Fulfilling potential
Getting the best out of boys … Nick Gallop reflects on how our understanding of the social, emotional and educational development of boys is changing for the better. There is rarely a more affirming moment within a school community than that of celebrating the students who complete their Duke of Edinburgh Awards. It is one of the highlights of the academic year – heartening and uplifting. Achieving an Award at any level requires commitment, determination, imagination and a willingness to stray outside the comfortable zones that young people often dwell within. The scheme is great too at unearthing and developing new skills and broadening horizons, and it is accessible to the widest range of students. The annual celebration evening always evokes a memory for me that stands tall amongst others. Thirty years ago this summer, I embarked upon my own expedition to complete a Gold Award in the beautiful surroundings of the Lake District. Looking back, I still firmly believe that had Basil Fawlty clasped hands with Manuel, the Spanish waiter, and the two of them strolled from Eskdale to Keswick and back, they would have encountered fewer scrapes than my band of brothers did in the summer of 1989. Back then, and no doubt eminently sensibly, boys’ and girls’ expedition groups were separate. Consequently, and whilst hardly creating laboratory-like conditions, if one had wanted to draw unvarnished attention to gender-based differences – in approaches to planning, working together, meeting expectations, rising to challenges – then the separation of the groups along gender lines did precisely that. The boys’ group – my group – was dogged by self-inflicted problems from the off. One of our foursome forgot to bring the second of our two-man tents. Efforts to procure another one failed, so we were treated to camp-wide hilarity each morning as the four of us emerged gasping from the tiniest of tents, like record-breakers spilling from a Mini Cooper. We were wretchedly lost on a number of occasions, regularly late into camp, miserably under-supplied with food, and routinely low on water and sunscreen. We also considered ourselves heroic – extinguishing an out-of-control cooking fire of neighbouring campers. In spite of it all, we satisfied our Assessor. Just. And the expedition goes down as one of the most entertaining and enjoyable, and most formative learning experiences of my life. And what of the girls’ group? Well, they looked on at our haplessness with a mixture of alarm and scorn. They quietly rolled their eyes at our misplaced confidence, rising to their own challenges determinedly, efficiently and seemingly without fuss. We did wonder whether they had enjoyed themselves though. Yes, as research goes it is woefully anecdotal at the very best. But stereotypical or not, thirty years on – and for better or worse – you would be hard pressed to find a teacher that
would deny those characteristics and traits in many of the girls and boys they teach. And yet, back then, the very notion that boys and girls might just have different approaches to problems, challenges, their own mental and physical development, their relationship with and respect for authority, their learning, was borderline unthinkable. Steve Biddulph, one of the world’s best-known (and bestselling) psychologists, reminds us what a different era it was, when ‘we rarely acknowledged differences in the brains of boys and girls, for fear this would imply gender inequality. Today we know that there are numerous differences, and by understanding these, we can build on boys’ and girls’ strengths and address their weaknesses.’ It has taken several decades of data gathering and research to meander from the deeply held but fallacious view that there are no significant differences in the way that boys and girls learn, and consequently no need to attune educational policies and strategies at macro or micro level accordingly, to the realisation that the view, held by some teachers, that many boys’ attitudes to learning, especially ones that manifest themselves in unhelpful ways, are inevitable and to be accepted and ‘managed’, could well, of itself, be part of the problem. That there are significant gender-based differences in educational development, achievement and outcome, has only latterly become incontrovertible. Qualitative data demonstrates significant gender-based variances in enthusiasm and motivation at various stages and educational contexts, in active and sustained participation in sport, and in other nonclassroom based activities. Widely documented quantitative data demonstrates a significant performance gap, especially at GCSE level. In all of the most recent years, girls have outperformed boys at GCSE level by more than 6% when it comes to awarding the top grades (9-7). Indeed, with boys less likely to succeed at GCSE, they are similarly less likely to continue to complete meaningful academic qualifications at Sixth Form level. Dropout rates amongst school and college students post-16 is far higher for boys than for girls: recent OECD figures indicate that a fifth of UK teenagers drop out of formal education at post-16 level (amongst the highest figures in the developed world), and an ever-growing majority of them are boys. In the last decade, progression to university reflects a similar gender gap, with girls more than a third more likely to go to university than boys, as over 30,000 more females than males entered Higher Education in each of the three years between 2016 and 2018. The picture goes far further than attitudes to learning and educational outcomes, with data supporting significant gender gaps for school exclusion rates; prescriptions for antidepressants
Autumn 2019
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