Where Do Royalty's Nannies Get Their Training?

British royals and lots of the world's other prominent families hire their nannies out of one century-old school: Norland College. Learn how it works in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://history.howstuffworks.com/european-history/norland-college-royal-nannies.htm

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey Brainstuff. Lauren
vogelban here. If you follow the British royal family, you
may have noticed that when its youngest members appear in public,
they're often accompanied by a neatly dressed nanny wearing a
tan uniform and maybe a brown hat. A childcareb is

(00:23):
always a rigorous job with lots to learn about, but
these nannies have received a particular education at Norland College,
an academy that trains the nannies of the world's wealthiest families.
A formal childcare education is a relatively new phenomenon for
the article. This episode is based on How Stuffworks. Spoke
with social historian doctor Louise Heron. She said Britain and

(00:46):
most European countries had some form of children's nurse, but
they would learn on the job, so you could go
from being a scullery maid to getting bumped up to
lower nurserymaid and then eventually one day you might make
children's nurse and be looking at the family. This would
change in England in eighteen ninety two when a primary

(01:06):
school teacher named Emily Ward saw an opportunity. Heron said
she realized that the nurses and nursery maids were all uneducated.
She thought that there was a business opportunity in training
children's nurses who could both raise and educate the next
generation of our upper classes. Ward founded Norland College in Bath, England,
and at first the training program only lasted a few months. Still,

(01:30):
the cost to attend was a bit steep. The women
who enrolled, and it was only women for a long time,
had a bit of family money. Heron said, the fees
forgetting the education at Norland Institute were beyond most working
class young women. They were things like a greengrocer's daughter
or the daughter of people who had their own small business.
But the tuition was well worth it for those who

(01:51):
could afford it. In those early years, women who landed
a nanny position after their training at Norland started with
salaries around thirty to forty pounds a year, on top
of having their expenses paid by their employers. It was
great money, especially for a woman in that place and time.
As Norland's reputation grew, so did its student body, from
just a handful of students who studied for a few

(02:12):
months to today's four year course with graduates earning a
BA in early childhood, education and care. The things got
complicated for many of the Norlanders spread across Europe in
the early twentieth century, as Heron detailed in her book
British Nanny's in the Great War, how Norlan's regiment of
nanny's coped with conflict and childcare in the Great War.

(02:33):
As she said, for Emily Ward, it was always one
of her aspirations that she would be placing young women
in aristocratic families, if not royal families. Very quickly she
managed to place a couple of girls within the German aristocracy,
which worked really well until World War One kicked off.
There was one young lady who managed to look after
a branch of the imperial family in Moscow and Saint Petersburg.

(02:55):
When the revolution kicked off in nineteen seventeen, she managed
to escape with them to Finland, but sadly she died
in the nineteen nineteen influenza epidemic. Through it all, Norland
carried on with a curriculum designed to produce childcare professionals
who are equipped to deal with just about anything from
minor medical mishaps to cooking and nutrition to tutoring Haron

(03:18):
said they taught the children to read and write, in
basic arithmetic, singing, piano and other musical instruments. They'd trained
to deal with children up to the age of quite
precisely seven years and eleven months. That's because at eight
most young ladies would be passed to the care of
a governess and boys would be, as Heron puts it,
packed off to prep school. Times have changed in lots

(03:42):
of ways over the years. Other schools with a similar
model have cropped up. Since twenty fifteen, Norland has accepted
male students, but Norland leans on its traditions. A Norland
nanny is easy to spot thanks to the unmistakable uniform,
a crisp, light brown dress with white trim or beige
trousers and a tweed blazer, with women often sporting a

(04:04):
short brimmed brown hat emblazoned with a gold n for
formal occasions. For the most part, Norland graduates dress in
more modern clothing after graduation, but sometimes their employer will
ask them to wear the uniform. Heron said, it's an
old fashioned uniform. It's traditional. At some point the Princess
of Wales has asked their nanny to wear a uniform

(04:24):
on public duty, not always, but at some key events.
In contrast, the school's curriculum now covers some very modern things,
the unusual situations that might possibly arise while caring for
the children of the world's most powerful people. Heron said,
they do lots of exciting things. There's some self defense.
They practice a vasive driving or driving in snow, ice

(04:46):
and fog, difficult conditions, and the nannies leave Norlands classrooms
having become consummate professionals, thanks in part to the thousands
of trainees who have come before them. Heron explained a
think of a parent with a first child, muddling through,
getting on with it and just occasionally making mistakes. With
a Norlander that doesn't happen. There have been some seven

(05:08):
thousand nannies trained since the very first day, and they
all provide feedback. If they had an issue, they'd write
the college asking for advice. Sometimes they'd write and say,
this is how I've dealt with this predicament, and I
think other nannies ought to know about it. So in
each Norlander you're looking at nine on seven thousand nannies
worth of experience. The total fees for the twenty twenty

(05:30):
two to twenty three school year four UK students are
just over fifteen thousand pounds that's about nineteen thousand American dollars,
and a Norland nanny can expect to make anywhere in
the range of thirty two thousand to one hundred and
twenty four thousand pounds or more depending on the type
and location of service. That's around forty to one hundred
and fifty six thousand American dollars. Every year, about one

(05:51):
hundred nannies graduate from Norland, but there are some eleven
open positions for every trained Norland nanny, so graduates are
very much in demand. Today's episode is based on the
article Norland College where the Royals Find their Nannies on
HowStuffWorks dot Com, written by Kate Morgan. Brain Stuff is

(06:12):
production of iHeartRadio in partnership with how Stuffworks dot Com
and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts from
iHeartRadio visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.