Matt Pinkett grimaces as he repeats Charles Dickens’s description of a female character in A Christmas Carol. “She had a ‘ripe little mouth’,” he says. “Isn’t that a horrible way to describe women?” The woman in question, Scrooge’s nephew’s wife, is peripheral to the tale; Pinkett’s students aren’t going to get a GCSE question about her. But he draws their attention to it every time he teaches the text: “It only takes me five minutes to say, ‘Why is this man infantilising this woman? Why that word ripe? It suggests consumption, it’s horrible’.”

The questions are part of what Pinkett, a shaven-headed, blokeish English teacher at King’s College Guildford, a comprehensive academy in Surrey, calls “militant tenderness” – his deliberate drive to combat what he sees as the “hyper-masculinisation” of boys by society, by modelling an alternative masculinity that values “kindness, vulnerability and love”.

Often it’s about as little as being relentlessly polite – saying please and thank you to his pupils – or expressing his emotions. “I’ll well up because a kid has written something beautiful or amazing,” he says. “Why would I hide that?”

Then there’s making sure he never fails to pick up on any “negative aspects of masculinity”. He pays merciless attention to his own language and that of his students and is fastidious about not using heteronormative examples: every time he asks a question such as why a man might write his girlfriend a sonnet, he’ll ask one about a man and his boyfriend, too.

Pinkett, 32, who is also a blogger and calls himself “Mr Pink” on Twitter, readily admits that as a younger man he indulged in just the kind of macho posturing he now rails against. So what inspired his philosophy now? “It’s me getting older, it’s my two-year-old daughter at an age where already I can see attempts to gender her a certain way,” he says.

His research for the book on improving boys’ educational outcomes he’s writing with Mark Roberts (see below), whom he met through Twitter, has played a big part too.

He does think his own personal style helps to make the point. “I’m just some skinhead bloke that talks a bit rough; if kids can see me being critical of the way people are gendered, that’s important,” he says. He thinks any teacher can – and should – be talking about gender.

The messages are getting through, Pinkett says. “This year I’ve had working-class boys say things to me like ‘it’s OK to cry, isn’t it, sir?’. I’ve heard them call out their mates for saying ‘you’re crying like a girl’.” And it’s not just about boys: “One girl said to me, ‘my mum keeps laughing at me because I didn’t know anything about feminism, and now it’s all I talk about’.”

#MeToo in primary school

Caroline Ash had her lightbulb moment reading a fairy story in class, and decided that rooting out sexist stereotypes needed to start with the very youngest children.

“It was in the midst of the #MeToo campaign,” the deputy head at Horton Grange primary school in Blyth, Northumberland, says. “And here I am, reading a story about somebody who’s sent to sleep by a wicked witch, is basically in a drug-induced coma, is kissed by a prince, wakes up and says ‘oh, he’s lovely, I’ll marry him’.”

Blyth is an old mining town and roles still tend to be stereotyped, Ash says. “The children do still see themselves in those very gender traditional roles. It’s very much the boys having to toughen up and the girls being objectified in terms of how pretty they are.” In year 3, the majority of pupils thought girls had smaller brains than boys.

Since her #MeToo moment, Ash has headed a school-wide drive to root out bias. That’s included a shake-up of the play areas in early years classes to put writing materials and dolls – which boys now play happily with – in the construction areas.

“We want children to feel free to make their own choices and not forced or pressured to make choices based on gender expectations,” Ash says.

There are discussions about misogynistic attitudes, a revamp of the curriculum so it no longer focuses on “dead white men”, and a focus on books with female leads – though Ash is frustrated at how hard it is find anything with nurturing male role models.

Ash thinks the changes have had an impact. “We are starting to get boys who feel passionately that their sisters and mothers and friends shouldn’t be treated differently.”

No ‘boy-friendly’ lessons

When Mark Roberts was brought into his school to improve boys’ results, his method was paradoxically to teach them the same way he teaches girls.

Roberts, assistant principal at Tavistock College in Devon, doesn’t believe in “boy-friendly” lessons. The idea of special strategies for boys is “absolute rubbish”, he thinks, and is also counter-productive: teaching centred on topics that it’s assumed will draw boys in, such as competition or sport, merely plays to the stereotypes that encourage them to turn off school in the first place. “We have this kind of toxic masculine culture where to be successful at academic work is seen as effeminate,” he says. “They’re not just seen as swots, but not being real men and real boys.

“Instead of being pandered to, boys – particularly working-class boys, who are generally the ones who underperform – need to have wider exposure to cultural capital, to know more about things their more privileged peers use to succeed.”

“We’ve got to break down stereotypes about subjects and as a male English teacher that’s something I’ve been passionate about doing,” he says. “I really emphasise gender as a construct and how society expects boys and men, and women and girls, to behave.

“We use the texts to address that, so in Romeo and Juliet, where Romeo’s says Juliet’s beauty ‘hath made me effeminate’, we look at this idea that falling in love makes him less of a man.”

Roberts went to a “working-class northern school where you kept your head down if you knew the answers”. “I empathised with these boys who were clever but wanted to fit in as well,” he says. In his classes any mockery is challenged immediately.

It seems to be yielding results: while only a quarter of students taking A-level English at the school used to be male – around the same as the national picture – half this year’s year 13 group are boys. And last year an equal number of boys and girls at the school got a Grade 9 in GCSE English, while nationally two-thirds of the top grades went to girls.

The gender-neutral school

You may recognise Graham Andre from the telly: the affable teacher was at the heart of the BBC documentary No More Boys and Girls, which saw his year 3 class at Lanesend primary on the Isle of Wight spend a term in a gender-neutral classroom. Having begun being pulled up for constantly calling girls “love” and “darling” and boys “fella” and “mate”, he swiftly went on to be a key player in the project.

A year on, it’s become a passion. The approach has been adopted across the school, and Andre is on the steering group of the Gender Equality Charter, which aims to help homes, schools and businesses root out inequality.

A lot of what the school is doing is about language, he explains. Classrooms have messages such as “girls are adventurous” and “boys are nurturing” on the walls.

In literacy, they’ve been working on words to describe feelings – happiness, sadness, what love means to them – and he’s found the boys far more able to talk openly than they used to be. The way they cope with anger is improving, too, he thinks. “They’re calming down a lot quicker, and now they can analyse why they’re angry – whereas before they would just say ‘I’m just angry’.”

Last term the “Boots to Ballet” project saw a troupe of more than 40 boys with no prior experience of ballet perform a version of The Nutcracker, with the help of a local dance teacher. “She said she doesn’t think she could have achieved what she did in any other school, as the boys here were so open to trying it because of the work we’ve been doing on stereotypes,” Andre says.

Meanwhile, the girls’ football team triumphed in every match last year. “A lot of that is down to this positive vibe they’re getting that girls can play sport. Boys are seeing that girls are just as able as they are and there’s a bit more respect there.”