British Male students continue to fall behind in secondary education

It is common knowledge that boys fall behind in school performance, and UK policy makers have addressed this issue in the past decade. In fact, they seem committed to narrowing gender gaps of any kind. This paper asks whether actual progress has been made in reducing the degree to which boys fall behind, and also whether gender differences in subject preference have changed in the period 2001 to 2013. Using an analysis of British secondary-education exam data and a comparison with data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), it is concluded that no progress has been made: Boys attained fewer top grades in nearly all school subjects. Further, boys and girls continue to choose elective school subjects along traditional interest lines. The problem of boys falling behind is obscured by the finding that grades of all children have risen considerably in this period. However, a comparison of Mathematics and English exam grades with PISA data suggests that this rise is due to grade inflation, not real improvement. The paper closes with recommendations for solutions. This paper investigates the degree to which boys fall behind in secondary education, using data from England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The paper also discusses the necessity and challenges of changing the current situation. In this paper, both performance and participation are reported. Performance is here defined in terms of the quality of grades school children attain. Participation is defined as enrolling for elective optional courses (such as Psychology or French). Throughout the paper, the terms " boys " and " girls " will be used as a short for male and female adolescent students in the age groups from (around) 14 to 18 years old. Educational performance gaps between boys and girls have been known for a long time. For example , already in the 17th century, the English philosopher Locke (1693) wrote that girls outperform boys when it comes to language skills. Still today, studies show that girls have better developed language skills (for a review, see Halpern, 2012), while boys typically perform equally well or better in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects, and these gaps are far more extreme at the tails of the performance distributions (Stoet & Geary, 2013). Understanding these performance gaps is necessary for addressing socio-political questions, such as whether the public and policy makers should be concerned and plan to change the current situation , …