To discover a really experienced child minder charges half what my Bulgarian cleaner does....

[nigelslaterfan]

I mean £8 an hour for the latter, 25 years old.
£4 for the former who I understand has nursery qualifications as well.

It just seems surprising. I guess the CM can have a bunch of kids at once but still, seems wrong somehow!

A CM will usually have more than one child, so it won't be £4 per hour.

It is one of the few jobs that allow a parent to stay at home with their own children too - thus reducing their own childcare costs. Which is why some people I know are thinking of childminding.

Childminders generally love children and love spending time with them, I doubt many cleaners love cleaning.

There is no way I would clean a strangers filth and toilets for £8 an hour. the going rate for an experienced cleaner (not just someone who has no experience or quals so calls themself a cleaner and uses the bathroom flash on your windows) is about £12 an hour... they deserve every penny of it.

Also, cm's around here are about £5.50 an hour. But most can have quite a few kids each paying that much, if they want to.

Hi. I pay my nanny £9 per hour to care for two children (plus her tax so £11.50 per hour gross) so I guess that is 4.50 per child after tax. Not much different to a childminder and she is fully trained too. I do wish I could pay her more and I pay her about £1.50 net per hour more than the going rate but as we pay a total of £1200 per month childcare there is a limit! If the government (are you listening Gordon!) made all childcare tax free for parents we could probably afford to pay more and up the wages

Cleaning is a physically demanding hard job but less skilled. Those doing it also deserve a decent wage. But I understand what you say about rewarding those who have trained and are very experienced.

Childcare ought to be a high status profession as doing it well is hard, and it is a tough, skilled job and so important. It is a shame it is not valued as much as it should be

Well I work in a preschool and get paid about 4 pound an hour less than cleaners do around here. But I would rather work with kids than clean other people's toilets.

My mum has to pay for homecare. Cleaning/ personal care etc and she is charged £16.00 per hour.

the earning potential of a childminder?umm..that old chestnut again It isnt as simple as it might seem, some childminders are 'full' that is they may work from 7.30 to 6pm with 3 early years children during school hours plus 2,3 or 4 before and after school children. Now these childminders are earning a decent 'wage' but where i live there are very few 'full' childminders. In fact the average is 1 or 2 early years children 3 or 4 days a week with some also having before and after school children. I do not know any childminders who have 3 children every day- and i know quite a few . I did see a while back a quote that said childminders were earning on average £6000 for a 42 hour week but i can not remember where i saw the article.

I would not want to work flat out 7 till 6 with 3 children every day- but it would be nice to have at least 3 children on at least one day a week- there are days when i just have the one child and working for £3.75 & knowing that i am in reality earning much less than £3 after taking costs out (some times this can feel a little soul destroying -esp knowing the paperwork is largly done outside of work hours and therefore unpaid- not to mention study time & training courses). And i will point out (i know it is obvious) that how ever many children are here each day, and no matter if they are just doing a few hours or 8 hours, i am still 'open', working hard, implementing planning, providing food, meeting legal requirements etc etc the only thing that changes is the amount of money i am earning per hour! However, mostly i wouldnt have it any other way- i love my job and count myself lucky to be able to do it.

I'm a cleaner in a Care Home. I get paid minimum wage.

As a one off, I'm working next Sunday. I don't get paid more for it, but my CM charges double time-£8 per hour, so I get to pay to go to work, I'll be over £2 out of pocket for every hour I do, plus an hour to get there and back. It'll take around 7 hours to clean the home, plus the hour so well over £20 it'll cost me to work.

It's a favour to my boss who is fab, and I haven't told her it'll cost, but it's madness for me to do it really.

My job is easy, but it's not pleasant. Today I've emptied and cleaned a bin full of piss, picked a dirty incontinence pad out of a toilet, got sworn at, and cleaned pee off the floor, and that's on top of the ordinary cleaning which involves 7 bathrooms, some of them gross anyway, plus the other rooms and helping out residents as necessary.

That terrible Muggleump.Mum's carer's only get a fraction of what she is charged too.

i am a childminder and wrked right up i think i was 37 and half weeks mayb 38 and half weeks when i had my daughter. i wrk monday to thursday so i stopped on the thursday intending to go back on the monday but my waters broke the early hours of friday morning. i looked after 2 children 1 who had just turned 1 and the other who was almost 2. was a bit tired but both kids slept at the sametime so i rested then and as soon as they left had all nite to rest. so it mite not be that bad to left her wrk right up.

cleaner is yours exclusively for the time she is cleaning your house.
childminder is doing upteen other things aswell as looking after your child, whether its looking after other children or getting her family's dinner ready, etc etc.
plus as everyone else has pointed out. CM often has a number of kids each paying £5/hr so that can soon tot up to a fairly respectable amount!

I think we all realise that a cm can have more than one child & therefore earn more per hour.

But back to the OP.

Yes it seems ridiculous that you would pay more per hour to have your house cleaned than your child looked after.

"Yes it seems ridiculous that you would pay more per hour to have your house cleaned than your child looked after"

i don't agree - i have a childminder (£7/ph incidentally) and a cleaner (£9/ph).

i would rather "outsource" the cleaning than the childcare! hence am happy to pay the cleaner more than the childminder.

also the childminder has 2 mindees the same age (4) and her own daughter (also 4) and they have a lovely time. My cleaner busts herself.

the childminder earns more than the cleaner when you take into account the multiples for a much nicer job.

of course there is an easy solution OP.

Pay your childminder £8 per hour. You don't have to pay her £4

Why does everyone keep saying that a cm can have more than one?

What I´m trying to say is my child is more important to me so you would think that childcare would cost more per hour.

Why do people always want to pay as little as possible to have someone look after their child ?

No, that doesn't figure though diddl. You pay lower childminding costs because there are LOADS of childminders (round here anyway) it's a rewarding job with perks such as not havig to pay your own childcare, being able to work from home and something you can do with relatively little experience or qualifications ( no offence meant there CM's - love to you all) so many people want to do it. Therefore they are in competition with each other, that keeps prices low.

Who want ti ckean up peopels scummy homes, bleach their shitty loos and move their crusty pants off the floor?

I'm sure if you feel the need to you could call your CM and tell her you'll be paying her double from now on as your kids are so important to you. Bet she'll be chuffed - let us know how it goes.

yes, Hando, I get the reasons why it isn´t so.

Just seems sad to me-almost as if the childcare is less important than the house.

I´m a SAHM btw, was talking hypothetically-I work out cheaper than paying a cm & cleaner.-perhaps OH hasn´t discovered my ebay habit yet!

But I do also feel that for the money some people pay they do expect far more than a cm/nursery can offer.

I also think of the Louise Woodward case-two high earners employing an au pair rather than a qualified nanny.

crikey, am quite at some of the low rates taken home by childminders on here.

Round here (north London) childminders charge between £50 and £70 per day, and you usually pay for the full day (so no reduction if you collect early or send your child to nursery for a couple of hours).

They ALL have at least three children - some have more.

I rang round 8 before finding a vacancy for my DS2, I only needed 2 days a week, and they were all full up.

So do move to North London ladies .

Incidentally, I pay my cleaner £10 per hour, but she has no pay when she walks between jobs and no holiday pay, so I reckon it works out about equal when you take that into account.

But if a cleaner is cleaning up after a family of 4 then the £8 per hour becomes £2 per hour per person.

There is that thought also.

Although I guess it depends on the cleaning being done.

For example we don´t all have our own toilet, oven etc.

Nor is our sitting room necessarily four times bigger than that of a person living alone.

"For example we don´t all have our own toilet, oven etc"

Yes, but your toilet will have been used 4 times as much as that of a single person

No, true, but 4 people definitely need more cleaning up after than 1.

Haven't read whole thread but basically I think there's a wider question here. I get really frustrated when people who are well paid say "I work hard for my money". course you do, well done. So do people who have chosen/are good at less well paid work. So I see it as good fortune to have the skillset that leads you to a job that pays well. I am frustrated bythe sense of entitlement some have. Not that they aren't entitled, but that they are more entitled than others. Comes down to all of us doing the best with the abilities and opportunities we have. So, take the credit for what you do by all means but lets not value people by what this imperfect world pays us.

Is there any evidence that au pairs are more liable to kill your child than a nanny In fact IIRC *parents are more likely to murder their children than anyone else.

My CM has no childcare qualification 18 year olds in the lcoal nursery have but I know who I'd trust more with my child. PLenty of cleaners have degrees - whats relevant is how good they are at their job not whether they have any qualification.

Well I suppose it depends what you mean by "cleaning up after".

If I had a cleaner & would want her to dust & vacuum-does this become harder just because we are a family?

True theyoungvisitor-although we do tend to clean up after ourselves if necessary.

This is fascinating reading and many good points are being made.

Clearly everything is relative. A North London friend of mine is always moaning about poverty but she has put all her money into her home, constantly redesigns the house, buys designer handbags at least twice a year, is given glam jewellry and buys lovely clothes.
She considers all these things to be necessary. Butmoans that they can't afford flasher holidays.

But you make your choices I guess.