Significant research from Steven Proud of Bristol University shows that boys perform better at English when there are fewer girls in the class, especially at primary school (5-11 year olds).
His report Girl Power?, though published in January 2008, seems to have some media leverage as he was talking about it at a Royal Economic Society's conference earlier this week.The report was covered in the British media (BBC, Guardian, Telegraph, Daily Mail).
As stated in the Guardian piece "Boys' English grades are up to a tenth worse when high numbers of girls are in the class with them, though girls' grades are unaffected. Boys do worse in English when there are girls in their class, researchers will say today, contradicting the widely held belief that girls are always a good influence on boys in school."
What Mr Proud is essentially saying is that English should be taught in single-sex classes because boys perform worse in the subject when there are girls present.
He suggests it "there are several possible reasons why boys do not perform well in mixed English classes. One is that if the majority of pupils are girls, the teacher uses learning techniques that are more suited to girls than boys. In addition, a class could be seen to be performing at an acceptable level overall, but boys are being overlooked and left behind."
What it shows is that there are reasons why boys fare less well than girls at English. This site (section and article) has long advocated more widespread single-sex schools/classes and the re-introduction of O-levels (also keeping GSCEs) as one way of tackling boys underachievement. Boys results in English are a long way behind those for girls (link).
Nearly all education specialists, local eductaion authorities, the Government and others continue to fail do anything much about this. Here is more evidence that shows soemthing can be done to prevent another generation of boy's falling behind.
There is always one intransigent voice (in the Guardian article) and this is provided by Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at the University of Buckingham. He said "Boys might be discouraged by how well girls are doing in English," he said, "but that still does not explain why they would do better in maths and science with a higher proportion of girls in their class.
"This is one study, among many, which detects very small differences between boys and girls. But you can't say that it means boys or girls should be separated. It has very little practical importance for schools."
It of course does have a practical significance on boys and they are the ones that count, not the institutions, which are supposedly there to support all pupils. That's what we pay taxes for.
What is he proposing, that we not bother to help boys and it is untrue that there are very small differences between boys and girls. He doesn't bother looking at the exam results then.
While these points are important, they are mostly about seconadry education which is a small issue relative to the scandal that is the lack of male teachers in primary school education.
Yes secondary schools fail boys, but the core of the problem is in primary education. Boys are now years behind by the age of 11 - that has nothing to do with singl sex classes.
The big issue is the feminisation of primary schools and the complete lack of males in children's lives.
Yet you can realistiaclly get more high quality male teachers into primary schools until you end the demonisation of all men as evil sex offenders.
I realise the government is supposed to be recruiting more male teachers, but when you think about it these aren't likely to be top caliber candidates given the current "all men are paedophiles" attitude we have from some in the government and even from companies such as British Airways.
Posted by: John Kimble | Thursday, 23 April 2009 at 15:08