They would be free to provide the training, or hire help from other providers as they wished.At present, about £350m a year is spent on teacher training, excluding the various payments to the trainees. Allocating this to schools according to size would mean that a typical secondary school of about 1,200 pupils could expect to receive in excess of £60,000 a year to train new teachers.Transferring the funding in this way would have a number of advantages. Many schools are keen to take this on, as we have seen in the rapid growth of school-based training (including employment-based training) in recent years But it is severely constrained by the funding available. Studying in higher education, even with periods of teaching practice, is very different from day-to-day work in the classroom, so the huge drop-out should be no surprise. To derive their income, providers have to concentrate on filling their places, irrespective of whether the trainees are those wanted by schools. Many trainees are not free to move far, so the geographical location of the training is important.An obvious way to meld the two stages would be to hand the responsibility for training over to the schools themselves. Meeting overall training targets does not mean that individual schools have available to them the teachers they need.These endemic weaknesses stem from teacher recruitment being a two-stage process, first by training providers, then by schools.
Hence, each year, about twice as many trainees have to be recruited as are actually needed.The second issue is the lack of “fit” with the schools’ requirements Too many are trained in primary and not enough in secondary Too many are recruited in biology and too few in physics. Too many of the trainees are in the north-west and too few in the south-east. Over a third of the trainees do not make it into maintained schools, and a further 20 per cent stay only a short time. The Government has been sounding pretty pleased with itself on teacher supply. In response to a recent Commons select committee report, it exults that the number of raw recruits into teaching has risen by 51 per cent since 1999; and that teacher numbers are at their highest for 20 years.
Now, it is possible to frame the figures in this way, but to do so glosses over two chronic problems First, there is the sheer wastefulness of the process. One way is to try to ensure that guest speakers in assembly and during special activity weeks are, as often as possible, men.It may mean that children become more accustomed to seeing butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers as male role models than the person in charge of their day-to-day learning.education independent.co.uk.
“It’s such a shame, especially for us in a multicultural area, where in most Asian families the man goes to work and the mother does all the domestic chores and childcare. It would be wonderful for children to see a man in a role where he sits down and reads a story.”So, unless and until there’s a dramatic change, primaries are going to have to use their ingenuity to get more men across the school threshold in other capacities. “I don’t give hugs, and am always careful when the kids are changing for PE.”At Hatfield School, Troy, one of three men in a teaching staff of 15, is aware of the same sensitivity, but has decided not to let it affect his behaviour in any way “I’m no less tactile than the women teachers here. He thinks the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of child protection, with the result that too many children are being deprived of the benefits of male teaching in their early years.It’s a problem recognised by Davies, in the head’s office at Coldfall Primary. “When a small child falls over in the playground, they want a cuddle, and I understand that some men feel cautious about giving that cuddle, particularly when it’s a girl.
But I think it’s a shame.” Clark, now in his fourth year of teaching, says it’s inevitable there’ll be some physical contact between teacher and child, but concedes that the potential for parental disapproval makes him think twice. “There tends to be an unspoken suspicion about the motives of a man who wants to work with young children,” says Professor Alan Smithers, from the Centre for Education and Employment Research at the University of Buckingham. It’s an emotion felt acutely in a world where television screens and newspapers are bulging with men carrying machine guns and footballers swearing and spitting at each other.However, the view, lurking in the background of some minds, that teaching small children is somehow a feminine thing or, even worse, that men can’t really be trusted in close proximity to children, appears still to be acting as a barrier to recruitment. Parents often breathe a sigh of relief when they realise their children are, for a whole year, going to be exposed to a positive and caring male role model. He says he’s immeasurably more satisfied now than he was in industry. “No two days are the same,” he explains, “and, despite the national curriculum, there is enough leeway to be able to take the kids out to play in the snow if you want.”The scarcity of men in primary schools can also work in their favour.
“I’m really interested in how they learn, rather than what they learn.”Chris Clark, who gave up a job as an electronics engineer four years ago, is now also a Year One teacher, at Coldfall School. “I enjoy being with children when it’s their first experience of school,” says Neil Troy, who teaches the five to six-year-olds in Year One at Hatfield Primary School in Sheffield. Teacher training colleges have told the TTA that men often submit late applications and don’t, in general, prepare as well as women for the interview.This hurdle aside, though, it seems clear that when men do become primary teachers and get settled into the job, they enjoy it just as much as women, and in some cases more. Advertising space is due to be taken out in Top Gear, Q and Empire magazines, read predominantly by men.But there’s anecdotal evidence that men are their own worst enemies when it comes to applying for primary training places, which, unlike secondary courses, are highly competitive and oversubscribed. “It’s crucial in the area of boys’ underachievement,” says Evelyn Davies, headteacher of Coldfall Primary School in Haringey, north London.
