Schools need to develop a “boy positive” learning environment to tackle educational underachievement, a report says.
This could include encouraging more men to become teachers and for school inspections to look closely at gender disparities, according to Boys will be boys: The educational underachievement of boys and young men.
The report by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) calculates that differences in educational achievement have meant that half a million young men have missed out on higher education over the past decade.
It says that an Asian girl in receipt of free school meals (FSM) is 63.6 per cent more likely to progress to higher education than a white boy on FSM.
Boys ‘fall behind’ girls at each education stage
Nick Hillman, director of HEPI and co-author of the report, said: “The resolute focus that is generally put on educational differences by class and ethnicity is generally missing when it comes to the sex of learners.
“That must change if we are to tackle one of the most egregious issues affecting education as well as society.”
He added: “Education holds the key to unlocking more equal opportunities across our society, but boys and men currently fall behind girls and women at each stage of education, from infant class to PhDs.”
There has long been concern about the comparative underachievement of boys at school compared with girls.
While the gap has been narrowing at GCSE and A level, this has been partly driven by falling attainment among girls.
Today’s HEPI report highlights statistics showing that 24 per cent of parents think that boys in their child’s school are made to feel ashamed of being male.
It asks whether “toxic masculinity” is “the cause or the effect of stigmatising boys and young men and failing to care about their education”.
The report also points out that males dominate diagnoses for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, dyslexia and stuttering, and that colour blindness is almost exclusively male.
Role models in schools
It finds that boys do not have enough male role models in school, with men comprising just 24 per cent of the teaching workforce.
At nursery and primary level, only one in seven teachers are male, it says, although this rises somewhat to 35 per cent at secondary level.
According to the Education Policy Institute, 30 per cent of primary schools have no male teachers at all.
The report’s authors call on the government to put a greater focus on gender disparities, including among staff, in school inspections as well as in higher education institutions’ access and participation plans.
The report points to “some useful initiatives [that] have revealed higher obstacles to learning and achievement among young men relative to young women, including lower educational aspirations, a shortage of role models of the same sex and bias among teachers”.
Reducing gender disparities
It says that schools can develop a “boy positive” learning environment by learning from those schools where a dedicated focus on reducing gender disparities has proved successful, and by reading the emerging literature on how to teach boys most effectively.
The report praises Dr Susan Morgan at Ulster University - which has sponsored the report - who has developed a programme to help working-class boys in Northern Ireland using a “strengths-based approach”, meaning it challenges and affirms masculine identities, promotes positive mental health and identifies blocks to learning, the report says.
Co-author Mark Brooks, male inclusion policy adviser, said that initiatives from the “grassroots of the education community” needed to be fast-tracked and mainstreamed “as we can no longer continue to let further generations of young men down”.
“We need them to do better academically,” he continued. “Not only because it helps them, our society and the economy, but also because - importantly - it helps young women, too. We need both to rise together.”
In 2024-25, around 44,000 fewer UK young men than women accepted a place at a UK higher education institution, the report states.
It adds that if young women and young men went to higher education at the same rate, there would actually be more male students, as more men are born each year. The gap means that there are “55,000 missing men” a year - or around half a million over the past decade, the research calculates.
The Department for Education has been approached for comment.
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