The problem with boys
THe ‘feminisation of education’ isn’t responsible for the underachievement of boys (Mail). What’s betraying our boys is that the attitude of some parents and society has remained in the Sixties when there was full employment for young men, regardless of their qualifications or attitude towards learning and authority.
Why would an employer in today’s increasingly competitive market want to employ a barely literate boy with a poor attendance and behaviour record against a girl who has studied hard?
There has always been an overwhelming dominance of females in education.
I’ve been teaching for 25 years, and when at parents’ evenings we point out underachievement and no input from home, I get the same resigned — but proud — response from many parents: ‘Oh, he’s not interested in reading, he’d much rather be out there kicking a ball.’
This might be okay if you’re going to be Ronaldo when you grow up, but it is hardly useful otherwise.
Boys get confusing messages from home and school. They have school telling them violence isn’t smart, but this is counteracted by parents telling them ‘if someone hits you, hit them back’. Parents and society need to wise up and prepare their boys for future success.
This is a mainly white British problem, and our international new arrivals and boys from ethnic minorities far outperform their indigenous peers.
Their parents value free education as a privilege and hammer home the need for respect and compliance. The least of a boy’s worries are in the six hours a day he spends in school.
Schools spend a vast amount of the pupil premium funding on providing extra catch-up sessions, pastoral support and great creative opportunities for boys.
We have lots of high-performing boys from a variety of backgrounds at my school (which is an area of high deprivation) and this is partly down to the ambition and high expectations of their parents — which includes lots of single-parent families doing the best they can every day.
SALLY MAGILL, headteacher, St John’s CE
Primary School, Bolton.