The news that boys who conform to masculine stereotypes tend to underperform at GCSE was depressing, but not for the reasons you might think.

The problem isn’t boys’ underachievement; the problem is the starting point. We shouldn’t be comparing boys and girls in the first place. 

The question instead should be: which boys? Which girls? There’s a wider set of issues out there affecting why young people don’t achieve at school.

We should be looking at race and class, and how that’s marginalising certain communities: how schools are completely unequal across different cultural communities. 

We really need to be focusing on marginalisation, economic deprivation, access to resources. Those things are much more of a detriment to young people’s educational outcomes than sex or gender. We see this so strongly right now, as Covid-19 has led to the escalation of inequalities.

Obsessed by the gender war

The problem is that everyone - Ofsted included - is obsessed by the gender war. Why are boys failing? And so this becomes constructed as a crisis of boys, and we don’t ask wider questions.

You see this increasing under the Conservative government: the focus is always on the individual, rather than on broad social problems, such as deprivation and inequality. But this is just a distraction. It’s a way of constructing a problem with boys, which ignores all the other issues out there.  

I think we’ve got a lot of other issues that are salient: there are lots of live debates around gender and sex. But people are just obsessed with putting children back into gender boxes. 

The other question, of course, is: why are we constantly obsessed with attainment? It always ends up positioning girls as having won, but that’s a false narrative. We only see one set of girls “winning”, and those are girls from privileged backgrounds. It’s a dead end. It’s a distraction from what’s really going on.

An escalation of gender violence

Because what’s really going on, meanwhile, is an escalation of gender violence - in schools, but also in society in general. 

As part of my research, I spoke to 150 young people, from seven very different schools. I found that 76 per cent of the girls had been sent unsolicited dick pics. Seventy per cent of them had been asked for a nude picture of themselves. 

Sometimes there was a double-whammy: they were sent a dick pic, and asked to trade it for a nude picture of themselves. This isn’t just sexting: it’s a form of abuse. 

But young people fall through the gaps: the revenge-porn helpline is only for people aged 18 and above. It’s quite hard for young people to know how to report something like this, and get support for it. 

This is something schools could help with, by introducing clear, comprehensive policies and guidelines, such as these. Many schools have policies on sexting, or on violence, but nothing that brings it all together under one heading. 

What it means to be gendered

Now that statutory relationships and sex education is being introduced, that would seem the ideal place to educate children about what gender is, and what it means to be gendered. What happens, though, is that sex education and discussions about gender and inequity can get separated. 

But we need the highest quality RSE, to help children learn about the interplay between gender and power. This includes educating pupils about gendered roles and stereotypes. 

We need to teach all pupils how to better understand gender and gendered processes in their everyday lives - such as how to manage the pressures to be hypermasculine or hyperfeminine - because these are pressures that come from the heteronormative patriarchy. These patriarchal logics - alongside race and class - force people back into stereotypical gender roles.

We need to teach young people about gender power relationships, right from the beginning, and how these relationships manifest themselves at school, online and offline. 

However, when we get sidetracked into issues like gender and achievement, or masculinity in crisis, we miss the everyday banality of young people and sexual violence. 

This is the real issue: not some diversion about boys against girls.

Professor Jessica Ringrose head of the sociology section at the UCL Institute of Education, and co-director of the UCL Centre for Sociology of Education and Equity 

Jessica Ringrose is currently running a survey, measuring the extent of image-based sexual abuse suffered by pupils aged between 13 and 18. Take the survey here.