The trouble with boys

As the mother of a boy and a girl, Helen Trussler has seen a stark contrast in their fortunes at school. While her 18-year-old daughter Beth has thrived, she feels that her once-confident son Harry, 12, has been crushed by a system that is biased against boys.

“He comes home from school in tears, tells me he’s stupid, dumb and should be in special needs,” said Trussler, 44, a home help from Guildford, Surrey.

 

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Last week, Mary Curnock Cook, the chief executive of Ucas, which manages applications for higher education courses, revealed that women outnumbered men in almost two-thirds of degree subjects. The gap has almost doubled since 2007: 66,840 more women than men are now on degree courses.

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What about the parents, though?

Lee Elliot Major, chief executive of the Sutton Trust, a charity that aims to improve social mobility through education, believes part of the responsibility must lie with them.

“We desperately need to get parents involved at schools,” he said. “Even with grades, many boys from poorer homes will not go on to A-levels, or even if they get them they will not go to the most prestigious universities. These boys think, ‘Am I worthy?’ There are hundreds of thousands of kids like that. Working-class boys fare well when they’re with middle-class kids, so our best schools also need to ensure fairer admissions — through ballots or banding — so they serve all children in their local community.

“If we carry on like this, by 2030 our universities will be full of mostly women, and the only men left will be middle-class.”

Read the full feature here (£)