Our schools need tough guys teaching teenage boys, not feminised men caring for primary-level infants

By Kathy Gyngell for The Daily Mail

Published: 19:55 GMT, 17 July 2012 | Updated: 19:55 GMT, 17 July 2012

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Role models: Education Secretary Michael Gove has said he wants more male teachers in schools

Michael Gove wants male role models for boys and better discipline he says. Yet, yesterday he let his civil servants knock back a Free School application that offered just that.

Mr Gove has also said he wants more male teachers.  He is right, they are needed.  To our cost, teaching has become a female-dominated profession  in both secondary and primary schools. Fewer than one in four recruits are men.  Only 25% of teachers are men and it is set to get worse as the profession sheds older members.

The three main teachers’ unions too are led by women. The simple fact is that this is not a great environment for men to work in. With the elimination of so many single-sex schools, boys today can go through their entire schooling without ever being taught by a man.

This is quite, quite wrong.  I would go so far as to say it is a disaster. No wonder so many of our young men are in crisis, out of control, on drugs and unemployable.

These boys have no male points of reference; they are left with gang leaders as their only possible male role models.  They grow up at school, as well as at home, trapped in a predominantly female environment. They resent it and buck against it. It is understandable. It cannot possibly fulfil their needs. 

So what could have been timelier than the Phoenix Free School concept and application?

Identified by the New Schools Network as one of the 16 strongest of the 250 free school applications, it has the backing of the local population of one of the more deprived and poorly served areas of Oldham.

But it is far more than that.

For it is not often, as Tim Knox, the Director of the Centre for Policy Studies, pointed out on Conservative Home yesterday, that you hear about a charismatic Muslim British army officer planning to head up a school. This is what Phoenix has.

It is not often that you find a school in which the head of studies is a former Tornado pilot, who also happens to have been head of science at three independent schools. At Phoenix you could.

It is, frankly, never that you find a school where all the teachers will have served at a senior rank in the British Army. At Phoenix you can.

Discipline: The Phoenix free school project aims to employ ex-servicemen as teachers

In the Phoenix Free School classroom indiscipline would be a relic of the past. Here the most recalcitrant boy would find authentic male role models for challenge and inspiration.

Yet, yesterday, Michael Gove’s civil servants knocked this application back. Their grounds were spurious.

Their decision begged the question of how committed the government really is to rectifying the teaching imbalance, let alone addressing the fundamental problem of discipline and wayward children.

Did the DfE ever really have its heart behind projects like this? Or does it have its own gender agenda that it is still pushing; which might be summed up as putting sticking plaster daddies into primary schools.

The giveaway was a speech last year from Michael Gove which essentially parroted the wisdom of Alan Johnston one of his Labour predecessors. Male teachers were needed, not in secondary schools, no, but in primary schools.

They were being put off, Michael Gove opined, by worries that teacher-pupil contact was a 'legal minefield'. Never fear, these barriers would be removed he promised.

Misguided: So far, the focus has been on providing more male primary school teachers

They were needed, he emphasized, 'to provide children who often lack male role models at home with male authority figures who can display both strength and sensitivity'. Alan Johnson, Labour’s former Secretary of State had said exactly the same thing. Perhaps the officials had churned out the same speech?

But why primary schools?  This is the the received wisdom that no one dares gainsay. Why? Because this is not about male role models for boys but about getting men to do women’s jobs. It is about getting daddy to be mummy. It is all about ghastly political correctness and gender parity politics. Never mind real consideration of children’s needs.

Of course everyone is applauding this years’ 51% rise in male primary teacher numbers, reported yesterday. But is it such a cause for celebration?

It certainly reflects the Government’s Training and Development Agency’s persistence in this matter. Their repeatedly launched initiatives to get men into primary schools finally seem to be bearing fruit.

But the irony is this. This is not where men are needed. Squashing men into ‘soft jobs’ does not give little boys either the father or the male role model they later need.  Encouraging men to place greater value on the caring and empathic qualities may be the order of the day.   But the idea that these skills are increasingly required in teaching is plain balderdash.

All that pushing men into primary schools will be to feminise the men. No doubt this is the intention. It will not make men out of little boys.  The ambition for gender parity is the real DfE agenda.

Women have taken over the secondary schools. Now men can be given the primaries. Talk about the wrong way round.

Gender balance in primary teaching will make little difference to boys’ results or to their social and emotional development. If a boy lacks a father – then he needs a male mentor special to him, not a man coping with 30 kids who probably can’t remember his name or whether the child has a father or not.

Nor is it innately a good thing. The fact is that primary education, unlike secondary education, is traditionally the domain of women teachers. And this is pretty much world over. It is the case in countries like Germany who have the best pupil outcomes.

Women teach younger children for a good reason. They (boys too) need the care and nurturing that women provide. Childhood, traditionally and cross culturally is the period in which children stay with women – with their mothers and grandmothers.  Whether in Africa, India, whether in the US or in the UK, whether in primitive or modern society, this is how nature has dictated it. Younger children need more mothering than fathering.

We upset it at our peril.

This female environment is the crucible of language development. It is from within this intimacy, warmth and security that a child is able to explore and develop.

It is a nice make belief that primary school sirs will make it up to boys of fatherless families. They won’t.

But what these boys desperately need and will help them is to have real men around when they hit puberty. Michael Gove seemed to understand this. He promised Troops for Teachers, a scheme started in the US in 1994. He endorsed the idea the day in 2008 that the CPS publication by Tom Burkard was published. Mr Gove  went on onto feature it in three consecutive speeches to the party conference.

In the US, about 40% of senior NCOs have a degree when they retire but very few British NCOs even have 'A' levels. So Tom's idea was that that they be trained as instructors with special reference to basic skills training. They would also have other duties, primarily pastoral care, sport, and outdoor activities. All the things that troublesome teens need plus a positive role for retiring soldiers.

Sadly the idea seems to have petered out. There is, I suspect, no enthusiasm for the idea in the DfE, which is clearly on the other side of the culture wars

Yet that and tough guys teaching teenage boys is the recipe for the change we need; not feminised men running the nappy curriculum that Michael Gove instead seems bent on.

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