European Commission - Culture - Magazine

Never say never - a guide to voluntary work

Au pairs

by Lucy Lethbridge

Here's a little known fact about recent French presidential candidate Segolene Royal: she once spent time as an au pair in Ireland. It all happened over 35 years ago, in 1971. The 18-year-old Segolene came to live for a summer with the Roche family in Orwell Road, Rathgar, Dublin, and helped to look after their three small children. Graziella Roche (now Graziella Schuster) remembered the young Segolene to the Independent earlier this year: she was "very warm-hearted, great fun. She was a big success. We'd had other French au pairs and, quite honestly, we didn't like them much … But Segolene took the time to play with us". Curiously, Mme Royal never mentioned her Irish interlude in her autobiography and neither did she use her experience of childcare in Orwell Road on the hustings. A shame really, because the au pair scheme is one of the oldest examples of co-operation in the European community, developed after the First World War to foster relationships and develop languages and cultural understanding across the continent. The first au pair exchange was between girls from Britain and Switzerland.

Nowadays, as more member states enter the Union, the scheme is open to a wider range of nationalities: about 25,000 people came to Britain as au pairs in 2007. When it works at its best, the experience of living as a working guest in a foreign household is a tremendously effective route to language and experience. It is designed not to provide a cheap domestic service but to be a host and guest experience in which each party makes a leap of trust. For a mere £60 per week (the current minimum rate) and full board, the au pair, aged between 17 and 28, agrees to help with childcare and light housework. She (or he, for since 1998 boys have been included in the scheme) must agree to babysit two or three evenings a week but they will have weekends off and an afternoon to go to an (obligatory) English language class. Most importantly, they are to be treated as far as possible as equal members of the household. In 1999, when MPs debated in the Commons the expansion of the minimum wage to include au pairs, one of the reasons why they elected to exempt the scheme was that it was counter to the original spirit of the scheme to regard au pairs as employees in the conventional sense.

Since the lifting of working visa restrictions on EU members, many young Europeans prefer to work abroad at other jobs and the field of possibilities has broadened. Living in a household and looking after children is not always alluring if you want to travel. But Maggie Dyer, who runs the London Au Pair and Nanny Agency and has been in the au pair business for nearly thirty years, says that this has in fact meant that in au pairing has returned to its roots. In her experience (and she has mainly French and German girls on her books), "They're not doing it any more because they just want to work abroad. They really want to learn a language and experience life in a family - like the first au pairs." And for the children they look after, it can be an eye-opening experience, a chance to learn smatterings of a different language, different social mores, different emphases, different stories. It doesn't always work (and there are horror stories) but when it does, it is to the enrichment of all participants.

Fifty years ago, in bombed-out Europe, the sense of real difference between nations must have been acute. For German-born Barbara Toyne, who came to Brighton in 1946 to be an au pair, it was the leisure of the middle-class household with whom she lived that amazed her. One of the contributors to the BBC archive of Second World War memories, she writes: "indeed was in shock to realise that my employer would wander about in her dressing gown till mid-morning, manicure her hands and paint her fingernails, then get into her long car and drive off to meet her friends for shopping and coffee. She would return for a light lunch, then disappear for her 'restie', while I took the three children to the front, promenading up and down, pushing a huge coach-built pram."

And European families too, benefited from the scheme. Since the war, middle-class households that had been used to one or two servants had found themselves facing a severe shortage of staff and with no immediate prospect of ever returning to the kind of well-staffed establishments they had been accustomed to before the war. Increasingly, women were going out to work and needed help to look after their children. The au pair scheme - provided (and this goes as much for families of today as then) that the hosts understood that the au pair girl was not to be treated merely as a source of cheap labour - was a solution to their problems. There are other advantages too, which extend beyond individual families. Au pairs, for example, pay for language classes run by local authorities which in turn helps to subsidise the authorities' adult literacy programmes.

If you are thinking of applying to be an au pair anywhere in the world, then it is important to know exactly what the rules of engagement are. They are laid out in the European Agreement on Au Pair Placement (ETS No. 68). Among them are the basics: that the au pair arrangement must be of a temporary nature; that its purpose must be cultural; that the persons placed must be foreigners; that the placement must be in families. There are a few cultural differences from country to country (laid out country by country on the website of the International Au Pair Association) but those basic rules apply. Try these links for helpful information:

The International Au Pair Association (www.iapa.org)

The Home Office Border and Immigration Agency (www.ind.homeoffice.gov.uk)

The European Committee for Au Pair Standards (www.ecapsweb.eu)

The British Au Pair Agencies Association (info@bapaa.org.uk)