We’ve really missed the point when it comes to gender grades and achievements.

“Plus ça change,” says Bernard Trafford at the end of one of the most perceptive articles of the educational media summer (”Education’s madness has an unnerving coherence”). Sadly, he’s right. He didn’t add the second half of the quote - ”plus c’est la même chose” - so I’m doing that here (”the more things change, the more they stay the same”). Because in spite of teachers’ many hours of overtime - unpaid, writing new schemes and plans, and the extra hours before and after school, not to mention the holiday revision courses - we are still mired in the same turgid discussions about gender and about standards. Changing the exams has not changed the narrative.

There is the increasingly false dichotomy between boys’ and girls’ results, with all the hopeless stereotypes trotted out to the media, and well-worn cliché-ed arguments about whether either gender is advantaged by one particular form of study over another.   

References to Professor Alan Smithers’ work cite boys as lazy last-minute chancers, unable to knuckle down to coursework because they get bored, bless ‘em. Girls are the stodgy, well-meaning drudges who have been disgracefully slogging over coursework all these years to outperform their male peers.

We really need to inject more subtlety into the coverage here.

Exam trends: gender rather than genes?

Are we to believe that character, preference and talent are handed down the gender line instead of the genes? This is the 21st century, where cooking is so cool that boys can occupy kitchens to their hearts’ content if they want to; men are allowed to cry in public; and women do weightlifting and boxing. And believe it or not, girls are so keen to join the Stem success story that humanities subjects are looking to their laurels.

To take the argument to its logical conclusion, do we really suppose that government ministers, exam boards and the exams regulator have been working together to produce an examination system that helps to identify the male lazy chancers who can pull it off under short-term pressure and reward them at the expense of the female hard-workers who consistently produce work of a high standard?

Were that the case with the new qualifications, employers and university admissions tutors should be revising their requirements in terms of top grades. Who wants workers or students who leave everything to the last minute? Businesses run 24/7 these days, and university assessment runs on a much more varied diet than last-minute exams.

So to inject a note of realism, even at the expense of the articles still in the pipeline about gender difference, the qualities that have always been needed to succeed in public examinations combine perseverance, industry, flair and spontaneity as well as more developed, long-distance thinking. Girls and boys possess these qualities. The old cliché about genius being 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration is so true.

And it’s true in life, too. Even inventive geniuses need to put in the work to get the patent and funding to see their inspiration manufactured and profitable.

Yvonne Williams is head of English and drama at a school in the south of England