“Dads – Boys Won’t Read Dickens, So Can You Pretend You Liked It When You Had To Read It?”
Should we have greater expectations for boys and books?
At a recent meeting at my son’s school, the Head of English gave a brief outline of what to expect from the new GCSE syllabus. It was all very informative and matter of fact, but it was what he said next that I found extremely worrying.
He appealed to the dads in the room for support, he said: “We all know that boys won’t be too keen on reading Great Expectations. So when they come home and tell you what they’ve got to read, can you just pretend that you enjoyed it when you had to read it?”
This ‘nudge and a wink’ attitude to educating boys is startling in my opinion, so I decided to look more closely at what’s happening to boys at school.
Each year after the publication of GCSE and A-Level results, educational outcomes based on gender always seem to make headline news. On 10 November 2016, the Telegraph reported:
“White working class boys are the worst performing ethnic group in the country…with three quarters failing to achieve five good GCSE grades.”
The DfE National Statistics for Special Educational Needs, July 2016 states that 14.7% of boys are on SEN support in school compared to 8.2% of girls.
It seems to be widely accepted in the UK that boys are being outperformed by girls at school and under-represented compared to their female peers in higher education.
Most notable is the disparity between the sexes in literacy, which, it is argued, has effects on how well boys perform in a range of school subjects.
In 2011, the Boys Commission Report conducted by the National Literacy Trust claimed that 76% of UK schools involved in their survey said boys in their school did not do as well in reading as girls.
Many reasons have been put forward for boys’ relative lack of engagement and progress at school. A culture of ‘laddism’, low self-esteem, lack of male teachers, not enough physical exercise, too much narrative over fact-based materials to name a few.
Some argue that parents are to blame. Writers such as Sue Palmer talk about ‘toxic childhoods’ and boys being left in a zombie-like state playing computer games when they are not in school.
Many boys themselves admit to thinking of reading as a girl’s activity. My eldest son has said that most of his friends think of the majority of school subjects as ‘girls’ subjects, with the exception of maths and physics.
Some schools are adopting ideas that they believe to be more ‘boy-friendly’ ie inviting sportsmen into school or running dads’ and sons’ groups, to encourage reading. There has also been a growth of interest in ideas from abroad such as Forest Schools, where more learning takes place outside.
The gender gap also appears to be widening in higher education. Mary Curnock Cook, the Head of UCAS admissions, has called for “positive action to secure equal education outcomes for boys” and is critical of the lack of government policy aimed at addressing the widening gap in boys and girls going to university.
UCAS data in December 2015 showed that the entry rate for 18-year-old women grew twice as fast in one year than it did for men.
But we need to ask why boys are outnumbered by girls at university. For instance, many of the courses filling up with girls are vocational ones for jobs such as nursing, teaching and social work; jobs that have traditionally been female-dominated for decades.
Worryingly, there have been calls from some to lower the grades required or for quota systems for some university courses for boys. This is patronising to boys and surely will only lead to lower standards on these courses.
It is true that boys are being outperformed by girls in many subjects and girls are in the majority at higher education. So we need to be asking, is there something wrong with boys or what is happening to them at school? Or is the problem with us, and our expectations of what they can achieve?
Louise will introduce the debate ‘Boy Trouble: Is Gender Important in Education?’, at 7pm on Monday 30 January at the Institute of Ideas Education Forum, Art Workers Guild, 6 Queen Street, London.
Further details can be found here; to book a place, email education@instituteofideas.com.
Louise Burton has spent 25 years working in education and is a member of the IoI Education Forum.
