World News

Of the 1,342 secondary school teachers in Bolton whose gender was listed in the School Workforce Census last year, 444 were male.

That meant men made up just 33 per cent of the workforce, compared with 38 per cent a decade earlier.

The proportion of male teachers across all of the area’s schools, including primary, nursery and special schools, was even lower, at 27 per cent.

Male babysitters were taken off the books of a leading babysitter placement service agency after a series of shocking predatory pedophile incidents took place while parents were away from their children.

The decision was met by a torrent of criticism that it fans prejudice against male sitters and nursery teachers.

When Yu Zehong started teaching at a kindergarten in Beijing in 2018, some parents asked to transfer their children to other classes.

The parents did not have a good impression of male teachers. Some were worried because of news reports about male staff members sexually assaulting children, while others thought a man would be too strict with the young students, Yu said.

Councillor Lynne Short has called on council officers to ramp up efforts to recruit a greater number of men into the city’s nurseries.

Official figures from the Scottish Social Services Council, which manages Scotland’s early years workforce, shows just 2% of it is male.

The rates vary from as much as 8% of creche staff being male to as little as 1% working in playgroups.

Achieving real gender balance in the early years continues to flummox countries across the world. On average in OECD countries, just 3.2 per cent of pre-primary teachers are male, with the rate lower than 1 per cent in most of Eastern Europe, Israel and Portugal.