Sir? Miss? How to address teachers is wrong priority for schools – Jayne Dowle

Outrage is spreading – with even a heated debate on ITV’s This Morning – about comments made by Dr Elly Barnes, head of Educate and Celebrate, a pro-LGBT rights charity, who told an NEU (The National Education Union) webinar that teachers could be addressed as ‘Teacher’ followed by their surname rather than ‘Mr’, ‘Miss’ or ‘Mrs’.

A Department for Education (DfE) spokesperson said that this move would be “inappropriate and completely unnecessary… it should not be happening in our classrooms”.

I welcome any debate which opens up discussion about how we address inequality in the way we speak and the terms we choose. Language is fluid and evolves constantly. However, we are in danger of allowing gender debate to dominate the education agenda.

What about some facts then? The term ‘Sir’ came from public schools and filtered downwards, because in the past young men always addressed their elders as such.

The term ‘Miss’, however, is more contentious. Until the 1944 Education Act, it was actually illegal for a woman to marry and continue teaching. ‘Miss’ then was a reality, rather than a political term, although its disparity with the grander ‘Sir’ may still rankle.

I’ve heard of some schools where female teachers are referred to as ‘Ma’am’ which sits more happily and equally alongside ‘Sir’, but heaven knows what the gender-neutral campaigners make of that one. My two teenagers, out of a kind of courtesy I think, have called all their female teachers ‘Miss xxx’– even those using their married names.

There are clearly important observations to be made. However, I would also argue that there are also far better ways to improve the classroom experience of our children and young people than fund webinars which seem less than relevant given the massive challenges all schools face right now.

It is, however, a conundrum. I was talking to a sixth-form student before this row broke and we fell into an interesting conversation about her A-level history studies. It’s more than three decades since I was learning about Rasputin and the Russian revolution and as far as I could tell, nothing much has changed. Except for the fact that she calls her teacher by his first name.

I was slightly taken aback. We would never have dreamed of using personal names, even by the time we’d reached 
the lofty heights of A-level. However, I must admit that at 18 years old, I often found myself in a weird linguistic hinterland; too respectful to call my history teacher ‘Richard’, and such familiarity certainly wasn’t encouraged, yet feeling just a little bit too mature to call him ‘Sir’.

If I recall, most of us usually settled for a mumbled “excuse me” or ‘Mr’. Did it really matter what we called him as long as we passed our exam?

I’ve thought about this a lot over the years and never more so than this week. What exactly should we call an educator, from pre-school onwards?

When I taught in a university, the odd first-year student would call me ‘Miss’ but I always discouraged that. Not out of feminist (or otherwise) principles, but because it was my belief that undergraduates should be developing into mature young adults. Using the nomenclature learned in primary school was only going to stand in their way, I’d point out, firmly.

When I did some work in one of Yorkshire’s single-sex independent schools, however, I felt a small thrill of pride when the class of 13-year-old boys automatically called me ‘Miss’.

It was quite a daunting experience, showing these youngsters how to put together a school newspaper, but I was pleased that they afforded me enough respect to address me by the same term as they would a ‘proper’ teacher.

It’s a blessing – and a curse – that we live in a free country where interpretations can still be made according to individual circumstances and the prevailing culture in a particular institution.

I’m reminded of the poor beleaguered man who had the joy of teaching physics to my comprehensive school O-level class. If anyone called him “Sir” he would roll his eyes and say “Not yet”.

I don’t think he ever received his knighthood, but I’d say that any teacher who can stay by their post in the current climate deserves a very large medal.

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