Fewer than one in seven of Europe’s primary teachers is a man. Governments want to recruit many more of them, but fail to find them.
In April of last year, while what often appeared to be the whole of the United Kingdom, or the part of it with a Netflix subscription at least, was still talking about the landmark series Adolescence, the country’s then education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, told the Children’s Commission’s Festival of Childhood that more men should become teachers. Since 2010, she said, the number of teachers in England’s schools had grown by 28,000, but only 533 of those were men. Yep, 533, or 1.9 per cent. Overall, only one in four of the country’s teachers is a man, with the numbers falling to just one in seven in nursery and primary schools, and just one in 33 in early years. Boys, she said, with toxic online influencers on the rise, need strong male role models to look up to. At home, of course, and at school too.
That the Department for Education’s census of trainee teachers for 2025-26, published in December, showed the male share of postgraduate primary trainees actually falling from 16 per cent to 14 per cent (it had been 22 per cent in 2015-16), in the very year the secretary of state had asked for the opposite, is hardly encouraging. At some schools there are no male teachers at all, says Joshua Fullard of Warwick Business School, formerly of the Education Policy Institute. Some 24 per cent in fact employ no male classroom teacher (in England, that rises to 30 per cent in Wales) and 47 per cent have no man on their senior leadership teams.
Not that England is anything resembling an exception, given that Eurostat’s primary education figures for 2024, published in May, count 273,000 men teaching in the EU’s primary schools against 1.6 million women, a male share of 14.4 per cent that falls below 10 per cent in nine member states. Lithuania is at the bottom of the pile on 3.9 per cent, while Denmark does best, but even here only 32.8 per cent of primary school teachers are men, although that does mean that boys have at least a reasonable chance of being taught by a man at some stage before they turn 11. For even younger children the numbers are even worse, with 95.1 per cent of the EU’s pre-primary teachers being women, and in Romania (where the kindergarten closest to this correspondent’s flat has never, to his knowledge, employed a man, except to drive a minibus) the figure is 99.7 per cent.
Isolation, suspicion, pay
Even schemes specifically designed to increase these numbers have met with only limited (and/or temporary) success. In Germany, the federal family ministry’s Mehr Männer in Kitas programme, which ran from 2011 to 2013 with 13.25 million euros of federal and European Social Fund money spread across 16 model regions, aimed at increasing the number of men in primary teaching to 20 per cent (men accounted for just 2.9 per cent of Kita staff when it started). By 2025, according to the Fachkräftebarometer Frühe Bildung, the number was up to eight per cent, a doubling in headcount (from 25,300 to 66,000) that came disproportionately from career-changers with a first job, and often children of their own, behind them. That’s still well below the target, however. The Netherlands, where 13 per cent of primary teachers and 24 per cent of trainees are men, went for structure instead. In December 2024 Mariëlle Paul, the state secretary for schools, announced that the pabo, the primary teaching degree, would be split into a young-child track and an older-child track, working on the theory that what puts men off is the compulsory placement with four-year-olds. The first students on the new tracks will start in September 2029.
Britain’s efforts look thin next to any of that. Maree Todd, then Scotland’s children’s minister, launched a Men in Early Years Challenge Fund in October 2018 worth 50,000 UK pounds, for a workforce that was only four per cent male. In England the Fatherhood Institute’s MITEY campaign, run by Jeremy Davies on 30,000 UK pounds of DfE seed money, has spent six years persuading nurseries to put men in their job adverts. Germany spent well over 200 times what Scotland did.
Across Europe, the blockages to training and hiring men to work in primary and pre-primary education are much the same everywhere, and they often begin with pay. Three in 10 English classroom teachers would be better off out of the profession, Dr Fullard’s earlier work found. Then comes isolation, with male trainees in primary schools often the only man in the building. Men in English primaries have left the teaching profession at a rate roughly one percentage point a year higher than women for a decade, according to the Impacted Group’s analysis of the 2025 census. There’s also suspicion to contend with, as a guide published in Kita in Germany highlights, giving over a whole section to protecting the lone man from ‘Generalverdacht’ without weakening child protection. And underneath all of it is what Mark Roberts, a teacher and the author of The Boy Question, set out for HEPI four days after Phillipson’s speech, in that the evidence that male teachers improve boys’ results is actually thin, and surveys of head teachers produce a list of 65 contradictory things they want a male teacher to be, including good at sport. As this correspondent can attest, not all men are.
None of this, however, is anything like an argument for not trying to train and recruit more male teachers. Far too many countries have made no effort at all to increase the numbers of men in teaching, at any level. This is a problem. Adolescence may have been a work of fiction but it raised a key point about the need for more positive male role models at a time when more toxic role models were filling the breach. Where nature abhors a vacuum, purveyors of toxic masculinity will see an opportunity.
Photo: Dreamstime.