Join us, sign our Charter and help shape our campaign!

Are you a man working in early years education, as a practitioner or in some other capacity? Maybe you’re not a man, but you want to see more men join this field. Perhaps you manage a nursery or pre-school – or a chain of them? You might have some other professional interest in getting more men into this line of work. Perhaps you are just someone who cares about gender diversity and wants their children or grandchildren to be educated and looked after by a mixed-gender workforce?

Whoever you are, welcome to the MITEY network and campaign!

The proportion of UK early years education professionals who are male is tiny (the latest figures are 3% in England and Wales, and 4% in Scotland) and has barely grown in the last 20 years.

We want to change that, and this website sits at the centre of our work. We will be updating this website with new resources during 2019-20.

And today (4 September 2019) we are launching a consultation about next steps.

We believe that Britain’s children deserve a high quality, gender-diverse Early Years workforce:

To show them that we can all be caregivers/ educators
To reflect and engage with the community they live in
To ensure they are looked after and educated by the best possible professionals, unlimited by gender, and
To give more men the chance to take part in the amazing job of looking after them.

We want to remove the infrastructural, cultural and other barriers that get in the way. For this, we need to get lots of different people, in lots of different organisations, working together for the same common goal.

Right now, as we start out on this journey, we need to connect with our ‘constituency’. That’s you. We’d like to ask you to take some simple actions, that will help us show how much support there is for our agenda; define our purpose more clearly; and choose our earliest battles:

Join our network
Sign our Charter
Tell us what you think of our MITEY goals – and add your own – by filling in our 2-minute survey. Just follow this link or scan the QR code below. Your responses will help us decide which priorities to pursue, and how to make them stick.