By Mike Bell (Lead researcher, APPG on Men and Boys’ Issues)
In this interview with CBS, Richard Reeves (President of the American Institute for Boys and Men, chair of the Centre for Policy Research in Men and Boys in the UK) put the case for holding boys back a year in their education (Redshirting) to take account of their slower rate of maturing.
The problem is: this is not supported by the evidence we gathered during the APPG Men & Boys inquiry into boys’ educational underachievement.
On maturity. Yes, it is true that boys go through puberty later than girls and yes, on average it is true that, in the classroom girls are better at sitting still, working together and getting on with the task.
However, we found a number of schools that had closed the gap for their boys and none of them referred to maturity as a key factor in their success.
Entry to education. Yes, it is true that fewer boys are ‘ready for school’ than girls aged 5. However, the evidence we received from people working with that age group is that this is a literacy/vocabulary problem, not a maturity one.
One pointed out that if you take a low-literacy boy aged 5 and keep him back, there is no evidence that his literacy will be significantly increased by age 6, because the main reason is that adults are not talking to him.
A team who work with primary school children for example, gave us evidence that early intervention on vocabulary can be highly effective in Reception year. He pointed out that it is not ‘boys’ who are not school ready, it’s a group of students, the majority of whom are boys. Holding all boys back does nothing for the low-literacy girls and is quite inappropriate for the high-literacy boys who are school-ready.
Secondary school
The successful interventions at the schools that closed the gap for their boys contained two fundamental lessons:
(1) That boys’ literacy is lower than that of girls, on average. The successful secondary schools we heard from all did major literacy interventions in yr 7. While this did not have a specifically boy-focus, when tested, a significant majority of yr 7 students with insufficient vocabulary to understand what the teacher is saying were boys. This seems to be a consistent finding internationally.
(2) That all the adults in the boys’ lives had been treating them in ways which contributed to their continued disadvantage. In the school–setting this meant that teachers:
a. were rewarding boys for a lower quality of work
b. were sanctioning boys more harshly for the same offence.
These schools found that teachers:
- were largely unaware they were doing this
- did not want to do it
- were happy to develop their practice to make sure this was corrected.
When these two factors are corrected as part of a wider cultural change in the school, the boys’ attainment rose to match that of the girls.
An extensive summary of what the schools did can be found here.
The main takeaway is that solutions to boys’ underachievement are readily available, do not involve holding them back and have good evidence of effectiveness.
Rather than making boys wait until they are “ready” for school, we should make our schools ready for boys.