Boys ‘should be revising this Easter to beat the girls’

Boys should have started their a-level revision during the easter holidays or they risk losing their university place to a more ‘diligent’ girl, the former head of Harrow has said.

Barnaby Lenon said all pupils should spend seven hours a day revising during the spring break to ensure they reached their potential in the summer exams.

and he said that while many girls may do this without prompting, boys are on average more ‘naturally lazy’ and ‘not particularly used to hard work’.

mr Lenon, who has spent most of his life teaching boys, including at Prince William’s school eton, said male students were becoming under-represented at universities partly for this reason.

data shows female pupils are more than a third more likely to go to university than their male peers, with about 30,000 more gaining places each year.

mr Lenon said: ‘Boys are naturally lazy. girls are more diligent during the term because they are more anxious to please their teacher.

‘Boys are not very anxious to please their teacher, they are not as diligent and therefore they’ve got more to catch up. some are not particularly used to hard work.’

He said many girls were more ‘intellectually mature’ and ‘can see there are long-term benefits for the short term pain of revision’.

mr Lenon, dean of education at the University of Buckingham, said while it was right to safeguard children’s mental health, encouraging them not to revise could have the opposite effect.

‘We all understand that there’s more to life than exams, but I think to say to a child that gCse or a-level grades don’t matter is a lie,’ he said.

‘For many people they do matter a great deal. How good is it for your mental health when you open your gCse results and find that you’ve failed maths?’

He said that getting a large chunk of revision done in the easter holidays actually helped to take the pressure off in the summer.

mr Lenon added: ‘the problem with boys is not that they’re suffering from such tremendous stress that they shouldn’t embark on revision.

‘the problem is often that they’re lazy and they have to be goaded into doing some work. and the ones that do work benefit from it. they can be confident that every hour spent revising will pay dividends.’

‘Boys are naturally lazy’