BAE0014

I am submitting this evidence as an individual with over 30 years’ experience across multiple phases of education working in government, the third sector and the private sector.  I currently hold a non-executive portfolio in education including as Chair of the Dyson Institute, Chair of Pearson’s UK qualifications business and as Trustee of a Multi Academy Trust.  I stepped down as Chief Executive of UCAS in 2017.

It was whilst at UCAS and party to the rich data it holds that I first became interested in the large disparities between male and female attainment and progression in education.  I have frequently drawn attention to these disparities, and they often get headlines in national media.  However, such headlines rarely do more than draw attention to the problem and there are still vanishingly few solutions being encouraged or evaluated – this topic still languishes in the too-difficult-to-handle-tray and policy interventions remain completely absent. 

Disparities between the sexes create different worries than, for example, gaps between independent and state educated, rich and poor, or North and South – gaps that we might not like, but largely understand and indeed which get considerable policy attention.

But boys and girls are more or less equally represented in all these groups; they come from the same communities, and the same families; they go to the same schools and have the same teachers.  This means that differential achievement cannot be explained by poverty, or by regional effects or by the shortage of otherwise of good teachers or good schools. 

Other evidence to the enquiry will no doubt rehearse the important data that show boys underperforming girls in education from the earliest phases right up to higher education.  Participation rates in higher education seem to embody the cumulative effects of disadvantage throughout primary and secondary education.  Approximately 30,000 fewer male school leavers progress to university than female school leavers.  This mirrors the same deficit of males undertaking A level study.  The number studying A levels in turn reflects the lower outcomes for boys at GCSE and so on.

Just 35% of secondary school teachers are male while only 14% of teachers in primary school are male.  Nearly a quarter of all state funded schools – primary and secondary - are without a single male classroom teacher.

Plenty of reports have ruled out that our feminised school workforce is a factor in boys’ underachievement. But others find evidence of teachers simply assuming that girls are going to do well and also assume that boys are going to get left behind.

During the pandemic when teacher-assessed grades were used for GCSEs and A Levels, grade inflation was much higher for girls than for boys in most subjects.  The OECD has found clear evidence of grading bias against boys (though interestingly found that this was from male teachers as well as female).

We are quick to assume that girls and young women need female role models – for example to persuade them to pursue STEM subjects.  Why are we so quick to assume that male role models for boys are not equally important?

And while campaigns for women in engineering and other STEM fields proliferate, why do we never see campaigns for more men to go into professions such as teaching, social work and healthcare?

The evidence shows that boys have worse education outcomes in all phases of compulsory and post-compulsory education.  The question we now must ask is “does it matter”?  After all, even though men enter the workplace with lower qualifications than women, they still earn 8% more on average. And that wage gap gets amplified when women take time out of work to have children and to care for them.

I think it really does matter.  Perhaps not so much for men with qualifications even if they are more modest than their female peers.  But for the large underclass of young men coming out of compulsory education with low or no qualifications, this matters because they are more likely to be unemployed – men with no qualifications are 1.7 times more likely to be unemployed than women with no qualifications.  Where people have two A levels or equivalent, there is virtually no gender gap in unemployment rates.

And if these poorly educated men are employed, they are more likely to work in hazardous, menial or dead-end roles.  This makes men less likely to look after their mental and physical health leading to higher substance abuse, smoking and alcohol consumption, lower life expectancy, much higher rates of imprisonment and of death by suicide.

We hear that 24% of parents think that boys in their child’s school are made to feel ashamed of being male and that 41% percent of children have been taught that young men are a problem in society.

I rail against the use of the abusive term ‘male, pale and stale’.  I hate the thought that my son, now in his early 30s, might turn a corner at what 40? Or 50? – and become automatically labelled ‘male pale and stale’, regardless of his achievements.  Why this is lazy stereotyping tolerated and not called out as discriminatory?

So yes, it does matter – it matters because a significant minority of men and boys are unnecessarily underachieving in education and going on to crowd our justice system, our prisons, our narratives about masculinity and the continuing fight for gender equality in the workplace and in the home.

What to do about it is another matter.  There are vanishingly few people researching what works for boys in education and there continues to be a policy vacuum on the subject.

Every MeToo moment, every high-profile violent abuse case by men against women, every priapic MP, every Andrew Tate fan, every careless reference to ‘toxic masculinity’, reinforces the narrative that men are not worth investing in. Yet I would suggest that until we start investing in boys and men, we’ll continue to witness too many men unable to engage in a democratic, law-abiding society and fulfilling life. 

And for those of us still acutely aware of discrimination against women, I believe we have a better chance of reaching equality at work, at home and in society if we educate men better. 

If the data you review during this enquiry were the other way round and manifesting lower attainment for women in education, there would be an outcry.  As a minimum, the Select Committee should call on government to set targets to reduce the attainment gaps between males and females and support schools and colleges to develop interventions to address this unacceptable and damaging inequality.  You might also ask why we have a Minister for Women and Equalities (my emphasis) rather than simply a Minister for Equalities. 

May 2024