Editorial: It's time to give schoolboys a break

At last, a Minister of Education has decided to try to do something about a problem that school research will not acknowledge - the "problem of boys". Trevor Mallard this week announced a programme aimed at finding ways to lift their level of achievement at secondary school. It is not just that they are being outperformed by girls these days; it seems to be a deeper-seated problem in modern education that has made it more than usually hard to motivate young males.

Parents know it, teachers know it but research commissioned by the Ministry of Education has been reluctant to confirm it. One study concluded the problem was not in education but in the attitudes of boys, which is true but hardly helpful. A generation ago, when the attitudes of too many teenage girls were not conductive to educational success, educational policy advisers were anxious to do something about it.

This time the concern has come from all-male schools. A year ago principals of 90 per cent of the country's boys' schools formed an association to combat what they called the "marginalisation" of boys. Although Mr Mallard sympathised with their view at the time, it has taken him a year to set up a programme to review the evidence of male achievement and to identify some school initiatives which seem to be making an improvement.

Perhaps the minister was waiting to be convinced by a second year's experience of the new National Certificate of Educational Achievement. In the first year of the NCEA, girls received twice as many excellence grades as did boys. The poor performance of boys was evident long before the previous examinations were ditched but they are obviously faring no better under a system which spreads the assessment through the year and requires a good organisation of a student's time.

"Anecdotal evidence suggests boys need clear targets ... ," says Mr Mallard, implying that the achievement credits that school students collect through the year do not present as clear a target as a single end-of-year exam. Members of the principals' group suggest that boys, unlike girls, concentrate on one thing at a time and prefer to swat in the final weeks when sports and other pursuits can be put aside.

Boys may be penalised also by much deeper trends in education and society. An Australian analyst, Jennifer Buckingham, has blamed the diminishing presence of men in boys' lives. She noted that one boy in three today is not living with his natural father and only 14 per cent of teachers in primary school classrooms are male. Boys are growing up with few male role models and school in particular, said Ms Buckingham, has been "feminised".

"This feminisation does not simply mean there are mostly women teachers. It means that curriculum, pedagogy and assessment now suit the capacities and interests more common among girls." She is referring no doubt to such trends as co-operative learning, personal expression, oral testing and so on.

It becomes easy to see why educational theorists have closed their eyes to a problem that calls into question many of changes they have wrought over the past 20 years or more. They quite rightly point out that the educational performance of girls has made great strides over the past two decades, and that the relative performance of boys is not a good reason to change tack now.

Yet the choice need not be of one style of schooling for both genders. Boys' schools ought to be encouraged to use material more suited to boys, organise classes in the more structured way males are said to prefer, and let them concentrate on a single examination if they wish. Big co-educational schools likewise may be able to provide an option of male-styled courses in main subjects.

It is not a gender competition, but if girls were the ones performing so poorly these days, educational researchers would be leading the demand for something to be done.