Why there are no male teachers

Telegraph

14-04-2025

Aidan Phipps started his working life as a sales representative, working for the travel company Trailfinders. Although he enjoyed his work, after 15 years in the job, he was starting to find it soul-destroying. On the suggestion of a friend, and after 10 days of work experience, he decided to retrain as a primary school teacher.
Now 52, having worked in a Lewisham primary and currently settled at an autism specialist school near Sevenoaks, Kent, Phipps's passion for his job is unequivocal. 'It's phenomenally hard work,' he says, 'but it's also extremely rewarding. The harder your class is at the beginning of the year, the more satisfied you'll be by the end. You have to put an awful lot into it to get that result, but do it well and there's an intrinsic reward.' And, he adds, 'when you see them [the children] make progress and you've made a contribution to helping them, it's phenomenally rewarding.'
Phipps could be the poster boy for Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, who, in the wake of the recent public debate surrounding Netflix's hit show Adolescence, declared that Britain needs more male teachers so that boys have better role models. 'Schools can't solve these problems alone, and responsibility starts at home with parents,' Phillipson acknowledged. 'But only one in four of the teachers in our schools are men… I want more male teachers – teaching, guiding, leading the boys in their classrooms.'
Phillipson is not wrong that teaching is a female-dominated occupation – not just in the UK, but across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. As Phillipson pointed out, since 2010, the number of teachers in British schools has increased by 28,000, but just 533 of these are men. In 2023/24, only 30 per cent of new entrants to postgraduate teacher training (PGCE) courses were male.
Although this did represent a two-percentage-point increase from the previous year, the overall trajectory has been downwards: a 2020 Education Policy Institute Report found that the proportion of men in secondary schools had fallen year-on-year since 2010 to 37.1 per cent, and stagnated in primary schools. Women make up 76 per cent of school teachers, and just one in seven teachers in nursery and primary schools today are men. Nearly a third of primary schools do not have a single male classroom teacher, according to a report published by Warwick Business School in 2023.
So why don't more men want to go into teaching? And would recruiting them really make such a difference?
Oliver Stevens trained as a teacher more than a decade ago, after working as a teaching assistant at Scarcroft Primary School in York, where he works today. 'Both of my parents were teachers, so I was heavily influenced by that,' he says. But, he says, more generally, 'there is a huge pastoral, caring element to the teaching profession, and I think that this puts some men off. Particularly pre-30 years old, and pre-children, many men I know don't consider themselves to have that caring side.'
Phipps agrees. 'I'd never considered in my 20s or 30s becoming a primary school teacher. I thought of primary school teachers as being like Miss Honey or Miss Trunchbull [from the Roald Dahl story Matilda ], whereas I'm quite a blokey bloke. I think a lot of men see it as something they couldn't do and wouldn't want to do.'
Sir Anthony Seldon, the former headmaster of Wellington College, in Berkshire, and of private Epsom College, in Surrey, says, 'There is a lack of positive role models.' He points out that, in real life and the media, teaching is not made to appear 'sexy or attractive – and it is'.
Mark Lehain, the executive head teacher at the Wootton Academy Trust, Bedfordshire, adds, 'Status is a big thing, and teaching is not a high-status profession for a lot of people.' He suggests that men may be more concerned with status in a job than women.
Meanwhile, stereotypical perceptions – that men who want to go into teaching small children in particular must be perverted weirdos – have permeated through society to the extent that even fictional inspirational teachers such as Robin Williams's Mr Keating in Dead Poets Society, or Richard Griffiths's Hector in The History Boys, are now viewed less as stimulating pedagogues and more as slightly odd anomalies. We might grudgingly be able to get our heads around an athletic male sports teacher (PE teachers are disproportionately male) or a male head, but why on earth, we think, would a bloke want to wrestle with recalcitrant four-year-olds?
Of course, it also comes down to cold, hard cash. Teacher salaries in England have seen a 13 per cent real terms decline since 2010, and although the headline figure is higher, starting salaries – which now stand at £31,650 – have seen a 5 per cent real-terms reduction. The Government's 2.8 per cent pay rise proposal remains unfunded.
'It doesn't pay very well for the amount of work that you do,' says Phipps. 'You could probably earn an awful lot more money working much less in another profession.'
Although primary and secondary starting teacher salaries are the same, not only do there tend to be more opportunities to advance the career ladder at secondary level, but senior leadership positions at this level pay more too. Given that the statistics show men are more likely than women to be in leadership positions in education, this only contributes further to male teachers being pulled out of the classroom (or taking themselves out) into management roles.
'Men are more likely to consider finances when deciding to go into, or leave, a profession,' said Joshua Fullard, an assistant professor of behavioural science at Warwick Business School, who authored the report on teacher gender diversity. 'This explains why the persistent decline in teacher's pay has affected male teacher numbers more than their female counterparts.' Fuller's report estimated that three in 10 teachers would be financially better off in another career.
'Whatever you do, it's going to come back to money,' agrees Matthew Jessop, the head teacher at Crosthwaite Church of England Primary School, near Kendal in Cumbria. The problem, he says, is not just trying to recruit more men to work in his school, but in recruiting full stop. 'Education, in real terms, has had its budgets slashed for the past 15 years; recruitment and retention have been at crisis levels for years now.' Teacher starting salaries in England are 29 per cent lower than in Scotland for a start, Jessop points out. 'The bigger question should be why do more people – men and women – not want to go into teaching?'
And this, perhaps, is the real nub of the issue, because actually, research suggests that the impact of male teachers on boys and young men is not as powerful as one might assume. A 2010 study of nearly 5,000 grade-four students in Hong Kong found no evidence that boys' reading improved when taught by men. In 2008, a research paper published in the British Educational Research Journal using information from 413 separate classes for 11-year-olds in England found 'little or no evidence' to support the idea that boys will be more motivated by male than female teachers in secondary maths, science and English classes. Furthermore, Australian researchers in 2007 found that there was little evidence to suggest boys see male teachers as father figures anyway; the academics found that between the ages of 10 and 16, a mere 2.4 per cent identified a teacher as a role model.
In 2007, Prof Becky Francis concluded that expecting male teachers to teach or relate to pupils in predictable or uniform ways simply on the basis of their 'maleness' was 'absurd'. Prof Francis was last year appointed to lead the Government's review of curriculum and assessment.
'While the idea of male teachers as role models is an alluring one, the plan is deeply flawed,' wrote Mark Roberts, an English teacher and director of research at Carrickfergus Grammar School, in a piece for the Higher Education Policy Institute earlier this month. 'Even if we can persuade lots of men to take up the call to arms to rescue our boys, there's little evidence to suggest that the plan will work.'
Full disclosure: Oliver Stevens is my youngest son's class teacher, and I was delighted to learn that for the second year in a row at primary school my eight-year-old would have a male teacher. But researching this piece made me pause to consider why. It's true that Stevens this year and my son's teacher last year have both been excellent. But their excellence is not because they're men; it's because they're good teachers. It's been the same for all three of my sons throughout their school careers: when I ask them about their best teachers, they cite a mixture of men and women.
'Yes, I have strict boundaries, and the children have consistency and I have high expectations of them, but so do all my other colleagues,' says Phipps. 'It helps that I am a male voice in a predominantly female environment, because I'm a man with two kids who likes football – that gives me a way in. But that's not the be-all and end-all; that's just me.