Something is Rotten in the State of Our Schooling

Civitas, 14 September 2006

A batch of newly published educational statistics reported in today’s Times makes troublesome reading. They show boys are progressively falling behind girls at school in the 3R’s. Neither boys nor girls, however, would appear to have much to write home about concerning their respective attainment levels in these areas, assuming, that is, they know how to. For they remain woefully below the expected standard in mathematics and reading at age 14 for both sexes and have fallen this year in the case of both sexes.
Of course, poor national literacy and numeracy has never stood in the way of the apparent ever-improving national performance of our schoolchildren at GCSE, A-levels, and gaining entry to University whose undergraduate numbers have increased by a third in the last decade. Yet, in these areas, the story once again is of girls consistently coming to out-perform boys, by achieving better GCSE and A level results at school and by now outnumbering boys at University in all subjects.
How worried should we all be about the apparent decline and fall of the English schoolboy?
Professor Geoffrey Crossick, who chairs the universities’ umbrella group Universities UK, is clearly one who thinks we all should be. He is reported to have voiced concern about ‘a subset of young men who are not going to university’ who turn out to be ‘mainly low-income white males … just as capable of going to university as others but who are not getting the chance to benefit from going’ because, according he says, they feel ‘locked out of the higher education world’.
Professor Crossick’s proposed remedy to save this educationally endangered species from permanent exclusion from the delights of spending three years wandering in the groves of academe, at the likely personal cost of clocking up an enormous debt, is affirmative action on their behalf in the form of an outreach programme targeted at persuading them to aspire after a University place.
One possible way to pitch such an outreach campaign would be to draw to their attention the superabundant supply of young women they are likely to encounter at University. I suspect, however, such a proposed outreach campaign would not survive scrutiny from the equal opportunities mandarins at the DfES.
Another more promising campaign line would be to draw the attention of these boys to the following highly significant statistic released without much comment along with all the other newly released ones. Despite being outperformed by their female counterparts at A level and outnumbered by them at University in all subjects, male undergraduates apparently still do better than female undergaduates at final honours, gaining more firsts despite being fewer in number.
In this anomalous statistic, are we just seeing the effect of a process of educational natural selection whereby only the most talented and keen males now apply for University? Or are we seeing something else many of us have long suspected? This is that introduction of modular-style course-work-based continuous assessment at GCSE and A level has consistently favoured girls, who tend to be more diligent, compliant and conscientious than boys, who, being more wayward and high-risk-taking than girls but just as proficient at least potentially, tend to out-perform girls in assessment when undergone in the more demanding conditions of the examination hall?
Should the latter be the reason why male undergraduates still outperform female ones in final honours, then, perhaps, it will become somewhat less of a mystery why, despite all the educational progress that girls have made in the last thirty years, women remain out-earned by men in the workplace. This pay-gap continues to vex Jenny Watson, chair of the Equal Opportunities Commission, who is reported to have responsed to the news that girls now do much better than boys at school and gaining a place in University by urging us all to ‘remember that while girls are forging ahead at school, they are still falling behind in the workplace and continue to suffer a 17% pay gap’.
One possible explanation for this pay-gap, however, as well as for the better male undergraduate performance at final honours, is that, in general, males are simply more competitive and more driven to excel than females.
Not only does this fact explain why, despite all the odds now being stacked against them, men still out-number women at the top of all hierarchies open to both sexes, a fact which does much to account for the paygap between them. It also explains why, under conditions of fair competition between them, which assuredly prevail in University assessment only when conducted by means of double-marked anonymous final unseen examination the mode of assessment favoured by all the best Universities in the determination of final honours, male students always tend to outperform their female counterparts.
Of course, none of this will or should be of much consolation to those young white males who won’t go to university because they have failed to learn to read and write at school, let alone gain the requisite A level grades. Sadly, they are the prime casualties of years of progressive educational policy, especially that directed towards achieving ‘equality of opportunity’ between the sexes in education which has been a code-word for women being giving preferential treatment in academia in all manner of subtle and not so subtle ways.
Professor Crossick is reported to have remarked in connection with the young white males whom he intends to encourage to aspire after a University education: ‘What is bad for society is having subsets of the population who don’t think higher education is for them’. In my view, still worse for society is having influential subsets of the population who think, like he, that higher education is and should be for everyone, and, like Jenny Watson, think the pay-gap something that necessarily can and should be closed, so long as it favours men.