Calls for more men in primary teaching: problematizing the issues

Abstract

The Teacher Training Agency has identified a need for more men to be recruited into primary teaching. This reflects wider calls to address social concerns expressed about boys from single‐parent families needing male teachers to deal with increasingly negative behaviour and underachievement. The calls for more men tend to centre on ideas of the role model they can present and, to a lesser extent, of their potential in raising the status of the teaching profession. The aim of this paper is to show that the issues are complex and generally need further analysis in informing policy and guidance for teachers in training. One group for whom the discussion is significant is male students preparing to become primary teachers. Interview data gathered from sixteen male teacher training students is used here to reflect the complexities faced by them in practice.

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Notes on contributors

Sue Smedley

Sandy Pepperell and Sue Smedley are Senior Lecturers in the Education Faculty at Roehampton Institute London. They worked before that as primary teachers in London. Their research interests are in initial teacher education, primary school culture, and gender. Sue Smedley coedited, with Sue Robson, Education in Early Childhood: First Things First (David Fulton 1996).