Getting the best out of boys, Nick Gallop

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

amongst adolescents; childhood obesity; and suicide rates. In the developed world, by the age of fifteen, boys are three times more likely to die than girls. Three times.

The picture is, of course, a complicated one. Many boys achieve highly at school whilst some girls do not. Attainment gaps exist for ethnicity and social class that often dwarf those for gender, and it is the interaction of all these factors that has an impact on the achievement and performance of girls as well as boys. Additionally, it is far from the case that girls outpace boys across the curriculum: data points to boys broadly matching girls in mathematics and science.

But, thankfully, gone are the days when educational policies made no reference to the existence of a ‘gender gap’. The enduring notion that educational strategies could and should remain avowedly ‘gender-blind’ has rightly been consigned to history. But whilst acknowledging the issue is one thing, understanding it is another entirely. Boys think and learn differently from girls; they develop socially and emotionally differently and at different rates; different things motivate them and enthuse them; they are moved, inspired and engaged by different things; they are fearful of, and disheartened by, different things.

How to make practical and meaningful sense of this? The last thirty years have seen a welcome reappraisal in our approach to understanding gender differences within the educational process. We have moved steadily on from what has been a persistent and pernicious erosion of faith in boys, learning instead to see their ‘frustrating habits’, their ‘giddiness’, their ‘impulsivity’ in a new light. In order to engage boys fully in an educational setting, the social and emotional context of their development needs to be engaged with too. A re-examination of the nature of what it means to be male – what it means to be a man – has led to a substantial and welcome broadening of our definitions of masculinity. We have also revised our standards and the expectations that we have of boys, and gained the skills and knowledge of how to resist the easy slide that leads away from understanding gender difference to accepting, and even endorsing, negative gender stereotypes.

Two books that broke the mould twenty years ago, helping to shift understanding of boys’ development for parents and educationalists alike and move the gender debate forward, were Raising Cain by Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson, and Raising Boys (subsequently re-issued several times) by Steve Biddulph.

Kindlon and Thompson challenged the educational and domestic settings within which boys developed with the question: what do boys need that they’re not getting? This question remains as relevant to us in schools now as ever. The authors discussed, for perhaps the first time, the vital importance of developing emotional literacy in young men and the need to cultivate emotional awareness and empathy to help boys to make sense of the social pressures and changes that they experience. They made significant strides in changing views of boys’ behaviour, shining a light on the some of the destructive emotional ‘training’ that many boys received in many educational settings. In the later parts of the book, the authors refer, arguably for the first time, to ‘toxic’ views of maleness, a term that is ubiquitous now, calling for a complete re-examination and a broadening of our understanding of masculinity.

Steve Biddulph made ground-breaking and reassuring sense about the things that make boys what and who they are – their natural creativity, their tendency to take risks, to act impulsively, to test, push and cross boundaries. From a parent’s and teacher’s perspective, the encouragement was to reset our dials when it comes to the behaviour of boys with a far better and clearer understanding of the impact of changing levels of testosterone, of the brain differences between girls and boys, the slower development of boys’ fine motor skills and cognitive skills. Biddulph also proposes some approaches to schooling that outline the importance of educational continuity, for example having the same teacher for longer periods of time, and how that can have a disproportionately positive influence on boys’ development and in building effective personal relationships.

Several more recent books are worthy of close scrutiny. In Bringing Up Boys: Shaping the Next Generation of Men, James Dobson develops further theories of the ‘toxicity’ of masculinity, and indeed the growing vilification of it, leading to a culture that has become deeply confusing for boys, who are growing up without a clear idea of what the end product should be. Other books, such as Celia Lashlie’s He’ll Be Ok and Claire Gillman’s The Best of Boys, provide steadily more positive versions of masculinity, and discuss the importance of developing a sense of pride in being male.

This year, in Boys Don’t Try?, reviewed elsewhere in this issue, authors Matt Pinkett and Mark Roberts focus squarely on the way that boys live up to, and down to, teacher expectations, with evidence to indicate that the key instrument to raising attainment in boys lies with teachers themselves. Teachers need to shed a (largely) unintentional prejudicial belief about boys’ attainment and behaviour. We need to recognise that misplaced gender ‘perceptions’ when boys and girls exhibit similar ‘typically’ male characteristics – attention-seeking, following a pack mentality, rejecting academic work and disrespecting authority – somehow leads to girls largely escaping sanction, and being given far greater licence and latitude than boys, with serious consequences for the performance of both genders.

When it comes to countering the ‘gender gap’, the value lies in taking time to understand how boys develop socially and emotionally outside educational settings; in employing strategies that actively encourage and communicate as positive and as broad a view of masculinity, uncorrupted by cultural prejudices, as possible; and in understanding that our own gender prejudices and misperceptions – our daily standards, expectations, tolerance levels and ways of communicating – have a deeply significant part to play in the educational performance of boys. Nick Gallop is Headmaster of Stamford School

Referenced reading: Raising Cain Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson (2000); Raising Boys Steve Biddulph (first published in 1998); Bringing Up Boys: Shaping the Next Generation of Men James Dobson (2001); He’ll Be Ok Celia Lashlie (2005); The Best of Boys Claire Gillman (2013); Boys Don’t Try? Matt Pinkett and Mark Roberts (2019)