Getting it Right for Boys ... and Girls

Wendy Bradford, Colin Noble

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415208840
• eBook ISBN: 9781134618132
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Boys' underachievement is grabbing headlines in the education debate, and it has never been more important to solve the problem. This book offers clear and practical strategies to headteachers, classroom teachers and other professionals for ways to address the issue. The book looks at:
*reasons for boys' underachievement
*ways of adapting teaching styles to maximise learning gains for boys ... and girls
*guidance on how to plan successful pyramid, whole-school and classroom approaches
*practical strategies for subject leaders and teachers
*examples of successful case studies
After introductory chapters examining whole-school issues and strategies there are further subject-specific chapters that advise on particular teaching approaches.

Chapter 1: We are facing a crisis

Chris Woodhead, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector for education, has written that the under-achievement of boys is the greatest challenge and crisis facing education. Others have gone further.

If there is a growing underclass, poorly educated young men are its vanguard. …It is certain that one of the critical equal opportunities issues for the next decade is the motivation and achievement of young men.

(Barber, 1994, p. 7)

It is easy to see why this view prevails. The tables in Chapter 2 show clearly that boys are achieving less than girls in most subjects, but particularly so in English and other subjects which demand higher level language and organisational skills. Given that the demand of the modern employer is increasingly for these very skills, the implications for boys, for their future and for society as a whole are very stark. For some boys, their low level communication skills affect their achievement not only in other areas of the curriculum but will also blight their life experiences and chances. Their potential is being left woefully short of being fully realised. There is the likelihood that they will find themselves marginalised and irrelevant to the next millennium’s job market.

Once out of education and with few qualifications, they become trapped in a revolving door of benefits and low-paid jobs. Within months, many fall off the margins and face a lifetime of social exclusion and crime.

(Finding the Missing, a report of the National Youth Agency)

For society, the prospects of a large cohort of under-employed, unskilled, under-educated and quite probably unpleasant young men is not a healthy one. We have to do something about it.

What crisis?

Practice makes perfect. If the cliché holds true, teachers these days must be almost perfect at balancing the hyperbole against reality. National statistics might worry the politicians, school statistics might worry the headteacher, but it’s the progress and results of individual students which concern teachers. They know better than to get swept along with the unthinking panic that could be the product of media interest in the issue of boys. Whatever school improvement strategies are being developed within a school, teachers need to be able to answer the question ‘Where are we now?’ This must be split into ‘How are our girls doing?’ and, of course, ‘How are our boys doing?’ The more delving that takes place at this point the more secure will be the knowledge about particular groups of boys and girls. How are our boys and girls doing in each subject area? How are our boys and girls from different ability groups performing? It is common to find that high and low ability boys are performing about on a par with high and low ability girls—but what about those of average ability? That is often where boys’ under-achievement can be found. Average girls often go on to get their Level 4s at Key Stage 2 and their crop of Bs and Cs at GCSE, whereas average boys provide the Level 3 s and the Ds and Es, which frustrates the school’s effort to hoist itself up the league table. Far more importantly, it limits the training and employment opportunities of the young men concerned.

It is worth remembering, of course, that under-achievement shows itself in many forms. It isn’t always noisy, disruptive and unco-operative. It can be also be helpful, reliable and delightfully cheerful! Teachers often use Cognitive Ability Test data, SATs results or a combination of both to establish the starting point from which progress will be measured. In some schools this exercise will reveal many under-achievers, in others it may reveal few. In some schools the under-achievers will be spread across all areas of the curriculum: in some they may be concentrated in, for example, English and French. In some schools, under-achievement will be apparent among students at all levels of ability: in others it may be a certain ability grouping which is faring badly.

And the girls?

Women never have young minds. They are born three thousand years old.

(Shelagh Delaney, A Taste of Honey, Act 1, Scene 2, 1959)

Some teachers express indignation that boys are attracting so much concern now that girls, justifiably in their view, are doing better. But are girls ‘doing better’? There are still huge gaps to close and stereotypes to challenge in the A level sciences and in some university courses. In addition, as a recent feminist book on the subject pointed out, the improvement in female achievement has not occurred for all girls, in particular those from low socioeconomic backgrounds (Epstein et al., 1998). The world of work suggests that although girls aspire to, and achieve, jobs in the reasonably well-paid professions of law and medicine they rarely appear at the top of those professions—and are still an exotic species in the higher ranks of commerce, finance, the civil service and industry. It may be that the lag effect will take time to shake out; one should not expect good school results over one decade to result in the overnight replacement and feminisation of the establishment.

What is more important is the observation by many teachers and parents of how girls succeed and the implications that has for their future life chances and career development. The National Curriculum, the system which has witnessed the relative success of girls, tends to demand a well-organised, compliant, procedure-observing teacher and pupil. It tends not to encourage the radical, the lateral thinker, the bloody-minded, the intuitive. Teachers have come to expect (and all teachers who entered the profession since 1988 have little experience of anything else) a curriculum where they do not have to worry too much about the content. The point of education has become, probably subliminally in most teachers’ minds, to maximise exam and SATs results. The point of teaching is to ensure that the National Curriculum has been covered. Despite the changes of 1995 and 1998, it is still obese. Whatever the reasons, be they genetic or learned, more girls than boys seem better equipped to slog through the curriculum quagmire. Boys and girls are rewarded for diligence, effort, deadline-keeping, good presentation, organisation and not wasting time. There is nothing wrong with that in itself, but does it properly instruct them about the success of the adult world? Here, school-learned qualities often have to be married to ambition, quick or creative thinking, confidence in one’s own judgement and skills, high expectations and occasionally breaking or bending the rules. In this book we suggest that teaching methods which have been encouraged by the National Curriculum could be changed to benefit both boys and girls.

We’re dealing with generalities

‘There are some boys who are very good at work, like yesterday in our form, there’s a boy who’s good at nearly every lesson.’

(Year 7 boy)

We’re dealing with generalities. There are thousands of individuals from both genders who are simply not recognisable from the descriptions we are giving to their gender. Their behaviour, learning style, achievement and demeanour are nothing to do with under-achieving boys or focused, self-managing girls. We are dealing with the problem of under-achievement and many pupils are not under-achieving. We also recognise that achievement is hugely influenced by socio-economic class and, to a lesser extent, by ethnicity. As Epstein points out:

Overall, the under-achievement of boys at school is a strongly classed and racialised phenomenon. Indeed class and the associated level of education of parents (for both boys and girls) continue to be the most reliable predictions of a child’s success in school examinations.

(Epstein et al., 1998, p. 11)

The only problem with this argument is that it does not answer the question of why boys under-achieve relative to girls. This can be answered, to some extent, by a consideration of class and race—but a major thrust of the book is that pupils who begin their school life from a relatively disadvantaged educational position are in greater need of good classroom practice. Good teaching is an escape route from failure: poor teaching practice is more likely to confirm it.

Achievement and pupils from minority ethnic groups

Trying to make sense of national figures for the academic achievement of ethnic minority pupils is not easy, partly because few LEAs effectively collect and collate reliable statistics (Blair and Bourne, 1998). Schools, and departments within schools, should make it a matter of priority that they have a rounded and accurate view of the performance of their own ethnic minority pupils (broken down by gender). It is only by the systematic analysis of the relative performances that patterns of achievement over a period of time can emerge—and this in turn enables more appropriate strategies to be adopted. In general terms, it appears that boys from Afro-Caribbean, mixed race and Pakistani backgrounds are particularly vulnerable to underachievement. The Afro-Caribbean and mixed race boys appear to be particularly susceptible from Key Stage 2 onwards, whereas with Pakistani boys (and also Pakistani girls) the under-achievement stretches across the phases. But the picture is so highly complex that it largely belies attempts to describe it, let alone diagnose and prescribe solutions. It certainly challenges tabloid images of racial stereotypes:

African-Caribbean boys have been seen…as a unified lump, who underachieve academically and are driven by a phallocentric revenge impulse to repair their oppressed maleness.

(Epstein et al., 1998, p. 124)

Tony Sewell (in Epstein et al., 1998) has pointed out that within any one cohort of Afro-Caribbean boys, at least four groups, all with differing attitudes towards school, can be traced. The vast majority of these boys support the idea of education and most support the goals of the school, but schools themselves need to do much more to understand the educational and curriculum needs of minority ethnic groups. Schools need to confront the ways in which they actually confirm Afro-Caribbean boys as ‘rebellious, phallocentric under-achievers’ and to have a clear policy about how to raise their achievement. We shall be returning to this issue later in the book as various strategies are considered for their applicability to minority ethnic groups.

We argue that the National Curriculum has in some respects been hostile to boys. It has also been less than kind to some teachers. In the late 1970s, ignoring Prime Minister Callaghan’s Ruskin College speech about the need for change in education, commentators enthused about the variety and richness of the English education system. LEAs, schools and teachers were to a large extent a law unto themselves. It may be a truism to point out that this was very successful when it worked and was a disgrace when it did not; but it does not answer the unexplored question of what happened to the culture of independence, eccentricity and exploration of educational methodologies. It seems to have been largely steamrollered by the National Curriculum juggernaut, and stifled to extinction by the blitzkrieg of SATs, league tables, parental choice and Local Management of Schools (LMS). Who can afford to experiment when failure results in a league table slip, possibly followed by a loss of pupils and finance?

This may be a good thing. It must surely be inappropriate to regard schools as laboratories of educational philosophy and children as the guineapigs of badly researched ideas which suit the political prejudice of the LEA, head or teacher. But the present alternative is equally unattractive. The teaching profession, although more accountable and responsible than ever before, has in many ways lost its confidence in its own abilities. There is an accepted culture of receiving thick tomes from the succession of government quangos since 1988 and then debating the organisational headache of how best to implement them. The sheer volume of guidance, diktat, programmes of study, tests, tasks and data which have landed on schools’ doorsteps has tended to be overwhelming. When Chris Woodhead, the Chief HMI, cunningly asked headteachers at a 1997 conference if they would like nationally provided units of work to support the National Curriculum, he was almost mobbed. Who could not desire such documents when they would save so much time and effort? If he had asked the question ten years earlier he would have been howled down.

In short, teachers as a profession have been subdued by the advent of the National Curriculum to the point where they have not only lost their resentment of central imposition but have come to expect and welcome it. There is a danger that teachers have become de-skilled. The very heart of the professionalism of the teacher, of understanding their students and how they learn, has been undermined by this new culture of dependency.

This will not do. Teachers have to regain the belief that what they do, how they apply different teaching methods to a variety of learners and situations, not only makes a difference but can also only lie within their own professional discretion. Carol Fitz-Gibbon (1996) writes enthusiastically about how school improvement comes about through trial and error, based on the motivation to make incremental improvements to practice.

There’s someone else in the classroom!

Whether they like it or not, there is another new age which will soon be upon teachers. Many will find it initially threatening or repugnant, but by the year 2002—when the government’s first academic targets will be due for delivery—it will have become common practice. Headteachers are beginning to take a very important part of their job seriously for the first time. They are having to show that they really are monitoring the quality of teaching and learning in their school. Arguably, they could monitor learning by analysing the examination results and other data. This gives a partial picture of the quality of teaching and learning, however. To do this they have to get into the classrooms and observe, or ‘walking the talk’ as one head has dubbed it. Some headteachers have been doing this for some time; most have yet to start in any systematic fashion. As a sense of accountability moves down through the school, middle managers will be centrally involved. It should make a huge difference to the profession. The old privacy will be dead and professional dialogues based on regular observations will be commonplace. It demands a great deal from all concerned. It presupposes a degree of professionalism which the recent changes in education have tended to discourage.

Any move to introduce changes in the context of raising boys’ achievement also demands professionalism. The sort of whole school and classroom-specific practices which we advocate are not a blueprint for success. They demand to some extent a willingness to try things out, to observe the outcomes and adjust or even abandon the strategies if deemed necessary. Teachers have to be given, and to accept, the right to fail. Doctors, lawyers, scientists and writers are doing this all the time—often with equally serious issues at risk. The industrialist who said the secret of his success was the willingness to double his failure rate has an important message for teachers. We are, after all, already failing both boys and girls by treading the safe path of doing nothing about the present, growing disparity of achievement. The re-professionalisation of the teaching force should mean a genuine dialogue about methodology, of inviting lesson observation, of asking for ideas and help and of admitting failure. This new-found openness also means the celebration of success. As the dialogue becomes better informed, as the barriers come down and classroom management is opened to scrutiny and discussion, success will inevitably outweigh failure.

Chapter 2: How and why boys under-achieve

For many years teachers have reported that boys are an issue. Chris Woodhead, in his capacity as Chief HMI and columnist in the Times Educational Supplement, has been writing about it for some time and quoted a shepherd in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale:

I wish there were no age between 10 and 23, because young men get wenches with child, upset the ancientry, stealing and fighting.

Woodhead’s conclusion is that young men have been exhibiting the same problems for at least four hundred years. Granted, there is little reference to boys’ academic under-achievement in Shakespeare, but the behaviour we associate with it certainly is. Arguably it is only the past ten years, with its emphasis on achievement, improvement and gathering evidence that have led to a systematic collection and analysis of the data which enables us to show jus...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: We are facing a crisis
• Chapter 2: How and why boys under-achieve
• Chapter 3: The importance of teaching and learning styles
• Chapter 4: How to organise a strategy to raise boys’ achievement
• Chapter 5: One school’s story
• Chapter 6: Making decisions about setting
• Chapter 7: Other whole school strategies designed to raise boys’ achievement
• Chapter 8: Getting it right for boys and girls in the classroom
• Chapter 9: Raising achievement in English
• Chapter 10: Raising achievement in mathematics and science
• Chapter 11: Raising achievement in design and technology
• Chapter 12: Raising achievement in modern foreign languages
• Chapter 13: Raising achievement in the humanities
• Chapter 14: Raising achievement in the arts
• Chapter 15: Getting it right in the secondary school library
• Chapter 16: Raising boys’ achievement across the pyramid
• Chapter 17: Exercises for continuous professional development
• Epilogue
• References and further reading