Boys Will Be Boys

Reading a number of recent reports and perusing recently published statistics dealing with educational performance in Wales, the well-established trend of boys underperforming vis-a-vis girls in most subjects, but particularly in the humanities, is getting progressively worse. This is a serious issue and needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency.

At the risk of being labelled politically incorrect, I would argue that the problem is deep-rooted and extensive and is, in some measure, a consequence of profound changes in our society. There seems to be a current fashion for single parenthood which, when combined with ‘education’ coming to be regarded as a ‘female’ profession, especially at primary level, can result in male children rarely having any contact with male role models in their formative years. As a result they have little awareness of the benefits of a sound education and how a lack of a good education affects their economic prospects. Moreover, these boys tend to become disaffected from school relatively early and under these circumstances it is hardly surprising that they under perform.

Alongside this, households seem to be more likely to have widescreen televisions and computer games machines than books and in such households there is apparently little encouragement for children to read of their own volition.

What could government do to address this problem, assuming that they are aware of it? Well, one thing they could do is to positively discriminate a little in favour of getting more males into the teaching profession, particularly in the primary sector. Secondly, in the secondary sector, they could arrange for children to be taught in single-sex classes for the core subjects of English, Mathematics and Science. Thirdly, they could instigate a serious and integrated campaign throughout the education system to make poor literacy and numeracy as socially unacceptable as smoking. Such a campaign would be an ideal theme for Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ and have a much more profound effect that all the much-vaunted foreign aid that he proposes to target in other countries to prevent the radicalisation of potential religious extremists.