For some years around two-thirds of secondary school teachers have been female, along with an overwhelming majority of primary school teachers. Men are disinclined to join the teaching profession for a variety of reasons, including the ever-increasing threat of false sexual offence claims from girls (Kato Harris comes to mind). Public schools, those charging fees, have a higher proportion of male teachers, as you’d expect. A piece in today’s Times by Nicola Woolcock, Education Correspondent:
Teacher training applicants have fallen by a third in a year, the latest figures show. Head teachers’ leaders blamed concerns over classroom stress and accountability, [J4MB: the implication being that women in particular are averse to stress and accountability) and confusion about routes into the profession, for the drop.
By mid-December 12,820 people had applied for postgraduate routes into teaching starting this autumn. This compares with 19,330 people at the same stage in 2016 and 20,330 in 2015. The decrease of 6,510 between 2017 and 2016 equates to 33 per cent.
The government has missed its teacher-recruitment targets for the past five years despite spending hundreds of millions of pounds on training new teachers. Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, described the figures as disastrous, “particularly as we know that there are going to be another half a million children coming through the system over the next nine years”.
He told the TES website: “I suspect that teacher workload, [J4MB: Preference Theory (2000) again – only one in seven women is ‘work-centred’, while four in seven men are] teacher accountability, all of that narrative, plays into the fact that people [J4MB: he means women, not ‘people’] – particularly young people perhaps making a decision about whether to go into accountancy, management consultancy or teaching – are just put off by something which looks like it’s not going to compare with the work-life balance they will get in a different career.”
The drop in postgraduate applications covered all age groups including career switchers and older applicants. The figures also showed decline across a range of subjects: those wanting to teach history fell by 46 per cent, science by 23 per cent, English by 25 per cent, maths by 28 per cent and French by 29 per cent. Design and technology was worst hit with the number of applicants falling by 67 per cent year on year.
For postgraduate primary school recruitment in England, the number of applicants fell by almost 39 per cent from 27,590 to 16,870. Male applicants fell in one year by 37 per cent, from 5,690 to 3,580, and female applicants by 32 per cent, from 13,640 to 9,240. [J4MB: this is a cynical way to present the statistics, in an area – primary schools – where there should be far more male teachers. There were 2,380 fewer male applicants, and 4,400 fewer female applicants. 65% of the decline in numbers can therefore be attributed to women.]
Among school-based training schemes for graduates, recognised by Ucas and included in its postgraduate figures, are School Direct and Scitt, where schools recruit trainees with specific jobs in mind. Other routes into teaching include a three-year undergraduate teacher-training degree and Teach First, the biggest graduate recruiter, whose figures are not included in those published by Ucas.
The Department for Education said that applications for teacher training had opened a week later this year so warned against drawing parallels.
A spokesman said: “There are now a record number of teachers in our schools – 15,500 more than in 2010. We are also creating a free website for schools to publish vacancies to help reduce costs and make it easier for aspiring and current teachers to find new posts.”
Incentives fail to lure graduates
Teacher training numbers are going from bad to worse as radical enticements and sops are waved around to attract people to the profession.From golden hellos and bursaries of £30,000 for maths graduates to gym memberships and private healthcare packages, schools are battling not only for the best but also for the distinctly average.
But they cannot compete with starting salaries at big City firms. They are also hindered by an image problem around excessive marking and a fairly inflexible workplace. Schools have been slow to embrace working from home (not impossible thanks to dedicated lesson planning time), part-time posts and job shares. [J4MB: in plain English, ‘Schools have been slow to embrace demands from women’. The obvious answer, as in other professions, is to recruit more men, fewer women.]
The picture is particularly bleak in a dozen deprived hotspots that the government has euphemistically called “opportunity areas”. One head teacher in Grimsby wrote on the Teach First website that its schools were struggling to recruit from an “ever-diminishing pool . . . As a result, headteachers are frequently forced to employ unqualified teachers.”
Eye-catching schemes included Troops to Teachers, endorsed by David Cameron, which targeted ex-soldiers. It was branded a flop and recruitment closed after it was revealed last January that only 220 people were training or had qualified in six years.
Ministers are endorsing Teach Now, which encourages older professionals to switch into teaching, and Teach First is following a similar tack, encouraging executives to return to the classrooms in their home towns. It is hoped that this rallying call for a Dads and Mums’ Army will plug the gap left by young graduates.
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Justice for Men & Boys 
Perhaps 24hr CCTV will make teaching safer for men.
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The problem there is coverage. Maybe they’ll need to wear always-recording bodycams when working? And the recordings preserved until they die?
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So we actually have more teachers than ever, but need more to be trained. Where have we seen this before? In fact anyone knows that the ” work-life balance” is pretty good in schools once the first few years of getting “settled in” with lesson plans etc. are done. I live in a Grammar School area so every other household is teachers who moved into grammar school catchment areas for their children. From observation established teachers enjoy their long summer hols.!! Hence its popularity with women as a career. But as other articles have pointed out the corollary of this is a lot of part time and “supply” teachers; so more teachers but not necessarily more “whole time” teachers teaching. Just like the NHS which has a doctor training problem exacerbated by a pretty massive shift to part time “family friendly” hours over the past decade or so (particularly following the disastrous GP Contract negotiations under New Labour). I suggest that there is in fact a great deal of “work life balance” and that’s part of the problem, not the solution. Couple that with a hostility to all things male and frankly the male applicants deserve medals.
Of course the logic of this would be to encourage boys and men to want to apply seeing as the flood of females is faltering. But I don’t expect to see any real effort into that. One of the hidden tragedies for the nation is the waste of talent and energy for the nation in completely disregarding its most energetic elements. Being restless and active may make them boys hard to handle sometimes but clearly the nation needs to harness that energy rather than “exclude it” and whinge.
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Unfortunately,constant CCTV monitoring needs to be implemented to prevent female staff and students from fabricating false allegations against male teachers. Interestingly, there has been huge increase in female teachers engaging in sexual activities with male students, often under-aged outside school premises. Ever since female teachers became majority at schools, life has become almost unbearable for male teachers, affecting education. This same pattern repeats itself wherever female workers join the staff, let alone become majority. I am so fed up working alongside women that I’d rather live in a gender segregated society by now. Enough is enough.
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Rather than constant CCTV monitoring I’d rather they just got rid of the feminist “I believe” rape laws, it’s very simple to do, there’s just zero political will to do it.
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Of course, I completely agree with you. But in the current climate, they are more likely to install CCTVs everywhere, rather than admitting there is a false allegations hysteria against men taking place.
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it would be better if they just applied the law correctly and imposed full length custodial sentences on female teachers who engage in sexual offences against minors( and that includes the idea that sex with a minor is non consensual and therefore rape)
impose the law properly and these abusers will soon get the message that sex with children comes at a very high price…
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Such euphemisms and generalised excuses for fall in recruitment figures – ‘workload,’ ‘stress levels.’
The real reasons they don’t dare name and avoid. Schools are horrifically filled with badly behaved, out of control, ill disciplined, short attention spanned brats, where schools barely keep a lid on this behaviour.
The liberal,permissive, lovey dovey lot who despise discipline have created chaos in the schools.
Male teachers can have their careers blown apart on the say so of female pupils, the likes of who we’ve seen in the Nando’s article previously.
What rational thinking person would put themselves in that work environment.
Schools are also PC training camps, teachers have to promote the latest PC fad – must put an awful lot of people off.
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Society is just going to have to wake up to the fact that women do not want to work 9-5 hours, which in many cases were set back in the factory era. Of course, this will mean the world of work will accommodate itself to suit their demands in as many places as it can, because its been giving in to female demands to change itself to suit the femmine interest for decades. Lord only knows what this will mean for men.
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good god
how is it not blindingly obvious to the recruiters why there is a recruitment problem in teaching !!!
as applies to any organization that has employees, if there is a hostile working environment( especially in a legal context) then who the heck would risk their lives and health in such places?
don’t the feminists use the “hostile” argument when campaigning on behalf of equality( oops sorry i meant superiority).
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