How hysterical mothers have driven men out of teaching in Britain

As endangered species go, this one is especially alarming: so rare has the male primary school teacher become that one in ten schools has none at all, while across the country they account for barely 15 per cent of those who teach under-11s. At a time when unprecedented numbers of children live with single mothers, this means that more and more of them have little or no contact with any male role model at all. So parents have decided, as a survey this week shows, that they aren't happy about it. They think, correctly, that it is good for children to have a man to look up to; that many pupils, especially boys, behave better with a man in charge. They think that their children are being shortchanged by the imbalance.

I agree. But I also think that too many of these 'concerned parents' have only themselves to blame. There are two reasons given to explain the slump in male teacher recruitment. The first is that men tend to view the profession as 'women's work'. But if that were true, then why are nearly half of all secondary school teachers men? Nor does it explain why, given the far more rigidly sex-divided jobs of my youth, most of my primary school teachers were men.

So let's hazard a guess at what has changed since then. My old teachers were free to enjoy their jobs because they were exempt from the second, and more truthful, of the reasons given by the Children's Workforce Development Council (which commissioned the survey) for the decline in numbers. It is that these days, men are scared of teaching young children because they are scared of false allegations of child abuse. And if you want to know who is largely responsible for creating an atmosphere in which such a fear is all too horribly realistic, look no further than the twittering bunch of over-protective, over-excitable mothers clustered around our school gates.

These are the people who have bought, wholesale, into the myth of the sexually predatory bogeyman on every corner; the people who have, in a single generation, swept us from the sensible 'don't take sweets from strangers' to the absurd 'all men are paedophiles'. These are the people who breathe the fire of the name-and-shame campaigns of the scurrilous end of the Press; the people who have propelled sensational memoir after memoir of child sex abuse to the top of the bestseller charts. These are the people who declare such abuse to be appalling, but who slavishly follow the titillating thrill of 'kiddie-fiddler' storylines in soaps or films - the same soaps and films that their children also watch.

And that, of course, is the point: observant, clever and calculating as most children can be, they note the drama that thrills Mummy so very much and, sometimes, they spot their chance of a leading role in it. Robbed as they have been of their innocence, familiar with concepts and even words that most of us would not have known at their age, they join in. This is not mere speculation on my part. I have personally known a false allegation to have happened and seen the desperately unfair consequences of it.

Let us call him Roger, this committed and dedicated teacher at an inner-city school. He was impeccably behaved and adored by pupils, staff and the head, who is a close friend of mine. So she was utterly taken aback when an eight-year-old, known already to be disturbed, complained that Roger had touched him 'inappropriately'. But no matter the head's disbelief, rules are rules and, no doubt, rightly so. So Roger was suspended and sent home with his future hanging in the balance until the necessary inquiry could be arranged. In the event, there was not only a lack of proof of his guilt, there was incontrovertible proof of his innocence, as he had never been alone with the child in question.

Back at school, however, this was not enough for the twitterers at the gates. There was much over-excitable chit-chat concerning 'no smoke without fire' - chit-chat picked up by the children until, just a few months later, it happened to him again. Another allegation, another suspension, another inquiry, another total exoneration. But this time, with Roger and his wife racing each other towards mental breakdown, he left teaching: everyone, but everyone, was a loser.

There was an 'abuse counsellor' whom I once interviewed whose immovable principle was that children never lie about such things. That is rot. They do lie. And the question is not why they do, but why shouldn't they? It's a he-said/she-said game. They think they stand a chance of winning it, they get to be the centre of attention, wielding a power unusual (and unhealthy) for a child, and fully aware that if they get caught out in the lie they won't even be punished for it. They know what rattles Mummy's cage so, not surprisingly, they rattle it.

If Mummy really wanted to do her child a favour, she would forego the thrills and spills of paedophile hysteria, complete with its marches, banners, petitions and idiots, and opt for a more rational assessment of the relationship between children and male adults. First, she might look closer to home. When the NSPCC reported this week that the police estimate some 50 allegations a day of sexual abuse against children, they meant, overwhelmingly, abuse at the hands of family or of parents' friends. Mummy should be rather more vigilant about the new boyfriend she allows into her home than she need ever be about a stranger, let alone a professional one. She might also like to monitor far more closely the menace of the internet and its 'grooming' chat rooms in which the real monsters lurk.

But as for the fear of a male primary school teacher turning out to be one of them, she can forget it: so rigorous are today's checks upon teachers that a Home Office spokesman boasts of 'the most comprehensive vetting service anywhere in the world'. In short, the chance of a predator sneaking through is up there with camels and eyes of needles.

We need more male primary school teachers for all our children. For boys, they provide a glimpse of potential for their own futures: a reason to work hard, to play fair, to demand respect from the world around them. It matters, too, for girls. If the first proper contact a girl has with men is as a teenager, when her hormones are raging, the consequences of her lack of experience of them are already too obvious.

But if, back in their formative years, Mummy's fevered and irrational obsession with paedophilia leads her to say - and, believe me, I've heard it said - that there must be 'something funny' about men who want to work with small children, their numbers will continue to fall until there are none left at all. If she cannot look at a teacher like Roger without suspicion, she may think she's only doing her best to keep her precious babies safe. In fact, she might be paying a price they can't afford.

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CT: Court backs school’s punishment of student for off-site writing

This is very dubious. What right has a school got to penalize what people do at home?

Burlington school officials acted within their rights to discipline a student for an Internet posting she wrote off school grounds, a federal judge has ruled. US District Court Judge Mark Kravitz rejected Avery Doninger's claim that administrators at Lewis B. Mills High School violated her rights of free speech and equal protection. She also alleged they inflicted emotional distress when they barred her from serving as class secretary because of the 2007 posting, which criticized the administrators for canceling a popular school activity.

Kravitz's ruling relied partly on the ambiguity over whether schools can regulate students' expression on the Internet. He noted in his ruling that times have changed since 1979, when a landmark student speech case set boundaries for schools regulating off-campus speech. Now, he wrote, students can send e-mails to hundreds of classmates at a time or post entries that can be read instantly by students, teachers, and administrators. "Off-campus speech can become on-campus speech with the click of a mouse," Kravitz wrote.

Kravitz cited previous rulings in his decision that school administrators were entitled to qualified immunity. That shields public officials from lawsuits for damages unless they violate clearly established rights that a reasonable official would have known. The officials could not reasonably be expected "to predict where the line between on- and off-campus speech will be drawn in this new digital era," he wrote.

Kravitz's ruling let Doninger's claim stand that her right to free speech was "chilled" when an administrator prohibited students from wearing T-shirts that read "Team Avery" to a student council election assembly. That matter can proceed to trial.

Doninger's attorney, Jon Schoenhorn, plans to appeal the rest of the ruling and said the case may ultimately have to be decided by the US Supreme Court. "We are not backing down," he said.

Thomas R. Gerarde, attorney for Regional School District 10, likened the case to "taking a no-hitter into the eighth inning" and pointed out that every ruling has favored the district so far. "The school district is pleased to have won another decided victory in this seemingly never-ending saga," Gerarde said.

The case stemmed from a 2007 dispute over comments that Doninger, then the junior class secretary, made about administrators in her blog after they canceled a popular event she helped plan. The event was later rescheduled. Administrators prohibited Doninger from seeking reelection as class secretary, but she refused to withdraw her candidacy and won as a write-in candidate. The school then barred her from serving in the post. Doninger, who graduated in 2008, now works for AmeriCorps in an impoverished school in Denver.

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