They say theres a shortage of male primary school tecahers in The UK nowadays and blame male graduates from not applying for what they say they see as a "girly"job.
Is this true do you think or rather a cover up for a disproportionate rejection of males for the posts that do apply as the Politically Correct powers that be wish to have mainly women in the primary schools?
This would mirror the alleged dicrimination in the courts vs Fathers 4 Justice etc.
Its not well known that in the late 1960s and 1970s an unofficial secrete blacklist itment policies of most large UK PLCs and their Boardrooms vs mainly long haired but often ANY graduate of the group of "modern"Unversities eg Warwick,East Anglia,Sussex,Essex and others that had been involved in Sit Ins and Protests.
More reserach is needed on this theory.
Other reasons for being reluctant to employ swinking long hairs may be a lack of confidence in the ability to suss them out if they have any kinks etc
As you can imagine its not very nice to be told "you will be barred from many jobs and posts in The UK and UK Society"
because we are suspicious of your political views your appearence and wish to punish the whole lot of you for being anti establishment

There are few men involved in the education of young children in many countries because men who might be so inclined consider it too risky. Men are very much at risk of accusations of improper behaviour and are guilty until proven innocent and even then they still under suspicion. Many children with solo mothers have no good male role models in their lives.

BOZO

In my infants & primary days, at least for 1958-1963, across 2 schools I can only recall 2 male teachers out of 10, and 1 out of 7 respectively, though the first had a Headmaster, too.

So it isn't anything new. But the graduate bit certainly is-none of my primary school teachers had a degree, I know.

I think this bit also goes back to the war & possibly even the Great War. So many men lost in the trenches etc meant women who'd taken over certain jobs were likely to keep them.

Did you know, for instance, that's how the majority of ordinary-grade Civil Servants came to be women? Unfortunately, someone later had the idea they could do management, too!!

Steve M

As Steve says, this isn't a new situation by any means. I go back 10 years before him and my score was Infant School, male staff 0, Junior School female staff 4, male staff 2 plus headmaster shared with the senior school.

I was never taught by a male in the Junior School though, except for occasional football sessions and odd periods when the normal class teacher was absent as each year had two streams and the two male teachers (both younger than the female staff) taught the other stream.

Likewise the degree bit. I'm pretty certain none of the teachers at Infant or Junior School had a degree, though some had done a short teacher training course. At that time (the late 1940s early 1950s) many teachers had no formal qualifications whatsoever other than a good secondary education. They did an excellent job for the most part though, because they loved teaching and were respected and appreciated by the community they lived and worked in.

Steve, you say:

that's how the majority of ordinary-grade Civil Servants came to be women? Unfortunately, someone later had the idea they could do management, too!!

Tut tut, you'll have the sisterhood after you, plus sorry, but I've got to disagree with you. Just as with male managers there are some excellent women managers, there are some rubbish women managers. I've managed a few of both. I've only been managed by one woman, and she was superb. She had a handicap most male managers didn't have though. Half her staff (the females) disliked her and lost no opportunity to be catty about her behind her back. In general women seem to dislike being managed by women, which certainly doesn't ease the path of women in management!

A_L

I've had(and not in the Biblical sense!) 3 female managers out of 4(that's HEO's) in my 14 years at CSA.

One was useless, one Ok & the present one superb-more of her in a few weeks.

I just thought I'd do a bit of stirring!!


Steve

Hi Steve, glad to hear you were just doing a bit of stirring - I certainly hadn't previously had you down as a man with a prejudice against the fair sex!

I await the forthcoming posting re the lady HEO with great interest. Will it be on-topic forum-wise I wonder?

A_L

Hmm on the subject of male teeches I DID have a number of males at my state primary school in the 1960s!
The Headmaster was a man too ( I think)
The males were mostly "new generation"luvvy duvvy groovy guys in their early 20s.
They were all pro Europe pro Beatles and pro yoof.
They took us on school trips to Belgium etc and there were no problems.
They mixed with the bun haired mini dressed female teeches OK whom they were very like.
It was the older and more senoir women teeches in their late 30s-40s (in 1964)who were usually Mrs.somebody who were the sticklers for C.P.
They would ruler kids in front of class on the hands or drag them upstairs for the strap on the hands to the male head.
However the females were more Kid friendly on the whole and would get into a swimming pool to teach kids to swim which the men did not.the men were more skivvers.
it seemed the women felt more responsibility to teach and cared more.

This is the main reason that girls are now outperforming boys in educational achievement. Boys need a male teacher, not only as a role model, but because men teach and impart information in a way that is logical to the male brain (whereas scatty brained women teachers impart information in their own illogical way, which makes no sense to either boys or adult males alike), but seems to work for girls!!!

Disciplinarian, a very interesting theory. Not one I would subscribe to though. I can't agree that in general female teachers are 'scatty brained' or that they impart information in a manner unintelligible to males. I, and the other lads in my class in Infant and Junior school had nothing but female teachers throughout. Most of us passed the 11 plus to Grammar or Public schools, and most of us have done tolerably well in life.

The reason why girls now consistently outperform boys up to and including A-level is because girls mature earlier and unlike boys do not need a great deal of imposed discipline to make them keep their nose to the educational grindstone. In my day lads got the necessary discipline to keep them concentrating on the task in hand in spades! It came courtesy of hand, slipper, cane and a variety of other implements! This is now banned by law. Other disciplinary methods available are ineffective and lads are not forced to toe the educational line, so in many cases they don't.

If your theory was correct boys taught by predominantly male staff in a single sex school should match girls taught by predominantly female staff in a single sex school. The blunt fact, as you'll see if you look at the A-level performance tables, is that they don't. The top 2 places in 2008 were taken by girls' schools and only 2 boys' schools and 1 mixed school made it into the top 10.

My own alma mater now consistently underperforms the equivalent local girls' school. Nottingham High School (Headmasters' Conference - boys only)and Nottingham Girls' High School (Girls' Day School Trust) if you want to check. These two schools are situated close together, draw their pupils from the same catchment area and from similar home backgrounds, often brother and sister at the respective schools. In 2008 Nottinghan Girls' High School came 37th in the Independent Schools A-level table, Nottingham High School came 96th. I rest my case m'lud!

For anybody who is seriously interested in this subject, I would strongly recommend two books by Dr Leonard Sax - Why Gender Matters and Boys Adrift.

Sax is an American Doctor - a paediatrician and a psychiatrist - and he's looked at the influence of gender differences on education in a great deal of detail. His work is somewhat politicised (he's an influential part of the movement to increase the amount of single sex education in the United States) but it is, for the most part, excellent.

AL, if I may comment - it is certainly true (and not just in the UK, it's being seen in most western countries) that girls generally outperform boys in education, and part of the reason is almost certainly roughly as you describe - the difference in the way boys and girls mature. Recent research seems to suggest that the idea that girls mature earlier than boys is too simplistic (there are domains in which boys mature earlier than girls, as well as domains in which girls mature earlier than boys), but because of the nature of schooling, girls do tend to have some advantage in this area. However, that's only part of the explanation, and Disciplinarian has identified another part of the explanation - boys do learn better from male teachers, and girls do learn better from female teachers in general terms (although certainly not because women are inherently less logical than men, it's much more complicated than that). There's a lot of other reasons as well - most curriculum is now designed in a way that tends to be closer to the way girls learn and the things girls like to learn, than it is to boys, and teaching methods have evolved over time to be closer to the ideal way most girls learn, and further away from the ways that work best for boys (one simple example - group work as opposed to individual work has become more and more common in schools, girls do better with group work than boys, while boys do better with individual work. Another more complex example - boys tend to learn mathematics better if you start with learning algorithms and then move to applying those to story type problems, girls tend to learn mathematics better if you start with story type problems, and develop algorithms from those - the latter approach has become more and more common in mathematics teaching over the last two or three decades.

In my view, a lot of what has happened in education stems from the fact that until the 1970s or so, most schools concentrated on what boys needed far more than what girls needed. That was unjust and as calls for equality grew, more and more attention was paid to ensuring that education met the needs of girls. It was naively assumed that making changes for girls would have a positive effect for the girls and either a positive effect or no effect at all on the boys. It was twenty years before anybody realised that boys were going backwards because nobody was even looking for any problems. Once they are identified, they are generally fairly easy to address (give students the choice of working in groups or individually, for example, or have a decent mixture of both) but it has to be noticed before this can be done.

To get back on topic (sorry, but I do have a Doctorate in educational psychology and as an educator of boys, this issue of gender and how it affects education is a hobby horse of mine), Sax in Why Gender Matters draws our attention to recent researcher that seems to strongly indicate that while corporal punishment works well with many boys without a high likelihood of negative side effects, when it comes to girls, it is far less likely to work, and far more likely to have negative ancillary effects. For the last forty years, we've been dealing with studies that claim that corporal punishment has neutral or negative effects on children - but most of those studies largely ignored gender. When you group boys and girls together in a study, you do tend to get research that shows corporal punishment to be neutral or weakly negative, but when efforts are made to separate genders, you find a moderate positive effect for boys and a strong negative effect for girls (the effect on girls is stronger than that on boys, which is why when the genders are combined, you tend to get an overall weak negative). From a psychological point of view, the evidence seems to be growing that normative corporal punishment can be useful for many boys, but is likely to be useless or worse than useless for many girls.

That's interesting - because when you look at historical educational practice, it has been routine and normal for schools and teachers to use corporal punishment far more often with boys than with girls. Some places or schools even went so far as to have rules that explicitly set different standards for boys and girls (special restrictions, or even total bans, on the corporal punishment of girls, for example). These decisions, these practices were not normally based on hard research - but were made based on the instinctive, experience based judgements of educators.

Basically, research now seems to be confirming what experienced teachers have long known based on their experience and judgement.

In the era when the needs of boys were supreme in schools, where boys right to the schooling they deserved was regarded as more important than girls, corporal punishment was a routine feature of most school systems in the English speaking world. It is probably not coincidental that as decisions were made that the needs of girls needed to be given more importance, that corporal punishment also fell into decline, and came to be banned more and more often. I don't think anybody intended to make schools less effective places for boys - but I do think that that happened, intentionally or otherwise, in many places. Certainly, across Australia, I've seen it happen.

(NOTE: As I have cited Sax and his views of corporal punishment above, in support of a position on corporal punishment, I hold quite strongly, I feel obliged, in fairness, to point out that even though Sax believes corporal punishment has a role in the rearing of boys, he is not a fan of the way schools like mine use it - because he also believes that it shouldn't be used with older children. I hope to eventually convince him otherwise, but I don't want to misrepresent the man's views.)

Girls can tend to be more studious and acedemic.
Fat lot of good when something needs building or a war needs fighting.
Males and females compliment each other they tend to have different strengths and weakness's

Thank you, Doctor Dominum. A most comprehensive posting on the subject, but also a very interesting one which I have read and re-read. My own ideas on this topic are based on my school experiences many years ago and a layman's interest in education since then. I readily concede that they are somewhat simplistic, and I am relieved to find that they do not depart too far from your own opinions which are not only forged in the flames of actual teaching experience but also backed by relevant qualifications.

You make several points which strike a chord:

• Group Work Unknown when I was at school. You sat at desks arranged in rows and columns and you performed as an individual, competing against other individuals in the class. If indeed this method favoured boys then schools in my day (late 1940's through to early 1960's) were certainly boy-centric!
  
  
• Maths Teaching This was invariably algorithm based. You learnt the algorithm or theorem, then you learnt how to apply it. Again boy-centric.
  
  
• Sex of Teachers Although all my regular teachers in infant and junior school were female, it wouldn't be unfair to say that they were not particularly feminine in their demeanor at school. It would have been a brave boy, or indeed a brave man, who crossed any of them! Maybe this hard line attitude made their teaching style more masculine, it's difficult to say. I do know though that the girls in my last year at junior school did just as well as the boys in the schools they attained via the 11+ examination which at that time dictated the academic rating of secondary education. The all-boy secondary school I attended had no female staff at all, and its A-level results in the year I took my A-levels were superior to those of the similar girls' school nearby. Even 5 years after I left this was beginning to change and, as noted in my posting above, the girls' school now wins hands down. Interestingly the main momentum of this swing more or less dates from the 1970s, which you identify as the period when education became more related to the needs of girls.
  
  
• Corporal Punishment In my mixed infant and junior schools corporal punishment was applied to both boys and girls but it was used far more on boys. Indeed, as I commented in my posting above, I suspect it was what kept most boys concentrating and learning in the very large (50+) classes. Difficult to estimate a ratio, but I'd say perhaps 10:1 boys to girls so punished in the junior school (ages 8 to 11/12). In the infant school (ages 5 to 8), with nothing stronger than smacking, maybe a bigger proportion of girls were punished, but still substantially less girls than boys. During my secondary education in an all-boy school I can't prove it but I'd be pretty certain a lot more boys were beaten there than girls were beaten in the two girls' schools of similar academic rating close by. If indeed any girls at all were beaten in one of them, which I doubt.
  
  
• Effects of CP I have no doubt that in general corporal punishment was disliked more by girls and might have negative long term effects on them. I suspect though that as might be expected this becomes more pronounced with age. At junior school the only person I saw resist punishment (almost unknown for children in those days) was a girl. Equally though a another girl at junior school whom I saw subjected to a very severe and humiliating punishment in class doesn't seem to have been unduly affected by it if her life summary posted a few years ago on Friends Reunited is anything to go by! However I have met at least one woman contemporary who was still extremely bitter about a corporal punishment received at secondary (post-junior) school.

All in all, I can perhaps count myself lucky to have been born and educated at an advantageous time for males. I happen to believe very strongly in the equality of the sexes. Equal however doesn't mean the same! I often say that men and women are the only known case in nature where two completely different species consistently breed true to type! I think lads, and possibly even some of the more tomboyish girls, are probably getting a raw deal in UK schools at present, and I suspect that something more than additional male teachers is needed to redress this.

Apart from the fact that A L had only male teachers in sec school and I had both genders it would seem that A Ls schooling was virtually the same as mine.
I once saw a 7 year old girl rulered on both hands at least 12 times until the ruler broke. This was not looked on as unusual just the result of defiance.
I can see why younger people cannot believe these things happened.
I read a report a few years back that Black boys in particular tend to be unruly because they have no Black male role model teachers. It would seem that modern female teachers are a soft touch.

A_L: as mentioned, I've met three women who said they'd been caned at school, and here (for what it's worth) are their attitudes.

Two of the women resented their punishments. One, now sadly no longer with us but who would now have been about 65, was caned because she was late for class. She resented the punishment because it wasn't her fault. All this was just mentioned in passing.

The second woman, much younger, was in the middle of a general diatribe about how teachers had too much power and weren't accountable (this was in the late seventies, so maybe that was true). As part of this, she said that she had been caned on her first day at secondary school for carving something on her desk. But, she said, she'd only been inking in an already existing carving! She reckoned that the teacher was looking to make an example of somebody on day one, and that she was just unlucky. She was so embarassed about this that she didn't tell her mother.

On the other hand, the third woman had been caned twice, and didn't seem concerned about it one way or another. That might, I suppose, have been because she subsequently became a teacher, and then a headmistress. Incidentally, this comment was part of a general discussion about school corporal punishment which started for some reason which I've never been able to fathom. Another (Scottish) woman present offered the view that CP "wasn't so terrible, it just stings for a while". Perhaps she'd been on the receiving end of a belt? Who knows?

Just one more observation. I've said that I once saw a seven-year old girl slippered in class. Some three years later, we were in morning assembly and the headmistress announced to us that she had been obliged to punish a girl (so that must have been a rare event). We were all sitting at the back of the hall, and the girl I've mentioned said to her neighbour "that's what I got", so clearly she wasn't too worried about it. Nor, as far as I'm aware, was she slippered again for talking in assembly!

To expand on something I wrote earlier. I was looking through my bookshelves the other day, trying to get things back in order for the end of the year and I came across a 1990 booklet put out by the Victorian Ministry of Education's Office of Schools Administration for the policy guidance of government schools in this state. It's a document that we, as an independent school, weren't actually required to pay any attention to, but we tend to look at them to see what good ideas they may contain.

This document is called 'A Fair Go For All: Guidelines for a Gender-Inclusive Curriculum' and it is one of a large number of documents published in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s which were intended to try and improve education for girls - this one came out of the Equal Opportunity Action Plan for Girls in Education 1988-1990 (incidentally, in retrospect, we now know that by 1988, girls were already outperforming boys in Victorian government schools, and the achievement of boys was already in decline versus previous standards). It's stated intention was to raise the status of, and improve opportunities for, women and girls in our society. In the long term, the presentation of a set of value which includes the feminine as well as the masculine will lead to a more humane and balanced society.

Please let me make clear that I do not, in any way, deny that there were issues that negatively affected girls in education in this state. There was real and systemic bias that was unfair to girls for a long time, and the efforts to fix that were well intended and essential. The problem is that there seems to have been an implicit assumption that fixing things for girls would not have any negative effect on boys regardless of what was done - as schools were changed to be better for girls, nobody considered the possibility some of those changes might be bad for boys. It is now generally accepted that this was the case, but it happened accidentally, and was a side effect of some very positive ideals.

This booklet, though, in my view, helps to explain part of why it happened. When you unpack the statements in it, it makes interesting reading.

Now, it was published in 1990, seven years after corporal punishment was banned in government schools (where regulations had only allowed it to be used for boys for over eighty years), so it is not of direct relevance to corporal punishment - but the statements it makes on discipline, in general, illustrate how the idea that you couldn't differentiate discipline for the genders had gained primacy in contrast to earlier times.

The most important quote in the document on this issue is, in my view, the following:

A non-sexist discipline policy combines a balanced attitude to the sexes and does not differentiate between them either in forms of discipline or the reasons for disciplining. In other words, the same behaviour is considered unacceptable and disciplined accordingly regardless of the sex of the student.

It is later restated:

In particular, as discusssed in Section 1 of these guidelines, schools need to take care that they do not differentiate between modes of discipline for girls and boys, or view behaviour on the part of girls more harshly than the same behaviour when performed by boys because it is seen to run counter to the expectations of feminine behaviour.

This is the key issue in my view - acting like gender differences don't exist and requiring schools to discipline boys and girls in exactly the same way.

One more, longer quote, of interest here.

Discipline policies have, in the past, reflected a masculine attitude of dealing physically with problem behaviour. They involved the infliction of pain and we basically confined to use on boys. With the requirement for the removal of corporal punishment, the major focus of discipline, nevertheless, sometimes still remains on the boys. Boys overwhelmingly receive teacher time and attention for disciplinary reasons. Gender differentiated forms of discipline tend to stress difference between the sexes usually with the view that females are weaker than males, and, therefore, need to be treated differently when it comes to discipline.

Thank you Doctor Dominum, a most interesting post. Though I was at school somewhat before 1990 one of the points covered in the document has a particular resonance:

.....or view behaviour on the part of girls more harshly than the same behaviour when performed by boys because it is seen to run counter to the expectations of feminine behaviour

In the late 1940s and the 1950s when I was at school there most certainly were particular expectations regarding the behaviour of women and girls, both in society in general and in schools in particular. At that time girls recieved less punishment at school than boys because they were in general better behaved and more biddable in the classroom.

I am fairly sure though that some of the (by later standards) very severe corporal punishment occasionally applied to schoolgirls at that time was motivated by a perception that the girl had breached the unwritten but generally accepted standards which it was felt should have governed her behavior.