Girls in school move ahead, boys fall behind. It’s the counter narrative reality that has silently underpinned education for for more than three decades.
“Well boys should work harder! Or behave better! Or do their homework!”
It’s the kind of stupid shit we’d never say to girls in school, or in STEM, or to women who are fighting the glass ceiling at work.
Likewise, when we look at the other attainment gaps in education, those of racial background and of differing socioeconomic groups, we don’t tell these people to work harder, or behave, or to cry their way out of these problems, because it’s a dumb and cruel thing to say.
Even the legendary Mary Curnock Cook is being ignored, she’s the former CEO of UCAS, the very organisation that oversees the UK’s college and universities admissions:
‘Disparities between the sexes create different worries than, for example, gaps between independent and state educated, rich and poor, or North and South – gaps that we may not like, but largely understand.
But boys and girls are more or less equally represented in all these groups; they go to the same schools and have the same teachers, so it is harder to pinpoint the causes of any gaps.’
Curnock Cook goes on, as she has for four consecutive years, to point at ‘unexplained’ and worrying differences in results between boys and girls, suggesting a ’systemic bias against boys’.
But silence resumes.
We have 30 years of data, we have the former head boss of UCAS shouting from the roof tops,
we have girls ahead of boys in every age group and at every level of education; be that SATs, GCSEs, A-levels or degrees
…and nothing is being said or done.
Nothing.
(except to get woman and girls into STEM of course!)
[1] https://tinyurl.com/3jrn9n48
[2] https://tinyurl.com/yuwn8dbf
[3] https://tinyurl.com/yyxh4hz3
BBC Article https://tinyurl.com/dx4kw8rk
OFQUAL Review https://tinyurl.com/tzw276n2