We have known for some time that something in the education system isn’t working for boys. In primary, secondary and now, as a report from the Higher Education Policy Institute confirms (Boys to Men, May 2016: http://bit.ly/1TjfNmD), in university education too, boys are lagging behind female class mates.
UCAS estimates that women are 35 per cent more likely to get a place on a degree course in the UK than a man. If current trends continue unchecked, things will get significantly worse for boys born today.
The fact also remains that if the tables were turned and we were talking about more than 45,000 fewer girls getting degrees in the UK (and that is just using data from 2011), there would be more questions asked.
The difference in attainment between boys and girls is certainly not a priority for the government. The White Paper Educational Excellence Everywhere focuses much more attention on addressing inequality in education related to poverty rather than gender.
Of course this is a worthy aim. NCB’s own Greater Expectations research has shown how growing up in a poor household can erode a child’s education, making them far less likely to achieve a good level of development at age four, to achieve well at school age 11 or do well in their GCSEs at 16 compared to a child from the most well-off backgrounds. But making no mention of gender imbalances in education may come to be seen as short-sighted.
What is causing boys to falter is complicated to unpick. The HEPI research shows that ethnicity is linked to attainment in university, with young White men from poor backgrounds at the bottom of the pile – only 10 per cent enter into higher education, compared, for example, to 60 per cent of young men with Chinese heritage.
Neurological differences also play their part. The report concludes that while the difference between girls’ and boys’ brains may have been overstated in the past, it is a factor. During adolescence, boys’ brains tend to undergo a neurological shift to a more efficient way of wiring the brain later than girls.
And then there are societal influences. At the heart of these concerns is that boys are faring less well because they lack positive male role-models around them as they grow up. We know that in the UK around one in four families are single-parent, and of these, a woman will head 90 per cent.
This disparity is echoed within the school workforce where women teachers are predominant in schools. However, there is no conclusive evidence that increasing the number of male teachers would raise attainment among boys.
One study in England found that women teachers are fairer in the way they treat different gender groups and less likely to be influenced by whether a pupil is a boy or a girl.
Whether these differences arise due to nature or nurture, the disparity in outcomes cannot be ignored. In an NCB study of boys’ attitudes to health, conducted in response to the fact that men are more likely to die prematurely of health conditions that should affect both sexes equally, we concluded that the solutions could only be brought about by multi-pronged interventions involving policy-makers, health professionals, parents, teachers, and, crucially, boys themselves (http://bit.ly/1XySoTx).
The solution to boy’s poor performance in education will require a similar breadth of action.
Here, we would do well to remind ourselves that the aim of education isn’t just improving crude output measures (like holding a degree certificate) but in building the capabilities of boys so they can thrive in an education system which may be at odds with some of their characteristics. A challenge for our current thinking on education is that boys deserve equality too.
- Anna Feuchtwang is chief executive of the National Children’s Bureau. Visit www.ncb.org.uk