Too few male teachers in primary schools?

[edupak]

I'm interested in parents' views concerning what I rightly or wrongly perceive as the ongoing feminisation of staffing in primary schools. Most state primary schools seem unable to attract a balanced mix of male and female staff. Is this necessarily an issue? Several friends have told me that they would prefer their boys to have a mix of male and female role models/teachers. Would be great to hear other views/experiences...

Edupak I suggest you petition ITT providers to find out why they don't train more male primary teachers.
Many heads have a positive discrimination policy of employing male candidates (even if they are an inferior candidate) simply to get male staff. The fact is fewer Jen are attracted to the role.

My son's favourite teachers were all female and he certainly wasn't a placid child wanting to comply.

Rabbitstew makes an excellent point. My ds is anything BUT boisterous and keen on breaking things. He is much more like the lazy stereotype of how a girl behaves at school...compliant, focused and very happy to sit still and learn.

Which gender of teacher is going to 'get' him?

And to add to that, it is lazy - and wrong - to assume that we teach children most 'like us' the best.

I was a quiet, boffinish, asthmatic pupil. As a teacher, I have a reputation for being particularly good with loud, boisterous, sporty boys who find formal learning tricky.

rabbitstew: your df and dm gave you balanced advice and support - lucky you! Some don't receive such a balance in their young lives, your penultimate post proves my point much better than I ever could. Thank you!

Sadly, your last post is pseudo intellectual feminist bile which suggests you struggle to listen to others or read what they have written. By the way all the research ever conducted across all cultures shows that children do better when men and women are part of their lives. Your evolutionary theory is laughably sexist and would be offensive if it had any credibility whatsoever. To answer your question simply: paternity and maternity are natural and equally important in the lives of our children. Nothing is more natural and biologically essential than this combination of influences. You are just another victim of the conditioning processes that some women and men, mostly for different reasons, have promoted in primary schools for generations within our culture. Thank goodness there are other contributors who do not have such a distorted view of evolution, otherwise humankind would soon become extinct me thinks.

I take it you are both experts in anthropology?

My ds loves his male teacher - possibly because like ds he is creative, bookish and fairly quiet and calm (well most of the time ds is calm). Ds isn't so keen on his enthusiastic, bouncy and active female teacher whom lots of the other dc love. They are both great teachers and I think that he learns a lot from both but they like ds don't fit into neat little male or female boxes. They are both just good teachers but with very different styles and I wouldn't care if it was a Martian hermaphrodite, as long as they were better than some of the teachers that dd2 has had the misfortune to have had.

Hi edupak

Appreciate you are busy being horrible to other posters, but wondering if you could answer my question about the actions you are personally taking to encourage men you know (and yourself if male) to help out at schools?

Such a plan could also help your wider goals - a number of the TAs at our school over the years were originally classroom volunteers who retrained.

Oh, you haven't mentioned TAs at all yet, do you feel as strongly about the male/female balance there?

Oh, poor edupak, confusing an argument for an opinion. You come across as a bit thick. At no point did I say that I believe it is good for women to bring up children until a rite of passage when men take over the boys.

You however, have argued that women cannot understand boys and are feminising education, which comes across as deeply sexist bile. Why not just admit that your crass comments about wanting teachers who understand your ds when he runs around breaking things were deeply silly and damaging to your argument? I don't think anybody on here has disagreed with you that more male primary school teachers would be a wonderful thing. Unfortunately, men don't volunteer themselves for the task and I don't think this is down to a feminist agenda, but centuries old conditioning.

And, whether it suits your or my opinion or not, it has never been the case that there are equal numbers of male and female primary school teachers, so our opinions about how much better it would be if there were equal numbers of both have to remain opinions until they become fact.

Or, in other words, we don't disagree with each other on much, just on the stupid idea that an unqualified, bad male teacher is better than a qualified, excellent female teacher; and on the idea that female teachers feminise boys by expecting them to behave like some unrealistic stereotype of little girls.

Horseygal1, interesting and offensive first post...

OP, I'm afraid any point you were trying to make loses any credibility it may have had when you resort to such personal attacks.

edupak has also remained strangely silent on the fact that while men and women go out to work elsewhere, leaving their children in someone else's care, a huge, low-paid almost entirely female workforce is looking after our pre-school age children. Why is it suddenly a problem in primary school, but no mention of the fact that men don't choose to work in nurseries (on minimum wage...), either? And to add insult to injury, edupak also appears to buy into the idea that looking after and educating children is low-skilled and therefore doesn't require any particular skill, intelligence or training, so it's OK to get untrained men into the classroom in vast numbers asap on the assumption that letting huge numbers of untrained people in to learn from their mistakes won't potentially do a huge amount of damage to the cause if it is handled in that way.

Maternity and paternity are, in any event, different from looking after strangers' children. Is there anything "natural" or "biologically essential" about sending children to school to learn to, amongst other things, read and write?

rabbitstew: I imagine you are being economical with the truth; as someone else pointed out on the thread you probably don't like men or male teachers. Just be honest with yourself even if you can't admit your true feelings here and please stop misquoting me to support your incoherent arguments. Of course women can understand boys, but their understanding is by definition different to that of a man's and in some cases, yes (shock horror) men, again by definition, are able to empathise more deeply with boys in some parts of life because they share a similar hormonal chemistry. The same is bound to be true of women and girls. That is why all research shows that children do better with parents from both genders. That is not to say many single parents do not do an amazing job, but the best starting point for a child is to have a mum and a dad. It really sickens me that some posters think men and women are the same or should be the same. We should celebrate difference not condemn it as a dirty reality to be washed away by the drip drip of cultural conditioning. Sad - so many sheep/rabbits

Edupak, I know you are new round here but insulting posters really isn't the way to convince them.

Any chance of you answering my questions?

I tend to agree with the person who raised this. There is an inbalance at primary schools.........whatever the reason.

I don't think anyone disagrees with the point that the profession is imbalanced.

Bless rabbitstew, she obviously thinks that trained teachers don't make mistakes. I've known terrible trained teachers and brilliant untrained ones and vice versa. A certificate doesn't make you a good teacher or good role model, more likely it conditions you to think like everyone else on your PGCE course. A teacher friend of mine said the only two teachers in her school who got outstanding inspections were not qualified; they were good people, passionate about their subject, had other career experiences to offer and loved helping children. The other teachers, though qualified, were less inspirational and stuck to the curriculum far too rigidly. If heads invest time in looking for good male role models, qualified or not, and ensure they meet CP criteria etc and monitor their teaching, I'm sure we could improve teaching standards and have a better gender balance in the classroom. Also, we may thank goodness start to dilute the left wing stereotypes joining the profession and bring people with all sorts of life and work experiences into schools, not just graduates of Education some of whom outrageously see teaching as a last, or worse still an only resort. Let's have more teachers who want to teach and make teaching more attractive to the men and women who have so much to offer. Currently the government reports that 6%, don't quote me on the exact number, of qualified teachers are simply not any good at all. So don't pretend rabbitstew that your PGCE certificates mean we have mistake free teaching. Many Academy heads invest time to find the best teachers whether they are qualified or not and are free to do so because of the lack of interference from government, left wing lunatics, their unions and their minions who have presided over a dramatic fall in UK school age literacy and numeracy standards when compared to the rest of the world. Blair and Brown wasted all that money on education only to implement strategies that saw standards fall! Incredible but true. Uk used to be about 6th in literacy and is now about 15th, we used to be about 11th in numeracy and we're now about 22nd. It will take the current government time to improve the situation, but they will, mostly by axing lazy and incompetent staff and making the NC more content heavy and of course by providing a climate which more actively encourages more male teachers, esp at primary level.

YonicScrewdriver: For a start I am posting on mumsnet - you may have noticed, to challenge the element most likely to be happy with the status quo or indifferent. Who knows where it will go next, but I'm speaking to the Secretary of State for Education about the issue and hoping it will be raised in Parliament soon. Are you doing anything about it?