The mum who accuses female teachers of favouring girls over boys

Controversial, yes. But with two sons, Lisa insists she’s seen many examples of bias – including a school play renamed Olivia Twist so a girl could play the lead

AS always, my son was excited about the yearly school play. what would they put on and what role might he get, he wondered. aged 11, Hayden was a likeable, happy-go-lucky boy, a deep thinker who always tried his best.

Imagine our surprise when the title of the production was announced: Olivia Twist. yes, Olivia, not Oliver. Charles Dickens’s most famous male character would be played by a girl.

was the teacher forced to alter the title because of a lack of boys wanting to take part? No. In fact, Hayden’s female teacher had decided the matter long before any pupil, male or female, was invited to volunteer.

and why? The answer was bias, pure and simple. She had decided a girl should take the role, and never mind any willing lad who might have been keen to try his hand.

admittedly, the girl chosen to play Olivia was a talented performer. But to me this was just another example of how boys like my sons are consistently and insidiously put down by teachers and today’s education system.

again and again, I have witnessed my boys made to feel second best because schools are so keen to champion girls.

It is all too clear to me that the pursuit of ‘equality’ in education has turned happy, hard-working boys like my sons into victims.

The education system, just like society at large, is loaded against boys and in favour of girls.

From teachers favouring girls when children raise their hands in class to suggesting that any boy who exhibits curiosity or sensitivity must have something wrong with him, boys are demeaned from the moment they put on their uniforms and enter the school gates.

LITTlE

wonder that the attainment gap between boys and girls has become a chasm. a girl born today is 75 per cent more likely than a boy to proceed to higher education, while young men enter the adult world more unsure of themselves than ever.

you might wonder who I am to make such a case. The answer is, I’m just an ordinary mum.

I have two sons — Hayden, now 15, who is set to do his GCSEs next year, and Daniel, who turns 17 this month and is studying creative media journalism at college and has eight GCSEs under his belt.

They are not in the a* pack, but both of them are solid students: Daniel’s chief interest is current affairs, while Hayden adores history and science. I’m 51, married and live in a small village near Brentwood in Essex. I was a City trader for several years before I bought my own gift shop.

Today I’m a housewife and care for my husband Peter, 59, who has ME ( sometimes called chronic fatigue syndrome).

I’m not an education specialist, but I am a devoted mum, keen for her children to progress in life and achieve all they want to.

I am so proud of my boys — but our education system hasn’t always taken the same pride and joy in them. Schools have become so over-feminised that they are knocking the natural spirit out of boys. They are failing our sons. My boys both attended the same primary and secondary schools: a Church of England village primary and then a mixed, state secondary rated Outstanding by Ofsted.

Of the two, the primary was definitely worst for demeaning male pupils — perhaps because every teacher there was female. It is a pattern repeated across the nation: just 15 per cent of primary school teachers are male. It is little wonder young boys can feel lost.

Experts agree that problems for boys start early. Their finemotor and cognitive skills develop later, so they lag behind girls throughout much of early school life.

This is not helped by the overfeminised teaching ethos in our state primary schools, as I soon discovered. It became quickly apparent that the teachers viewed little boys as caricatures rather than individuals — it was almost as if they were written off before they had begun.

So when the female head teacher met Hayden — an inquisitive little chap who liked to take conversations to the next level — she was perplexed.

Surely, you could almost see her thinking, there must be something wrong with a boy who can think so deeply and respond so sensitively to situations.

Five- year- old Hayden, she quickly determined, must be autistic. She requested that he be ‘statemented’ by the local authorities, meaning he should be officially recognised as having special needs — which would allow her to access more funding for her school.

Needless to say, I was devastated by the news. But I knew deep down that my son was not autistic, and when officials came to examine Hayden they agreed with me emphatically: he was just inquisitive, not autistic in the slightest.

yet the school seemed to think that any boy who wasn’t running around the playground like a headless chicken had to have something that needed ‘fixing’.

attempts were made to wrongly diagnose another curious young lad as autistic, until his furious mother decided to pull her son out of the school.

Boys were just lumped together, whatever their quirks and talents, with predictably damaging consequences for their attainment and self-esteem.

One class teacher commented at a parents’ evening that my other son Daniel — then just five and a summer baby — was ‘immature’ compared with the girls in his class. I was furious.

again, he was being judged on the basis of his gender, not his individual characteristics.

as every mum knows, at that tender age a six-month age gap can make a world of difference between children — and every parent of boys knows that girls naturally mature faster. It is a biological reality, not cause for criticism from a teacher.

Meanwhile, the boisterous behaviour typical of many young boys quickly sees many of them condemned as ‘naughty’, a label that follows them for the rest of their school lives.

There

is also research that suggests boys in particular would benefit from increased break time during the school day. This extra chance to let off steam has been found to improve their focus, while girls can concentrate without extra play.

I never felt my boys were nurtured in primary school. Girls were treated as precious, dainty things to be cared for, while boys were left hanging.

The impact on my sons’ confidence was devastating. Daniel, the elder one, was so brainwashed by his early experiences that when he moved to secondary school, he couldn’t imagine being put in the same set as a girl because he thought they were just naturally cleverer. In his mind, there was one level for the girls and another for boys like him.

Going to secondary school has,

thankfully, gone some way to helping my sons rebuild their confidence. It was there they finally encountered their first male teachers — albeit in the usual subjects: science, business and economics, Pe. all other subjects are taught by women.

I can’t help but wonder whether if english literature, for instance, was taught by a man, or if the curriculum was tailored more towards boys, with less emphasis on such classics as Jane eyre and romeo and Juliet, young males might embrace reading more. research backs me up: in classes where boys were taught english from non- fiction texts rather than novels, they achieved better results.

even in secondary school, my sons say there is a bias towards girls in the classroom, especially from female teachers. This is doubly damaging for boys: as Hayden tells me, there are only so many times you can know the answer, put your hand up and be ignored before you start to think, ‘Why bother?’

The favouritism of female teachers towards girls reinforces the message that, in boys’ eyes, women both old and young simply don’t think much of them at all.

all too often, boys in school are treated as superfluous, a distraction from the main purpose, which is grooming girls for success. No wonder the girls seem to have that extra air of poise and confidence.

For decades, taxpayers’ money has been spent on encouraging girls to apply for jobs in fields such as science, technology and engineering that in previous eras were dominated by men. Yet, at the same time, there has been a falling-off in the encouragement given to young men to become doctors (two out of three new GPs are now female) or lawyers (more than three in five trainees are female).

GIrls, it seems, are told they can do anything. boys, meanwhile, are left to languish. It should come as little surprise, then, that plenty of girls feel they don’t need boys or men in their lives at all.

Yes, most girls want a boyfriend for the added status it gives them among their female friends. but as for wanting a young man of their own age to provide emotional support, companionship and love, forget it. The girls have absorbed the message that they can make it on their own.

In our over-sexualised online age, girls appear to be adapting to the challenges better than boys. at the school gates I see girls with their skirts rolled up so high you can’t even see them under their blazers. These displays of sexual awareness don’t help hormonal boys of their age, who can’t handle such precociousness until later in life.

While girls are treated as young women, boys are treated only as boys — and the effects of such infantilisation last a lifetime.

It seems society systematically places men on the back foot, from the day schooling commences.

all that said, I would never have placed my sons in a single- sex school. I believe every child needs to grow in a diverse atmosphere to prepare them for adulthood. but surely there is a way to encourage both girls and boys to achieve?

I have made sure my sons feel they are not a ‘ lesser breed’ just because they are boys. after all, they want to do just as well as girls in life, even if the education system is incapable of recognising this.

My Hayden is 6ft tall and has size 12 feet. He may look like a man in some ways, but he still needs just as much encouragement as the dainty girls in his class.

The quest for equality is all well and good — but not if it leaves our boys behind.