At Banff Academy in Aberdeenshire, the design and technology department has just undergone a £1 million refurbishment, which has transformed it from “a museum” - one bandsaw dated back to the 1970s - to a bastion of cutting-edge technology, says the faculty head Caroline McFarlane.

The school now has a new computer-aided design and manufacture suite, with a laser cutter, 3D printer and CNC router - a computer-controlled cutting machine that can whittle a block of wood into any shape - as well as three more new classrooms and four workshops.

Among the workshops is one particularly eye-catching hub of activity: it’s dedicated to boatbuilding and a four-oared St Ayles skiff - a distinctly Scottish variety of rowing boat - that students are working on diligently.

The school sits on Scotland’s north-east coast and is just a 15-minute walk away from the harbour, where another St Ayles skiff built by students is berthed. It is named “Roisin” after technical education teacher Roisin Steele, who helped the students to build it, along with volunteer Pete Danks. Steele also runs the thriving boat club that allows them to take their creations out in the bay after school in the summer.

However, bang up-to-date workshops and state-of-the-art technology aside, perhaps the most obvious sign of the march of time and progress at Banff Academy is the shifting demographics of the design and technology faculty itself, which just five year ago was all-male but now is all-female.

At Banff, the faculty comprises teachers Caroline McFarlane, Roisin Steele and Caitlin Paton, and technician Alison Innes.

Overall, according to the teaching census carried out in September 2018, 30 per cent of Scottish “techie” teachers are now female, compared with 14 per cent a decade ago. Could this feminisation of the techie teaching workforce, therefore, usher in a new dawn for the subjects that fall under the technical education banner, some of which have the worst uptake by girls of any Stem options?

Last year, less than one in 10 National 5 engineering science candidates were female, and even the most popular technical education subject at N5 among girls - graphic communication - still only managed to rack up 29 per cent of entries from female candidates (see graphic, right). To put those figures in context, physics is often held up as a subject that struggles to attract girls, but last year at N5, 28 per cent of the candidates entered for that qualification were female.

Where are the role models?

McFarlane, Banff’s design and technology faculty head, has been in post for just over two years and runs courses in practical woodwork, design and manufacture, graphic communication and, of course, boatbuilding - but uptake among girls remains frustratingly low, she says. Girls come along to lunchtime clubs - especially if they are single-sex clubs - and appear to enjoy the work they do when the subject is compulsory in S1 and S2, but still, for many, techie is “a bit of an afterthought”, she says.

McFarlane blames, in part, the controversial narrowing of the curriculum in S4 - an issue that is currently the focus of an inquiry by the Scottish Parliament’s Education and Skills Committee (see box, below). Many Scottish pupils now take forward only six subjects into the senior phase of secondary, as opposed to the eight they would often have pursued under the previous qualifications regime.

She also believes that a lack of high-profile role models for girls is an issue. Famous chefs such as Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay have led to it being “OK for boys to cook” and have increased the uptake of home economics and cake craft among male students, she says, but there are no equivalent female engineers or architects that girls know about and look up to.

You might expect that seeing McFarlane and her colleagues wielding mallets and chisels and welding would influence girls at the school, but she believes that when they walk into design and technology and find an all-female staff it does not strike them as unusual - they have not lived through the decades when techie departments were dominated by male teachers, she points out.

“They come in and see us here but they are used to their teachers being female,” says McFarlane. “At primary stage, the profession is overwhelmingly female so they just accept us as being ‘the teacher’ without giving it too much thought.”

Parents, however, are a different story: they do notice, and even in 2019 an all-female design and technology department can leave them utterly befuddled.

McFarlane has lost count of the number of times that she has been stopped on parents’ nights by mums and dads looking for “Mr McFarlane”, despite the fact that the information they have clearly states their appointment is with Ms McFarlane.

Steele has also come across her fair share of confused parents who have been searching for middle-aged men in overalls, but instead have found themselves surrounded by women in their twenties and thirties. At a recent S2 parents’ night, one dad even urged McFarlane to explain to his daughter that “girls don’t do techie”.

“He was really talking to the wrong people,” she says, laughing.

Winning over parents will be the key to girls taking her subject in the future, says McFarlane, who started out as an architect and moved into teaching when the 2008 financial crisis hit. Steele, meanwhile, believes that there is nothing in particular that is turning girls off techie but that they tend to pick their subjects based on what their friends are taking. “There are a lot of Stem opportunities for girls around here [because of the oil and gas industry in the region]. It’s just about them making that choice and deciding maybe they want to do something independently,” says Steele.

When she was at school, technical education was the department where Steele thrived after her progress in other subjects was blighted by dyslexia, which went undiagnosed until her first year at university.

Capital gains

Research backs up these teachers’ gut instincts. Teachers have some influence over the girls’ choices, but they are just one piece of the puzzle - and the same goes for high-profile role models, says Louise Archer, the Karl Mannheim professor of sociology of education at UCL Institute of Education.

The research also suggests that having a good teacher of either gender has more of an impact than simply having a female teacher, Archer adds.

“Specific motivation and encouragement from a key adult, such as a teacher, is important, but our research suggests that it is the pedagogy as much as the person that can shape whether or not a student comes to see Stem as ‘for me’ or not,” she explains.

Archer is responsible for directing the Aspires project, a major UCL longitudinal study into why certain groups of young people, including girls, are less likely to pursue science. Aspires has tracked the development of thousands of young people’s career aspirations from the age of 10 to 14, and concluded that liking science is not enough in order for pupils to pursue it.

Rather, the researchers found that it was a child’s “science capital” that mattered. The amount of science capital that pupils have is influenced by their experiences at school, but also by what they experience at home, out of school and in everyday life. A child who attends science festivals, who goes to a school where science subjects are valued and promoted and who knows people who “do science” will have more science capital than a child who is not exposed to these things.

According to Archer, science capital is “significantly related to attitudes and aspirations in technology”. “We think it is fair to say that science capital can be referred to as Stem capital,” she says.

Therefore, the influence of family on the student is important, as McFarlane has long suspected, but so is their school’s ethos, who they know and what they do in their spare time.

The Aspires project - which has now moved on to its second phase and is tracking pupils aged between 15 and 19 - also found that girls who chose to buck the trend and pursue A-level physics had certain attributes. They were proud to be different, and most identified as “not girly”. The researchers also found that the girls were highly competitive, self-confident in their academic ability, and had a “brainy” identity. They came from families with high science capital and attended schools with “a strong school science ethos”. They were also aware that working in a male-dominated field could provide them with a competitive advantage.

At Banff Academy, 17-year-old Jodie Strachan is studying Higher graphic communication and is one of just two girls taking the subject. She says that playing football growing up and being in a boys’ team meant that being in a male-dominated environment in technical education “did not intimidate me at all”.

Jodie, who is in S5, thinks that other girls opt out of the technical education subjects because there is a lack of understanding around what the faculty has to offer. They think of it as “dirty and hands-on” but, in fact, a subject like graphics is more about “being arty”, she says.

Jodie got greater insight into what techie was about in S3 through the Girls in Energy project run by the local North East Scotland College and the school. She thinks that taster sessions aimed at girls that demonstrate the variety of skills within technical education might open their eyes.

Ultimately, though, she believes that more girls will start to study in Banff’s design and technology faculty. When she arrived at the school, the department was all-male, which was why very few girls in her age group took the subjects, she says.

“When it was just the male teachers, it felt like it was just the boys who were included - that it was just a male subject. Now it’s the female teachers, everyone gets involved and, with all the new equipment, it looks so much better. It just looks so much more enticing.”

(Bath)room for improvement

McFarlane certainly hopes so, especially as when girls do pursue her subjects they tend to excel - Jodie and the other girl in Higher graphic communication, Natasha Coldwell, achieved the joint best exam results in the prelims. However, McFarlane is also conscious that for some of the boys, an increasingly feminine teaching workforce might not feel like a good thing (see box).

The atmosphere in an all-female faculty can be different, she says. For example, recently Steele tried on a dress and fascinator bought for a wedding at break time in order to get some second opinions from her colleagues. However, McFarlane says if the faculty feels different, it probably has more to do with the teachers’ ages than their gender: McFarlane is 32, Steele is 29 and Paton is 23.

“Some of the teachers we have got are a bit more willing to have noise and a bit of friendly banter,” says McFarlane. “So the atmosphere can be more enjoyable - a really good learning environment the pupils are happy to be in. If they go into industry, they will have the radio on and they will be chatting. Obviously, though, when they are working on the theory or written pieces, they need to be able to concentrate and the environment has to change.”

However, in this all-singing, all-dancing new techie department, there remains one very visible reminder that gender equality in Stem is still some way off for girls: the loos.

The transformation of the department did not extend to tackling the toilets, which means that while the boys have their own toilet, the girls - including the teachers - have to use the disabled one.

It’s a hangover from the era when the block was boys-only, but is nonetheless symbolic: Scottish schools still have a long road to travel before the last vestiges of sexism are flushed away.

Emma Seith is a reporter for Tes Scotland. She tweets @Emma_Seith

This article originally appeared in the 19 April 2019 issue of Tes Scotland under the headline “Design equality”