Why are all female teachers called Miss?

You could be forgiven for thinking you’d inadvertently turned back the clock. Cross the threshold into the majority of British schools and what appears to confront you is a workforce of unmarried women. Surely it’s 1904 not 2024, and teaching is still a spinster’s business? For, in the average 21st-century school, each and every woman teacher – married, unmarried, divorced, celibate, cat-loving, asexual or simply overworked – is addressed by her pupils as ‘Miss’.

I’m not talking about ‘Miss’ as a regrettable replacement for a name, as in ‘I asked Miss for some lined paper’, though that’s bad enough. I’m referring to the translation in pupil speak of Mrs Brown to ‘Miss Brown’, Mrs Bentley to ‘Miss Bentley’, Mrs Clark to ‘Miss Clark’, and so on. This is not new-wave feminism, a trendy revisionism by which any woman with a PGCE proudly takes ownership of the once-despised single-woman’s title.