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I have four boys myself, and I did watch Gareth's programme too.I agree with Claire when she wonders whether boys and girls are so terribly different: I have mothered them as I would have mothered a daughter - I was never a girly-girl before and always outside playing and exploring, together with lots of boys and girls. But I was also happy to sit and read, write, draw, colour in. I try to encourage my boys to do that too. And even though they need to be 'let out' to run and get rid of their energy, they can sit quietly and play with toys, read or do something by themselves too - without watching TV. I wasn't that different myself! Girls need to run around too. They like building fires, join the boy scouts and do exciting stuff too. I know I do.

"It also doesn’t help that primary school education is dominated by female teachers and that many people believe that the work set has a female bias, as indicated in this article in Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú News Education & Family."

It's not just that there is a female bias. It is also that men are actively excluded! With teaching positions like these being so dominated by females, the aftermath of the job selection interview is bound to be overly concerned with anxieties about whether a male would "fit in" at the school.

Especially as men don't tend to get quite so quickly hysterical about day-to-day workplace issues as women. Females detecting this then hastily conclude that, a lack of interest at the same level of hysteria as them, must mean the male is out of touch or poor at his job and the back-stabbing begins!

Small wonder then how young boys are so disinterested generally having so little in the way of male role models. Our society is all the poorer for such a wholly immature approach to school management.

I personally don't think that women get "hysterical' about day-to-day workplace issues" but I definitely agree that more can be done to recruit men to teach at primary level and that boys need strong male role models.

Boys and girls are different, and there is no getting away from it. As the father of a 12 year old daughter currently at an all-girls schools, I am relieved she is not learning in a mixed environment - most disruption tends to come from boys, and that comment is not based on a wild generalisation, but on my own experience of seeing how classrooms work.

What struck me about the Gareth Malone programme and The Classroom Experiment with Dylan Wiliam that has been shown this week is this: I watched these programmes expecting to be dismayed by pupil behaviour. Instead I have come away angry and disillusioned with the quality of teaching in our schools. I've rarely seen such negativity and reluctance to embrace new ideas from such a bunch of so-called professionals - and this attitude was prevalent in both programmes. Combine this with lack of parenting skills, and it's no wonder so many children turn off from education.

Having worked in the education sector as an "outsider", I can fully empathise with the hostility and scepticism that greeted the new ideas being put forward. The sad fact is this: educational ideas lag behind work-based adult learning environments by about 20 years. What schools are considering radical - no hands up, traffic light monitoring and peer feedback - has been the stuff of qualified trainers for years.

Teachers may not want to hear this, but they need to up their game to give our children the education they both need and deserve. No doubt the majority involved in the profession will say they do this to the best of their abilities and within dwindling resources - but the attitudes displayed in the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Schools Season programmes are, in my view, rife within the profession, and need to challenged.