More Male Teachers Not Required, Says Report

Boosting the number of male teachers in school would have little impact on boys' attitudes towards education or their academic results, a report says.

Only one in eight primary teachers is a man and the figure for nurseries is smaller at one in eleven, but the idea boys would do better if they had more male role models in the classroom is misguided, say contributors to the report Boys to Men.
The government has been concerned about boys' poor performance at school compared with girls for some years and has also expressed a desire for more male role models in schools…

But in the report for the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, Christine Skelton, part of a team of researchers from the universities of Roehampton, Surrey, Newcastle and London Metropolitan, says their study of more than 300 seven and eight-year-olds found the gender of their teachers was not important to them nor did most see them as role models.

"Our research indicates that girls seem to be more positive about men than women teachers; boys were slightly more positive about women teachers than they were about men teachers. If the current government policy is right – i.e. that there is something beneficial about gender match - we would see some trend that supported such a premise. We did not."

Mary Thornton, of Hertfordshire University, and Patricia Bricheno, of Cambridge University, who questioned 250 primary and secondary schoolchildren, draw similar conclusions: "As a policy to remedy underachievement and laddish behaviour, boys are not queuing up to say 'give me a man teacher, I want to be like him', or girls, 'give me a woman teacher I want to be like her'."

Their studies of primary school results for 11-year-olds found no direct correlation with the gender balance of staff: "We certainly found that socio-economic status - the social class and background of the kids - had a much stronger correlation with behaviour and with achievement than the staff gender balance."

They say there never was a "golden age" when men accounted for a high proportion of teachers, and "small" declines in male primary teachers in the 1990s "are highly unlikely to have caused poorer behaviour among boys or their relative and recent underachievement when compared to girls"…

In secondary schools, four in ten teachers are men, although heads are worried the proportion may fall as a "bulge" of older teachers leaves the profession. Michael Watkins, of the Training and Development Agency for Schools, says: "We think there is a need to make the primary teaching workforce more representative by increasing the number of male teachers."

But he adds: "We do not think that male teachers make better primary teachers or that it takes a male teacher to drive up standards of boys or improve challenging behaviour."

For the complete article please go to: http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,1977694,00.html


For a different perspective see:
http://www.tes.co.uk/blogs/blog.aspx?path=/Media/02%20Archive/11%20June%202006/&post=2248183

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