CPRMB publishes landmark review of boys’ education outcomes across high-income countries

The Centre for Policy Research on Men and Boys (CPRMB) has embarked on a major project investigating why education standards have fallen among young people across the developed world. Over the past ten years, average attainment among 15-year-olds across OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries has declined in reading, maths and science. 

Approximately one in four students can now be classified as low achievers in core subjects. This group is disproportionately male.

The project has collated and reviewed information detailing where boys are struggling most and in which subjects, and where they are doing better, with the aim of explaining why they are in so much greater difficulty than girls and suggesting what might be done about it.

Nick Isles, CPRMB Director, says,

“At its best, education should enable talent in whatever form that takes, help children become productive workers and citizens and empower and enrich them with knowledge about the world as it once was, as it is now and as it will become in the future. For far too many boys it is failing on all these measures, something which all governments and educators must understand and get to grips with. The gender gap is stark; at the bottom of the achievement spectrum the weakest 10% of boys are behind the weakest performing cohort of girls by a full year. It’s important to stress that we need to find ways to bring boys up, not to drag girls down, which would be of benefit to no one.”

The research project, which is being launched at the first anniversary of the launch of the CPRMB, draws on peer-reviewed research, national assessment data and international large-scale student assessments across high-income economies around the world. It will produce three reports, the first of which is released today and maps the scale and nature of gender gaps across cognitive, non-cognitive and attainment outcomes.

The second report will focus on context; the factors shaping the outcomes outlined in the first report including social norms, education system design, socioeconomic factors and developmental patterns, and the policy levers that can influence them. The third release will look at the drivers of student learning closest to boys’ day-to-day experience of schooling, including classroom environment, family and home, wellbeing and engagement, and crucially, what policy can do to influence them.

The work is being carried out by CPRMB Research Fellow, Jordan Hill, who is also the author of the first report. A former Education Policy Analyst at the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills, he has also worked as a Research Manager in Brussels, focusing on research and innovation policy, and as a Higher Education Policy Officer for a university association in London.

Jordan says,

“What struck me most in pulling this research together is how consistent the picture is across very different countries and contexts. This isn’t a quirk of one education system or one culture. And crucially, it isn’t reducible to disadvantage either. Boys’ underperformance shows up across the income spectrum, shaped by things like gender norms around academic effort that poverty can’t account for. That consistency is actually useful as it tells us there are underlying mechanisms we can identify and act on, and that’s exactly what the next two reports set out to do.”

Among the first reports most significant observations are,

• Boys’ literacy disadvantage emerges early and widens throughout schooling, while gender differences in mathematics are typically smaller and often favour boys, particularly among the highest-achieving students.
• Across subjects, low-performing boys typically struggle more than low-performing girls.
• Girls are often better at applying foundational knowledge and skills to analyse, evaluate and generate solutions to real-world challenges and there is also a need to address boys’ disadvantage in more complex tasks, not just foundational literacy.
• Countries where girls perform as well as or better than boys in mathematics tend to be the same countries where girls outperform boys most strongly in reading.
• Gender differences in achievement interact with other sources of educational inequality, however boys’ underperformance is more than just a poverty story.
• Girls and boys report differences in their social-emotional skills, and these differences tend to widen as they grow older.
• Boys face higher risks of delayed progression and non-completion.

Running in parallel to the review is the CPRMB’s Boys’s Education Commission, chaired by political strategist, writer and former headteacher, Peter Hyman. The Commission is gathering evidence from experts on why boys are falling behind at so many levels of education. 

Peter says,

“This review will inform so much of our work and provide us with a great deal of useful insight for our focused, time-limited inquiry, and between the two we have a decent chance of coming up with serious policy initiatives to reverse the trend of struggling boys for the benefit of all.”

Nick says,

“Nothing as comprehensive as this has ever been attempted before in trying to dig down into why boys are struggling so much in education, and why that pattern is reproduced in so many different and disparate countries. As developed nations, we have been slow to recognise the problem, but we can do so no longer if we are to maintain any degree of social stability and cohesion. To continue to ignore this gender divide would be disastrous for us all.”