Parents want male teachers for boys

Child psychotherapist Augustina Driessen said male role models were important. Picture / Bay of Plenty Times

Parents are asking primary and intermediate schools to put their children in male-taught classrooms amid fears they are missing out on positive male role models.

Education Ministry figures show there are just 355 male primary and intermediate school teachers in the Bay of Plenty compared with 1464 female -- meaning males are outnumbered four to one.

Parents Inc -- an organisation encouraging good parenting skills -- includes advice in its seminars urging solo mothers to request male teachers for their young boys.

Programme manager Suzanne Lander said research had shown boys aged 11-12 years began to separate from their mothers and start to learn what it is to be a man through role models around them.

"If they don't have the role models around that is really hard. I can understand why parents would request male teachers."

Child psychotherapist Augustina Driessen also encouraged solo mothers to find alternative male role models through schools or even by befriending a trusted male in the community.

"Children need males in their lives. It is like discipline, you can't start later, you need to start early while they are still under the umbrella and before they move out into the world."

Tauranga Principals Association president and Otumoetai Intermediate principal, Henk Popping, said parents were frequently requesting their children be taught by a male teacher.

"From our point of view we are dealing with emerging adolescents and it is important to have good female and male role models."

Males in teacher training institutes in Tauranga, like the rest of the country, are highly outnumbered.

At Bethlehem Institute, 91 women are currently training to become primary school teachers compared with just 24 men, and at the University of Waikato's Tauranga campus there are 75 women studying primary school teaching compared with 19 men.

Nationally, just 10 per cent of about 800 teacher training scholarships went to men last year.

Several principals cited low salaries and high-profile legal cases as deterrents to men entering primary teaching.

- BAY OF PLENTY TIMES