The gender gap

By Jim Sweetman

It’s that time of year for examination results and, as usual, they are showing a small overall improvement. Although it is always possible to find somebody to moan about this and to say that standards were higher in their day, we would be in big trouble without this annual feature which is known as grade creep. If we didn’t have it, there would then be no school improvement since that is measured on the same figures, and OFSTED would have to say that all our schools were rubbish in spite of billions of pounds of investment, and then we couldn’t have any academies if schools were not improving, and we would have to abandon the curriculum because it would be clear that it wasn’t working, and Michael Gove would have to resign and go back to News International. And, so on!

So if that isn’t worth commenting on, then what is? The figures we really need to sit up and take notice of are those that describe the differential performances of boys and girls at GCSE when they are 16 years old and on the verge of adulthood. The gap has been slowly increasing year by year and now just under 20% of passes achieved by boys are at the top two grades (A* and A) in contrast with 26.5% of passes achieved by girls. That is a big difference and people should be worried.

According to the BBC, Andrew Hall who is the director general of the biggest examination board in the UK says examiners are ‘scratching their heads’ over this trend which must be something to do with ‘boys and girls maturing at different rates’. He doesn’t really sound very bothered does he? And he certainly doesn’t want to blame any aspect of the examination system for it.

A good reason why he and everyone else ought to be concerned is what happens at the other end of the scale – at every grade boys achieve less than girls and at the bottom end lots more boys get qualifications which are increasingly worthless – as colleges, apprenticeships and training place more stress on a minimum grade C in English and Mathematics. Of course, people talk about these bottom grades as if they have some currency but, in practice, they are not worth much in terms of buying entry into a job or further training.

The place that these people then end up is in the NEET statistics – standing for ‘Not in Employment, Education or Training’ – and in the 16 to 24 age range there are now almost 1million of them. The figures indicate more or less equal numbers of boys and girls but since a large proportion of the girls are mothers it is the young male cohort which is most worrying. Add in the fact that NEETs are concentrated in areas of social disadvantage and you don’t need to run an examination board to see how this lack of any prospects relates to the disaffection which ends in alienation, gang membership and rioting.

The very term NEET is also a dreadful blanket label for the socially excluded. It defines people in negative ways and leads governments into intervention and reduction programmes instead of tackling the issues. It is one of the ways in which our society has forged the social exclusion of rioters and looters which the media have then discussed as if it is a lifestyle choice.

It gets worse. Recruitment consultants talk about ‘identity capital’, the package of educational, social and emotional resources which influence adult employability. Ex-bankers do pretty well on this measure but young men from disadvantaged areas with no discernible educational qualification, emotionally and financially impoverished and without role models are at the bottom of the heap. It would be funny if it wasn’t true that the very expensive ConneXions service set up to target this problem was based on the idea that counselling would help. Of course it wasn’t effective. It was just more labelling, more fire-fighting and a bit more reinforcement for the socially excluded tag.

So why do boys do so badly in education or to be more precise why and how does the education system stuff the chances of boys so pointedly? This question doesn’t get asked much because some boys do okay and it is therefore assumed that the others are defective. Some boys go to independent schools and get different kinds of education and some boys get a leg up into what are called – without any sense of irony – jobs for the boys.

To be fair to the man from the examination board, maturation is an issue but only when attainment is locked to age. In other words, we expect boys to be able to do things as well as girls at key stage one ignoring the fact that their motor skills are less well developed and their concentration spans shorter and then we test them and the boys do less well and so failure is helpfully embedded from the start.
As the boys grow up and become active and curious, we insist that they are sedentary and focused and emphasise writing as almost the only output of schooling forgetting that being slower to develop motor skills made the boys untidy and instilled bad habits from the start. When the boys want to start doing things with their hands and making stuff, we want them to stop and do more writing and when they want to talk and learn from one another we tell them to be quiet. Is it any wonder that it is cool not to be interested in learning?

What is new in this and why has it made a difference now? Whatever one thinks of the national curriculum, it is indisputable that it puts facts and spoon feeding in front of discovery and it requires less practical work, less independent work, less exploration and more writing. Couple this with key stage testing which tells everyone which level they are at and makes that information public so that boys see they are not doing well in class, and link that to expectations of teacher performance which make teachers intolerant of boys who try but don’t succeed. Then, downplay the practical and vocational subjects and the opportunity to get dirty hands, to make music and create art throughout secondary education. Put in more testing just to make clear to the boys that they are failures and by the time you get to GCSE your self-fulfilling prophecy will come true.

A lot of readers will think this overstates the case. They will argue that boys need more discipline to help them concentrate and because some boys succeed then they must all have the potential. Grown-up girls and grown-up successful boys are unlikely to want to admit to their advantage even as they castigate the rioters for, allegedly, socially segregating themselves by language, clothes and culture. Perhaps it is time that they did. The gender gap in education is a lot more pernicious and more worthy of study than some people seem to believe.