After decades of working in the City, Stephen Hargreaves could have chosen a more relaxing way to spend his fifties.
Instead, he has swapped investment banking for a different set of challenges at the front of the classroom, as a maths teacher.
It is all the more remarkable as he was expelled from school at 15 and had to take English and maths GCSE for the first time this year. Despite his career success, his background means he can empathise with struggling pupils.
While the majority of those entering the teaching profession are young women, Hargreaves, 52, is one of a growing number of older men training as teachers after decades working in very different jobs.
This year’s male recruits have included a 54-year-old firefighter, a senior automobile designer and a 72-year-old former driving instructor. They have all retrained as teachers with support from Now Teach, a charity that helps career changers. More than half of the Now Teach network is male compared with a third of the national teaching workforce.
Hargreaves, a former investment manager who lives in north London, was repeatedly physically abused by a teacher at primary school and disengaged from education after that.
He said: “I just coasted through the rest of school, my behaviour deteriorated and I was in more and more trouble.” At 15 he was told not to return to school, except to sit GCSEs in business studies and French. He lived in a rural area of Kent and took on manual labour, working in fields while being “angry with the world”.
The owner of a horse farm he worked on taught him the importance of reliability. He decided to return to education and took an access to higher education course with dreams of starting a degree in physiotherapy. That course was oversubscribed, so he took a business course instead then started a data inputting and filing job.
He worked hard and stayed late, taking on tasks beyond his remit and was repeatedly promoted. After gravitating towards higher risk elements of the profession, he ended up as head of high-yield funds at a leading investment bank in charge of funds worth billions of pounds. During the coronavirus pandemic, he toyed with the idea of becoming a teacher after realising that the most satisfying part of his job was mentoring younger employees and he decided to make the switch this year.
Before starting teacher training, he had to complete a qualification equivalent to GCSE maths and English and he started working at a school in Hertfordshire this autumn.
Success boiled down to reliability, he said: “If you learn nothing else in life, it is key to be in the place you need to be, do the job you need to do, at the time you said you would do it. You don’t need to sugarcoat it.
“I love being in the classroom, I’ve found it easy to relate to children, particularly the tougher ones. Some people think the way they behave isn’t rational; it can be hard and frustrating, but I understand their lives. This will be the rest of my life’s work.”
Hargreaves is already working with academics to conduct research about the importance of self-esteem in children and plans to write a book, saying: “Schools are brilliant at safeguarding and keeping children physically safe but that doesn’t help those suffering from trauma. Some are suffering terribly but teachers don’t necessarily know.
“I want to work with them to address underlying problems. There’s a complete lack of understanding that you can’t learn without good self-esteem and that all behaviour problems go back to that. You get self-esteem from a sense of belonging — that’s what the military and gangs do so well. We need to address that in the curriculum and teacher training.”
Ministers and education experts have called for more men in the classroom to act as positive role models for boys, particularly in the wake of the Adolescence television show earlier this year, telling the story of a boy who murdered a female classmate.
He said this month: “There are not enough good examples out there of good, kind men and the things that they do. There’s not enough narrative about good men.
“When you’ve got unregulated information and the form of people like Andrew Tate, who are sort of pushing a very immature and disruptive idea of masculinity on to vulnerable young men, then that’s where the problem holds.”
“Men want to be teachers, but just two in five applicants makes it on to a training course, compared to over half of females.
“Now Teach’s conversion rates [between men and women] are near parity. We believe this shows the need for a dedicated support service to nurture this green shoot amidst a decade of missed recruitment targets and help men make a sustainable career change to the sector.”
Older people switching to teaching via Now Teach have an average starting age of 50 and the male converts include businessmen, entrepreneurs and managers and those coming out of retirement.
By Nicola Woolcock – Times Education Editor