On International Women’s Day, we face a full return to school after a pandemic year of constant crises, when the pressure has been intense and the danger of rising infection omnipresent, even in lockdown.

Perhaps Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, the deputy chief medical officer, meant to be reassuring to all teachers when he stated that the Covid death rates for male teachers were 18.4 deaths per 100,000, compared with more than 100 deaths per 100,000 for men in the highest-risk groups.

If such statistics are selected to quell dissent, they fall woefully short of convincing, when they render female teachers invisible, even non-existent. Three quarters - 75.8 per cent - of teachers in all state-funded schools are women, and there are more female than male teachers in every ethnic group. 

Yet men are a very influential minority in education, colonising the headships, multi-academy trust leadership positions and even unions. They are more indirectly involved in classrooms than their female counterparts. Thus women are far more likely to be caught in classrooms, which the government has made no effort to make any safer than they were at the beginning of January.

International Women’s Day: Don’t women in education matter?

The quoted mortality rates are only part of the larger picture. If we look at infection rates, teaching assistants - who are predominantly female - are three times as likely to be affected, and classroom teachers in general twice as likely, according to the NEU.

It is as if women in education are either invisible or don’t matter, even though they are the ones closest to the nation’s children. The public discourse is all about schools (collective noun) needing to step up to the mark. 

It’s not just that women are faded out of the picture when it comes to health and safety issues. The teacher voices in the public arena are - with the exception of Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the NEU - almost exclusively male. 

Geoff Barton (general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, and a superb advocate for the interests of headteachers) has regular slots on breakfast shows and radio. Both male and female heads are well-represented by him, so that they can maintain a public discourse of devotion to their schools and can highlight the woeful quality of decision-making and communication.

In comparison, the union voice representing teachers, learning assistants and support workers is rarely consulted.

Strident male voices 

Meanwhile, the news is full of strident male voices. In May, Lord Adonis was prepared to set Ofsted on to schools in order to ensure that all lessons went online. His intervention epitomises the male discourse of the past year, closely followed by education secretary Gavin Williamson’s instruction to parents that they should complain to the inspectorate if they were dissatisfied with virtual lessons. 

The consumerist approach has empowered parents, to the detriment of the largely female profession, who are trying to care for their own children while chained to a computer or returning to an unsafe workplace. 

The general public might expect to hear, loud and clear, the - female - voice of the Ofsted chief inspector. But what do they get? The strident tones of the former post-holder Sir Michael Wilshaw, now retired and out of touch - another clear indication that gender bias is still prevalent in broadcasting.

Where is Amanda Spielman? Has she become invisible except when she is being browbeaten by Robert Halfon, chair of the Commons Education Select Committee, because, quite wisely, she didn’t send in a taskforce of inspectors to check out schooling? Her more nuanced reasoning and up-to-date knowledge are much needed in the public domain.

Instead, Sir Michael and Mr Halfon take it upon themselves to crack the whip to get teachers (mainly women) back into unsafe classrooms in pursuit of an agenda that is as much economic and political as it is child-centred. 

Male-dominated education leadership, wavering between long periods of indecision and last-minute diktats, leaves a legacy of overwork and anxiety for the predominantly female profession. Even in 2021, there are few female MPs to fight our corner. 

Layla Moran, physics teacher and Liberal Democrat education spokesperson, pointed us in the right direction when she said, after her election as an MP: “I’d like to see curriculum taken out of the hands of politicians altogether, and instead put in systems where teachers have more of an input and the best interests of the learners are at heart.”

Emma Hardy, shadow FE and HE minister and a former primary school teacher, sees the key importance of fair distribution of money, as she was “fighting [so] that we get the funding we need for the schools in Hull”.  

Better-placed, these female former teachers could make a significant difference to the quality and sustainability of life-affirming education, by redressing funding imbalance and restoring education to those most qualified to run it successfully. Sadly, they are on the opposition benches, well-distanced from the almost exclusively male Cabinet. 

Women need to be listened to - now

The consequence is that there is no effective challenge to the dominant male factions who feel entitled to dragoon the predominantly female classroom teachers and teaching assistants into needlessly longer working hours and actual self-sacrifice. 

Today is International Women’s Day. It should be a time to celebrate the contribution of women in education all over the world. But in 2020-21, the global response to the pandemic fractured our “normal”, and cruelly exposed the deep-rooted inequalities in societies. When children were kept out of school in lockdowns, it was all too obvious that there was no substitute for the humanity of the (mostly female) classroom teacher. 

The predominantly male government wants children looked after and the public placated, so that economic life can resume. It has shrugged off many of its responsibilities - not least running the machinery of the public examinations system and systems for Covid testing. 

For 2022, the self-serving hierarchies need to be flattened and the domineering masculine culture softened. Women teachers must no longer accept a place on the sidelines of influential discussion. 

Placed in the firing line again and again, they have proved themselves more than equal to the task, and to the strident men who have thoughtlessly imposed so much on them. 

It’s time for women teachers to change the narrative by casting off the cloak of invisibility (apologies to Harry Potter fans). We need to ensure that we are visible, audible - and actively listened to. Now.

Yvonne Williams has spent nearly 34 years in the classroom, and 22 years as a head of English. She has contributed chapters on workload and wellbeing to Mentoring English Teachers in the Secondary School, edited by Debbie Hickman (Routledge)