The notable absence of primary school male teachers is a longstanding problem that has proved tricky to resolve. So much so in fact that for many in education, past and present, the gender gap in early education is all they have ever know, despite efforts to address the shortfall.

Today, as a  new infographic shows, there is still a lot to be done to inspire men to enter the profession and take up primary school teaching. While progress has certainly been made in boosting male recruits over the years, the breadth and depth of this change is still small scale.

Women still outnumber men six to one, despite the number of male trainee teachers increasing by a substantial 50 per cent between 2008 and 2012 (and, interestingly, at five times the rate of women). Yet, you still need 129,000 additional men to sign up to primary school teaching to get them on a level par with women.

As a result of this deficit, there are thousands of schools in the UK without any male teachers at all, which, many argue, doesn't necessarily damage a pupil's experience of education or the world, but nevertheless distorts it.

It isn't, for example, representative of the diverse and multicultural world they will enter into as adults. For young boys in particular, the absence of male role models in education can and does perpetuate certain myths or apprehensions men have about entering into primary school teaching.

As one headteacher – Alex Lundie of Broadmead Primary in Croydon – put it in an interview with the London Evening Standard last year: "We are a mixed world and it is good for children to have role models of both genders, but they have to be good role models. I wouldn’t say I feel a deficit in terms of what we have but we would happily recruit men to more reflect society."

As a generalisation, men, if they harbour any interest in teaching, tend to opt to enter the profession at a secondary school level or take up a post later on life, lecturing in further or higher education. These remain their preferred arenas of interest, even though, specific to primary and secondary, the pay scale and progression routes are more or less the same.

Why is this so? As mentioned above, there is a vicious cycle of sorts that emerges from the current status quo: there is a decided lack of male teachers in primary schools, which, on consideration, has an influence on choice of vocation, tacitly or otherwise.

There's also a lot to be said of what society dictates as acceptable and thus, so it is, that typecasts about the kind of man that enters into primary school teaching rear their ugly head. The masculinity of men is put up for debate, their motives are questioned and old-fashioned ideas about guys lacking the natural nurturing or caring qualities trump common sense thinking.

Against all of this, it is rather obvious to see that there are perhaps more roadblocks to men entering primary school teaching than there are open highways, so to speak. Make a positive impact on the profession, so that more men embrace early education is going to be difficult and it will take time, but it isn't impossible.There is a great career to be had, as Darren McCann, deputy head of St Ambrose primary school, said back in 2012:

"I’d always done well at school and initially thought I’d want to be a doctor or a lawyer. This all changed after I visited a school for work experience. A career in teaching shot to the top of my list. It was my ambition that directed me to primary teaching specifically - there are great opportunities for progression - and I’ve reaped the benefits of that decision."