Agroup of key stage 2 primary teachers converges around the photocopier, comparing new September class lists. One of them voices her concerns about being able to achieve the excellent results her headteacher expects of her with such a “boy-heavy” class.

Meanwhile, a head of modern foreign languages at the local secondary school sits at his desk, scrutinising data as he compiles sets for GCSE Spanish. He notices that the top set is mainly girls and the bottom set is mainly boys. But he decides to leave it as it is. After all, while the boys, with their superior oral skills, may do better at the speaking elements, they’ll probably struggle with the written parts of the specifications.

In the classroom down the hall, a deputy headteacher gives a nervy newly qualified teacher some feedback on his lesson observation. There was too much off-task chatter, she tells him. And some of the boys were very passive in their learning. In future, she advises, he’s got to make sure that these boys are fully engaged. He needs to create more exciting resources. He needs to avoid so many extended writing tasks. He needs to “inject pace” into the lessons so the boys don’t get bored.

And finally, at a governors’ meeting in the next town along the coast, the participants are flicking through the school’s annual behaviour report. Someone queries the high rate of fixed-term exclusions among male pupils but a voice quickly responds that it’s just a case of “boys being boys”. The report - and the matter - is closed.

This is how easily it happens: a slow but persistent erosion of faith in boys. And then the statistics roll in and the trap is laid.

According to government figures, in the key stage 2 Sats last year, the gender gap at the expected standard in reading, writing and maths was eight percentage points: 68 per cent of girls reached the expected standard compared with 60 per cent of boys.

At GCSE last year, 17.2 per cent of GCSE entries by male pupils were awarded an A/7 grade or above; the proportion of female entries achieving an A/7 or above was 23.7 per cent. Around 62.3 per cent of male entries achieved C/4 and above; 71.4 per cent of girls hit the same marker.

In the most recent statistics available - for the 2016-17 year - the permanent exclusion rate for boys (0.15 per cent) was more than three times higher than that for girls (0.04 per cent), and the fixed-period exclusion rates were similarly disparate (6.91 per cent for boys compared with 2.53 per cent for girls).

It has always been like this, for as long as we teachers can remember. It’s just how it is, we think; it’s nothing to do with us.

But it is. What is holding boys back in schools? There is strong evidence to suggest that you are.

Prime suspects

When we conceived the idea of writing a book about masculinity in schools (see box, opposite), we discussed what we thought were the main issues preventing a narrowing of the gender attainment gap. Prime suspects included failed “boys’ engagement” strategies, anti-school attitudes and boys’ negative relationships with teachers and each other.

But our experiences in education had given us a gut feeling that another factor - perhaps the most important one - was at play. Teaching is a profession besieged with variables. There are so many things that influence the performance of our pupils over which we have little control: IQ, sleep routines, whether they were read to as an infant. However, among all these variables is one constant: us.

Ask a teacher or senior leader if they have high expectations of their pupils and you’ll get a universally predictable response in the affirmative. After all, nobody likes to think that they are delivering dumbed-down content or have different beliefs about what different groups of pupils can achieve.

And yet our time working in schools and debating on social media had left us with the distinct feeling that many teachers have (largely) unintentional prejudicial beliefs about boys’ attainment and behaviour.

We know from the research just how important teacher expectations can be. Rosenthal’s and Jacobson’s seminal 1968 study showed that teachers’ expectations can have a powerful impact on pupil achievement. At the start of an academic year, the researchers told US elementary school teachers that a group of their pupils was made up of high achievers and would need to be stretched. They then followed the children’s progress and discovered that the “high achievers” - who were in fact of mixed prior attainment and were chosen at random - had indeed excelled over their peers.

Coining the term “Pygmalion effect”, Rosenthal and Jacobson had succeeded in illustrating the significant impact of high teacher expectations on student outcomes.

We also know that low teacher expectations can have a similarly powerful influence. Babad et al’s 1982 work introduced Pygmalion’s opposite: the “Golem effect”. It revealed how negative self-fulfilling prophecies can lead to poor pupil outcomes. In fact, according to the researchers, such prophecies have a more powerful impact than positive ones.

But what evidence do we have about the relationship between teacher expectations and gender?

An illuminating 2004 study by Susan Jones and Debra Myhill sheds light on how teachers’ perceptions of academic potential are frequently shaped by a pupil’s gender.

Jones and Myhill found that a large majority of primary, middle and secondary teachers stated a belief that boys should do just as well as girls at school. In follow-up interviews and observations, however, the researchers found a divergence between what the teachers said about equal outcomes for boys and girls in theory, and how they spoke about boys when confronted with the realities of the classroom.

As the researchers explain, among these teachers there was a “tendency to associate boys with underachievement and girls with high achievement”. In their discussions about boys’ academic potential, teachers fell back on stereotypical generalisations, making statements like “girls are better writers” and “girls like reading more”, whereas boys were invariably spoken of in terms of what they “cannot, will not and do not do”.

But does believing that boys are less likely than girls to be academically successful - what Jones and Myhill term a “deficit model of male achievement” - necessarily directly translate into lower test results?

We know that poor expectations do lead to lower results, as explained earlier. And some evidence suggests we even mark boys down owing to gender bias.

Research from 2016 into French middle-school pupils, conducted by Camille Terrier of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, concluded that teachers are prejudiced against boys when assessing, arguing that “teachers’ gender biases have a high and significant effect on boys’ progress relative to girls in both mathematics and literacy”.

Similarly, research into KS2 assessment by Tammy Campbell (2015) found evidence that gender stereotypes lead to biased judgements, where boys are systematically given lower scores than their ability warrants in English.

When it comes to attainment, then, our hunch has a compelling evidence base: it seems clear that teachers’ unconscious gender biases bring about a Golem effect that directly contributes to boys’ relative academic underperformance.

Class clowns?

But what does the research tell us about how teachers’ perceptions of behaviour also contribute to boys’ underachievement?

Understandably, much of the literature on boys and behaviour focuses on secondary schools. Most boys, the assumption suggests, undergo some kind of Kevin the Teenager-style metamorphosis as soon as puberty kicks in. A recent article in Tes, looking at testosterone, did a good job of detailing why that perception is fraught with issues: the impact of the sex hormone is much more about seeking social status in general than specifically promoting violent alpha-male behaviour patterns.

The researchers found that much more of a factor in teenage behaviour was what happened before puberty: adolescent behaviours, explained Kate Steinbeck, endocrinologist and Medical Foundation Chair in adolescent medicine at the University of Sydney, are commonly an extension of behaviours learned (or not learned) in childhood.

This is why research carried out in primary schools is so fascinating.

A recent study by Lynn A Barnett looked at teachers’ views of playful children in Years 2, 3, and 4. Barnett found that when boys behaved in a lively manner, they “were stigmatised by their teachers”, who viewed their behaviour as problematic and often labelled them as “class clowns”.

Despite very similar behaviour, the lively girls managed to dodge the class clown tag, with their conduct being overlooked when it came to teacher ratings. Extrovert boys were seen as a nuisance, extrovert girls as confident and mischievous.

Unsurprisingly, over time, the boys identified as class clowns suffered reduced levels of self-esteem and self-efficacy.

The role model myth

One frequently stated explanation for the poor performance and apparent poor behaviour of younger boys is the “feminisation” of primary schools where, according to the 2017 school workforce census, 87 per cent of primary school teachers are women. According to this theory, boys need more male role models to inspire them on to academic excellence.

Yet, longitudinal research from America and British research by Becky Francis et al has shown that the gender of the teacher makes no difference to academic attainment for boys or girls, and that pupils feel that the gender of the teacher is insignificant.

Furthermore, Christine Skelton has argued convincingly that efforts to position male teachers as role models may make things worse by promoting a stereotypical masculinity that, paradoxically, encourages anti-school work attitudes.

So, the issue is not the gender of the teachers - it’s their gender perceptions.

Beliefs about boys as “class clowns” persist in secondary school. Carolyn Jackson’s 2010 study into teachers’ perceptions of adolescent boys revealed a plethora of complaints about boys’ apparently frustrating natures. According to their teachers, boys are drawn to a “laddishness” that involves:

• Following a “pack mentality” driven by a desire to fit in with the group.
• Being loud in an effort to gain attention.
• Rejecting academic work and lionising those who are good at sport.
• Lacking respect for authority and wanting to have the last word.
• Disrupting lessons as a matter of course.

Now, many secondary teachers reading this may well be thinking, “What’s the problem? I also recognise those behaviours in the boys I teach”. And, in certain cases, they’d be right. We could quite easily reel off a list of boys we’ve taught over the years who would fit into this category.

But, funnily enough, we could also reel off a list of girls who exemplify the dubious traits that apparently embody “laddishness”.

And this is precisely where the problem lies: it’s very unhelpful to smear all boys, or even most boys, with this sticky brush while overlooking the poor behaviour of some girls and sparing them the metaphorical tarring we so freely give to boys.

How far does this “tarring” determine how teachers interact with male pupils?

A couple of years after their initial study, Myhill and Jones researched pupils’ perceptions of whether teachers’ behaviour management was different for boys and girls. A sizeable majority of pupils of both sexes felt that teachers treat boys more negatively than girls.

This perception increases with age. Secondary school pupils are more likely to voice concerns about teachers’ gender biases: 62 per cent of interviewed pupils felt that boys were unfavourably treated by teachers; just 8 per cent felt the reverse was true. Themes that emerged included:

Girls escape behaviour sanctions because teachers don’t expect them to misbehave.

• Teachers - especially male ones - are gentler with girls, worrying that girls will cry if told off.
• Girls are treated more like adults in school because teachers think they’re more mature than boys.
• Boys are told off - and punished - more frequently for behaviour that girls also exhibit in the classroom.

Whether these views reflect reality is a different question. But this study illustrates that a significant percentage of pupils believe that boys are treated unfairly in lessons. Whether it is “true” does not negate the fact that pupils thinking this is true is highly problematic for the reasons expressed earlier about the importance of teacher expectations.

So, on behaviour and in attainment, there is a compelling case from the research that our initial hunch is true: the biggest controllable factor in the poor outcomes for boys is us, their teachers.

We should also add that this has detrimental effects on girls, too. On the surface, girls seem to get a better deal from “favourable” treatment. But look deeper and you realise that when teachers tiptoe around girls’ behaviour, they are reinforcing stereotypical ideas that girls are delicate creatures lacking in emotional resilience.

In addition, the level of scrutiny of girls’ academic performance - and the high expectations that go into that - can clearly have as many negative impacts as positive. In November, Professor Tamsin Ford reported in this magazine that the group with the most worrying occurrence of mental health challenges was the 16-19 female group. While that clearly has a number of causes, pressure to conform to an expectation of high-achieving femininity cannot be discounted.

So, what do we do? What we have detailed above might leave us feeling uncomfortable but, as teachers and school leaders, we must face up to it. Based on our reading of the research, here are three things we should all look to implement immediately:

1. Improve gender issues training

Teachers and school leaders need to be educated about how they might play a part in lowering expectations of boys. That does not mean that teachers should be castigated for their stereotyping. After all, teachers are part of society and society leaves us riddled with damaging preconceptions about gender.

What’s more, research tells us that teachers feel they aren’t adequately trained on gender issues, and feel unskilled and uncomfortable when it comes to discussing gender stereotypes. Initial teacher training providers and school leaders need to help them out.

2. Think carefully about how you respond to classroom behaviour

Assuming that boys will cause more problems in your class might lead to boys causing more problems in your class. Some boys will mess around, of course. But then so will some girls. Avoid pre-judging groups on gender alone.

You need to be reflective and honest here: are you sure you’re fair and even-handed when disruption occurs in your class? Think about your voice, your body language and the attention you give to boys and girls.

3. Raise academic expectations

Low expectations of boys lead to a self-destructive circle of underperformance. Sustained and systemic high challenge for all pupils is the only long-term response to these damaging beliefs.

There are no quick fixes, no rapid interventions in this regard. Only through a shift in teacher attitudes and whole-school ethos can we begin to deal with the stubborn stereotypes that harm boys and girls.

Mark Roberts is an assistant headteacher in the South West of England. Matt Pinkett is an English teacher. He tweets @Positivteacha

This article originally appeared in the 19 April 2019 issue under the headline “What’s holding boys back? (You are)”