Date published: 2007/07/06
The BBC says:
Recruiting more male teachers will not help close the gap between boys' and girls' educational achievement, government researchers say.
Ministers plan to increase the number of men in the classroom as part of plans to help boys get better grades.
But a report released by the Department for Children, Schools and Families suggested the approach was "simplistic" and could back-fire.
Using more boy-friendly teaching styles was also unlikely to help, it added.
The report - Gender and Education: The Evidence on Pupils in England - was a review of previous research into the fact that girls consistently out-perform boys at GCSE, especially in subjects like English.
And results last summer showed that by the age of 14 boys were 14% behind girls on average in their national test results for English.
The DCSF report said: "The increasing gender imbalance in the school workforce has raised concern that male role models are not available to boys.
"The fact that policy efforts have been made to address this imbalance reflects the theory that having more male teachers could help to raise the attainment (and/or improve the behaviour) of boys.
"However, this approach has been criticised as simplistic."
This was because research carried out last year found that two-thirds of pupils rejected the idea that the gender of their teachers mattered.
Instead children looked at the qualities of teachers, rather than their gender.
Both boys and girls said they thought teachers treated boys more harshly than girls.
The report said: "This finding is in line with other research suggesting that teachers have low expectations of boys' academic potential and such low expectations could contribute to their low achievement."
Some experts have suggested that boys perform less well than girls in schools because women teachers, who make up 84% of primary school teachers and 54% of secondary school teachers, naturally taught in ways preferred by girls.
But the report found little evidence that boys and girls had different learning styles.
It also said that there was no case for introducing boy-friendly teaching methods because anything that was likely to improve boys' grades would also improve girls' results.
This would then perpetuate the gender gap, the report argued.
Not that long ago boys were doing better than girls at school and they said it was all down to the way the system was biased towards boys, so they changed it. Of course you wouldn't expect a consistent statement from one minute to the next from educationalists since they have to justify their exsitence by continually coming up with new ways to ruin education.
And here they also clearly have some funny ideas. So they have "rejected the idea that the gender of ... teachers mattered". Why? Because "research carried out last year found that two-thrids of pupils rejected" this idea. Oh well that clinches it then. How about instead taking random selections of pupils and having them taught by random female and male teachers and seeing what the result is. That would be a bit more believable than what students allegedly think (as filtered by the educationalists and their biased surveys).
And then there is the surreal statement that "there was no case for introducing boy-friendly teaching methods because anything that was likely to improve boys' grades would also improve girls' results". Gee whiz, why would anyone want to use teaching methods that improve everybody all around, how dreadful.
If the government spent less money on these fatuous reports and more money on education the country would be better off.
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