed bigotry when they want background checks when working with vulnerable groups even though statistically I’m in a very low risk category because it isn’t about me.)

Also considering the number of medical processionals who have committed sexual offences against their patients(Again the vast majority male) including while they’re literally undergoing surgery, you’d have to be staggeringly naive to rely on trust.

Of course I understand the statistical risk etc, but to extrapolate your argument, do we just not let men do these jobs? Do I tell that to my primary teacher nephew? Or my male friend who coaches a girls football team?

Who is more at risk to a child step parents/new partner or nursery staff?

I have no problem with male teachers or coaches, though again I acknowledge there is a risk and I think that safeguarding in many situations need to be improved but I am not comfortable with children young enough to require personal care, especially if non-verbal, receiving it from male childcare workers.

I’ve worked with a number of male practitioners in my 30+ years in early years. Most were brilliant. Really tuned in to what the children and knew them well. Great at their job and rarely bitchy in any way.

I’ve worked with two who were quite lazy, one of whom seemed to think women should fall at his feet and seemed surprised that as a mum of two teenagers I had no interest in him the way he wanted me to. He stopped speaking to me when he realised I wasn’t smitten by him. The other one had only applied for a job with us as it was his qualification and as he was travelling he had been unable to pick up bar work. Parents complained they watched too much tv and not a lot of play. He left to travel again and the parents were happy when the assistant manager took the room over and returned to what they expected.

I’ve never worked with a male who has been struck off the SSSC but have worked with females who have found themselves subject to investigations and hearings by the SSSC for not being respectful and nasty.

I don't think "children are constantly being failed": most children receive a good standard of care. There are failings which are obviously terrible, and there are some instances in which changes to practice could have prevented incidents. But I think it's probably also true that children are much safer in registered childcare now than in the past when they may have been left with anyone who would have them. Eliminating all risk is impossible.

I'm not sure a statistic about sexual abuse (against all people, of all ages) tells us much here, though I agree perpetrators of sexual abuse against children are more likely to be men. The relevant statistic would be whether the number of nursery workers who perpetrate abuse and who are men is disproportionately higher than the number of men work in nurseries. And I don't think that data exists. Also, if we're going on statistics alone, children are most likely to be abused by family members - and no one is advocating for all children to be removed at birth.

I witnesses a male nursery staff put his hand down a little boys trousers so I removed my dd from the nursery and explained why to be told it’s been investigated and it’s believed he was checking the boys nappy to see if it was padded.

Obviously the people who spend the most time with them but I was talking specifically of their actual Father(Again still a risk but not entirely avoidable as children do have and need Fathers. They do not need male nursery workers giving them personal care). I have an abhorrence of people introducing new partners to their children much too early or too casually for this exact reason and several others and I am not generally a fan of blending families but that’s another thread.

Well I find that very bigoted of you. I changed babies nappies as a male nurse, as did other male and female family members. I even changed my own children's nappies when they were babies, 2 of whom were girls. I managed not to be inappropriate with any of them.
Should female nursery workers, nurses etc not be allowed to change boys nappies, in case they're tempted to have a little fiddle?

If you had a little boy would you have been comfortable with a female changing his nappy? Or would you have wanted a male doing this?
a male to look after the boys
a female to look after girls.

sounds right.

Absolutely. Lots of kids don’t have positive male role models in their lives.

The more positive male role models in childcare settings the better.

Well obviously no one is advocating for children to be removed at birth because that would be incredibly traumatic and detrimental and unnecessary in most cases and children need families, and someone is going to have to look after them but that is in no way equivalent to avoiding male nursery workers giving personal care to young children. Children will not suffer psychologically and developmentally if they do not have male childcare workers changing their nappies.

I never understand the argument that because safeguarding will never be perfect that we shouldn’t bother doing anything, that we shouldn’t try to improve it or that we should even do less. It’s bizarre to me. Not everything has to be perfect or fool proof to be worth doing.

Fabulous experience.
Our nursery had a male member of staff and he was great, I wish there had been more.
I have a DS rather than a daughter but my friends who have daughters thought hew as wonderful too.

I couldn’t give a shit if you think it’s bigoted. It’s about children’s safety and safeguarding not men’s feelings. Again as we have already discussed men are far, far more likely to commit sexual abuse than women. Having a woman do personal care doesn’t completely eliminate risk but it drastically reduces it and that is worth doing imo.

Bloody hell there are over 1,200 children in Melbourne who are going to have to be tested for possible STDs because of a male nursery worker but it’s men’s feelings that really matter.

Delivering adult and child protection training is part of my job. I often look on the regulator's website for the country where I live and work to find recent examples of malpractice to show as examples. Over the past couple of years I have noticed a significant increase in the number of male staff who have had warnings and/or conditions placed on their registration, or been struck off the register, for sexual harassment or assault of both colleagues and people in their care.

This is obviously just an anecdotal observation and I haven't measured any statistics, but in a female-heavy profession the numbers still seem heavily weighted towards male staff having these allegations against them upheld. Clearly all this does is supports what we already know about men being statistically more likely to perpetrate violent and/or sexual offences (I'd argue sexual offences are violent) and doesn't suggest that all male practitioners are a risk to their clients, but it's worth paying heed.

It also serves to demonstrate that safeguarding processes are only part of the picture; a DBS check only tells us there's nothing known about an individual; if safer recruitment was a silver bullet then we'd have no one being found to have subsequently breached professional practice guidelines or broken the law.

Because the benefits of having nursery jobs open to people of both sexes outweigh the risks (as with the benefits of keeping children with their parents outweighing the risks of those parents being abusive). Not allowing men to work in nurseries is detrimental in removing a large proportion of potential nursery workers, and in giving children the benefit of interacting with people of both sexes from a young age and having role models of both sexes. If your argument is that men should be able to work in nurseries but shouldn't change nappies, I don't think that will substantially reduce risks of sexual abuse: the nappy change area in my children's nursery was in no way private.

The nursery worker who immediately springs to my mind (UK) was a woman found guilty of filming herself abusing very young children at work for the consumption of her ring. Some time ago when our kids were young.