Justine Doughty - Let’s Hear it for the Boys: what is the best way to engage and challenge boys to excel in English? Every year, the perennial question arises: what will we do about the boys? At Cowes Enterprise College, English results mirror national trends where boys’ achievement lags behind that of girls; in 2019, boys’ progress was -1.19, and shockingly, only 30% achieved a grade 5 and above. Sadly, boys on the Isle of Wight who are classed as eligible for free school meals and of white British ethnicity make the third worst progress in GCSE in the country, beating only Blackpool and Knowsley (citation note 1). Naturally, as a team, we find this very worrying and are constantly asking what we can do to ensure that our boys are given the best life chances by enabling them to achieve their true potential. Why does this matter? The statistics for young men who do not achieve well in school are grim. According to Pinkett and Roberts, boys are more likely to be excluded from school and less likely to go to university; boys are less likely to become apprentices; boys are less likely to find paid work between the ages of 22 and 29. They also belong to the gender that makes up 96% of the UK prison population. Children who are excluded from school at the age of 12 are four times more likely to be jailed as adults. 75% of suicides are male – it is the single biggest killer of men under the age of 40. Of these, the most deprived 10% of society are twice as likely to die from suicide as those boys born amongst the richest 10%. What can we do? As a team, we searched and searched for strategies that could help boys and reflected critically on our practice to find the ‘magic bullet’ that would solve the problem. As you can imagine, we came up short. Different books made different suggestions. Much of the research was outdated and heavily biased in favour of constructivist approaches that reinforced gendered assumptions and fostered ‘toxic masculinity’ such as: boys like competition, boys don’t like reading, boys are kinaesthetic learners that need to expend their natural energy (all that testosterone, you know!), boys learn better when a girl sits next to them as girls are inherently ‘civilized’ and boys are ‘savages’. Of course, some boys don’t like reading and some boys do like competition, but to say that they all do, is more of a woefully inadequate critique of culturally constructed masculinity, rather than honest academic assessment of boys’ potential. For many years, we worked with stereotypical strategies such as picking ‘boy friendly books,’ wasting time on trying to cater to VAK learning styles and devising all sorts of gimmicks to try to ‘hook’ the boys etc… Time for something more controversial; we took a risk and created two boys’ sets. We chose boys who were two grades or more below their target grade and who had shown potential. The classes were mixed prior attainment, with students who showed potential to achieve grade 6s and students for whom literacy was a significant issue. Laura Augustus and I took on the groups and worked through what strategies we thought would work best with them. For the purpose of this write up, I am only focussing on one, universally agreed upon truth about boys’ achievement – and any students’ achievement: high expectations. High Expectations All research agrees that high expectations equal high outcomes. However, it is important to note that what we don’t often talk about is how our perceptions and biases unconsciously ‘shape’ our
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