What do Women Really Really Want? A case study of mature women training to work in childcare

Most studies of adult education align this with life change but my research project tells a different story revealing that mature women training to work in childcare were seeking continuity in their lives, engaging with activities that connected aspects of the family, workplace and educational experience and constructing a sense of personal identity through these linkages. The recently completed project studied a group of mature women who enrolled on an Early Years Supervisors’ course over a ten-year period in a Further Education (FE) College in Eastern England. This was a vocational course, funded at times by different government initiatives - local, national or European - as part of the broader aim to raise standards within childcare in the UK and because of its work orientation might have been accessed for predominately instrumental purposes: to support a career in childcare work. Expecting that to be the case, I anticipated that the majority of the women would talk about career paths, salary structures and end goals but found that not to be the case. Instead, they discussed a range of alternative motivations that we shall look at further in this paper. First, however, I shall describe briefly the nature of the research, to provide a contextual framework