Changing social norms about gender isn't easy, but as a primary school teacher, Marcus Gibson is making a change even though he says it's only "on a very small, microscale"
By Eelinn Vanquaethem
A couple of men are seated in a circle in one of the classrooms at Randal Cremer primary school. Most of them seem to be in their thirties. All of them are looking at one person, Marcus Gibson, a male primary school teacher who organises workshops for fathers.
He is pretending that a child is standing in front of him. He squats so he's at the imaginary child's eye level and tells it off. Many of the men looking nod and one of them even says that it is a lot different from what he thought parenting was like. Marcus organises the workshops as he believes men go through an initial shock when they work with children or when they become a father. According to him "they have some sort of masculinity complex around it".
Even when he tells new parents at the school that he is one of the teachers, he notices that a couple of them are shocked to see a man taking care of children who are under seven years old. He says that "a lot of people still expect it to be a woman's job because it looks more like a nurturing and a caring role when actually it's so far away from that". Not only that, but people are still very used to seeing a female teacher in schools because more women than men pursue such a profession. In November 2015, for example, only 15.2 per cent of nursery and primary school teachers were male according to the Department for Education.
At a meeting with all of the year two teachers, Marcus was the only man out of 13 teachers. He did notice this, but never felt like it bothered him or that it had any impact on his job.
Looking at various schools, Marcus did notice that men who pursue a career in teaching do seem to get a promotion a lot quicker. The school he previously worked at, for example, had a male executive head and deputy head. According to Marcus, they climbed to the top rather quickly and believes this is because there aren't a lot of men in the industry. The few that are therefore get fast-tracked to make it seem that the school is more diverse. Marcus himself does shy away from those type of leadership roles.
"Anything that takes me out of the classroom puts me off of the job in a lot of ways because the reason I became a teacher was to teach children and to be with children."
Marcus always knew he wasn't meant to work in an office and knew profit wouldn't motivate him. Halfway through his sociology degree at Goldsmiths University, he realised he wanted to become a teacher, a passion he picked up when helping out on trips at the school his mother worked at. He has now been teaching for five years and still loves it every day.
"It's one of those jobs where every day you could name ten things that were amazing but you could also name ten things that were really tough."
In the few years he has been teaching, he did notice that a couple of boys do benefit from having a male teacher. Marcus has noticed that "they've actually become a lot more confident and a lot more willing to speak out in class". As a result, they seem to be a lot more willing to get on with their learning.
Marcus isn't the only one who has noticed the benefits of male teachers. Teach First, a charity that addresses educational disadvantages in England and Wales, says that children need access to committed and talented teachers from a variety of backgrounds. Some bursaries and scholarships have now been put in place to encourage more men to become teachers at nurseries and primary schools, but Marcus believes that this will only achieve the bare minimum.
"I think if you spoke to most men, they wouldn't even know that exists," he says. "I just don't think a lot of men feel like they could go into certain fields of work."
Marcus criticises the social norm for mothers to stay at home to take care of the children and for people to assume that women will take on nurturing roles. "It's just something that people think is in nature and it isn't," he says.
One of the ways in which we could encourage more men to become teachers is by educating society as a whole and to ensure people aren't locked into views.
He does understand that it will take more than schools starting to teach different values. People may be held back, for example, by "the way their family thinks", but that doesn't stop him from encouraging the children he's teaching to think about the way they perceive different genders.
At the core of it all, Marcus just wants people to understand that people are good at different things. For him, it is being patient and considerate with children. For others, it might be typing away on a computer in an office.
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