Educational Performance: Boys

Angela Rayner Excerpts

Tuesday 6th September 2016 Westminster Hall

[Angela Rayner (Ashton-under-Lyne) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Walker. I will try to be brief. I thank the hon. Member for Lincoln (Karl MᶜCartney) for securing this debate on such an important topic. I will resist going where I was tempted to go with some of the comments that he made. As a white working-class girl, I would not want to stamp down a white working-class boy; we have to show solidarity.

Equality issues affect those from many backgrounds, but I will focus on what I believe to be the elephant in the room, which many Members have raised—class. Class is much more of a determining factor in this debate than gender, and it affects the issue disproportionately. I agree fully with the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh). All children have the right to a good-quality free education. All of us in this Chamber can agree on that.

I refer back to the comments made by the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce). Although I agree that fatherhood is important to the issue, healthy relationships are also important. That is why the Opposition want the Government to do more to equip young people by offering age-appropriate resilience and relationships education in all schools. Although boys from prosperous backgrounds dominate the very top of the attainment scale, there is growing concern about boys performing poorly overall at school compared with girls. I thank the hon. Member for Lincoln for sharing with us his story about his gran. He and I also have that in common: I had a strong gran who pushed me forward.

Boys are more likely to have the worst results, drop out and leave education unskilled and poorly qualified, as the hon. Gentleman eloquently said. Some 38% of boys eligible for free school meals fall behind in early language and communication. That is nearly double the national average of 20%. In our increasingly unequal society, it is not surprising that class is still such a massive barrier to education attainment. I am pleased that the hon. Gentleman agrees—other hon. Members alluded to it—that grammar schools are not the answer to the problem. We need to raise standards across the spectrum of schools.

I was moved by what the hon. Member for Weaver Vale (Graham Evans) said as well. I did not know his back story, but I am pleased that he shared with us his own experiences as a white working-class boy. Like him, I fought tooth and nail to get where I am today, and I had key social levers to help me that have now been, sadly, asset-stripped away by this Government.

Many hon. Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi) and the hon. Member for Telford (Lucy Allan), spoke at length about the importance of early years, which is absolutely right. I focus in my closing remarks on asking what the Government will do to invest in good early years education, because it is not happening at the moment; the funding is being cut. We know that funding from central Government is important in early-years intervention services, and that the cuts will have a massive impact on boys and girls from working-class backgrounds. What steps will the Government take to raise the aspirations and self-belief of students from poorer backgrounds, particularly boys?

[Mr Charles Walker (in the Chair)]

Minister of State, you have ample time to answer the debate: more than 10 minutes.

[The Minister for Schools (Mr Nick Gibb)]

Well, let me get on with it, Mr Walker. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Lincoln (Karl MᶜCartney) on securing this important debate. It has been an excellent and pacy debate, with excellent speeches on both sides of the Chamber, particularly the passionate speech, based on personal experience, of my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Graham Evans), the thoughtful speeches of my hon. Friends the Members for Congleton (Fiona Bruce), for Telford (Lucy Allan) and for Portsmouth South (Mrs Drummond), and other speeches that I will refer to in a moment.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Lincoln and the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) have so clearly set out, there are still far too many young people—boys and girls—who are held back by their background and circumstances and who leave school without the basic building blocks for a successful future. The Government are determined to tackle those issues. Tackling educational inequality means raising the bar, setting the highest expectations for all pupils at every stage and raising standards so that every school can deliver a world-class education.

We have already made enormous strides. More than 1.4 million more pupils are now being taught in schools judged good or outstanding by Ofsted than in 2010. Once again, this year’s A-level and GCSE results are testimony to the hard work of thousands of pupils and teachers. But while it is right that we celebrate those achievements, we must also recognise that there are groups of pupils for whom the chances of achieving good GCSEs and A-levels are simply too low.

Tackling the inequality driven by socio-economic background is a key priority for the Government, as is tackling the inequality driven by gender. Whichever way we read the data, they show that girls outperform boys at all educational stages in most areas of the curriculum. In 2015, there was a gap of nearly 16 percentage points between girls and boys judged to be achieving a good level of development at the end of the early years foundation stage: 74.3% for girls and 58.6% for boys. The gap persists at primary school in most, but not all, subjects.

In 2015, while boys’ and girls’ performance in mathematics was consistent—87% of boys and girls achieving level 4 or higher in the key stage 2 maths assessment—a significantly higher percentage of girls than boys achieved the expected standard in reading, writing and grammar, punctuation and spelling. In reading, writing and maths, 83% of all girls achieved at least the expected standard, compared with 77% of boys.

By the time pupils reach the end of key stage 4 at secondary school, the gender gap in attainment has increased. Girls outperform boys across all major curriculum subjects, although the size of the gap varies considerably by subject. For example, in 2015, girls only just outperformed boys in maths and individual sciences, but in English the gap was nearly 15 percentage points, and in the most commonly studied languages—French, German and Spanish—it was around 10 percentage points. Girls remain more likely than boys to be entered for the English baccalaureate: in 2015, more than 43% of girls studied the suite of English baccalaureate qualifying subjects, compared with 34% of boys. More girls than boys achieved it, too: 29% of girls, compared with around 19% of boys.

The cumulative impact of low prior attainment during primary and secondary school is likely to be one of the main factors influencing the slightly lower proportion of boys progressing to a sustained college or sixth form at 16 and the slightly higher likelihood that boys will be not in education, employment or training at the same age. In England, young women are 36% more likely to apply to university than young men; the difference in application rates between them is the highest on record.

It is important to note, however, that gender gaps are a common occurrence internationally, as the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Patricia Gibson) pointed out. They are in favour of girls in reading, in favour of boys in mathematics but mixed in science. According to the most recent PISA study—the programme for international student assessment, conducted by the OECD—the reading ability of girls is higher than that of boys in every country.

On average across OECD countries, 15-year-old girls are around a year ahead of boys—38 PISA points. The size of that gap is narrower in England: our girls outperform boys by 24 PISA points. The gender gap in maths is reversed—boys do better—and is not as large: 11 PISA points, or four months of education, across the OECD. In fact, boys only scored significantly better than girls in 27 out of 65 countries, and the gender gap remains in favour of girls in Jordan, Qatar, Thailand, Malaysia and Iceland, as I think the hon. Lady referred to. The size of the gap is similar in England to the average across all OECD countries, which is 13 PISA points.

What are the drivers of boys’ under-achievement? I listened very carefully to the excellent speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth South. While there is a plethora of data to show where and by how much girls do better than boys in education, there is only limited evidence that explains precisely why boys do not perform as well as girls. There is no shortage of theories, but many of them are not supported by robust research evidence. For example, it has been argued that boys naturally prefer examinations and girls prefer coursework, so boys may have been disadvantaged by the move from exam-based assessments to GCSEs, which place a greater emphasis on coursework. In fact, the attainment of girls at the end of secondary school was already improving before the introduction of GCSEs, and subsequent reductions in the weighting of the coursework component of GCSEs have had little impact on gender attainment patterns.

Another view, which my hon. Friend the Member for Lincoln referred to, is that the performance of boys is held back by the lack of male teachers in schools, particularly during the primary phase. He is right to point out that there is a huge disparity in the numbers of men and women teaching in primary schools, but studies that have looked for correlation between teacher gender and pupil attainment have mostly found no relationship of improved attainment when boys are taught by male teachers—although that does not mean we do not want to address the imbalance in the gender of primary school teachers.

The research evidence does suggest that the behaviour and attitudes of boys and girls towards school and academic study tend to differ in a number of ways—my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth South referred to some of those. Pupil-level factors appear to play an important role in the gender attainment gap. We know that there are some schools in which pupil attainment is high and the gap between girls and boys is small or non-existent. Those schools tend to be characterised by a positive attitude to study, high expectations of all pupils, high-quality teaching and classroom management, and close tracking of individual pupils’ achievement.

As the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden so passionately and ably pointed out, academies in the Harris Federation in her constituency are improving educational standards for pupils from poorer backgrounds because they adopt those attitudes to education. I have not yet seen evidence of the gap closing, because I do not have the data, but if the hon. Lady has them, or if I can get them from Dan Moynihan, it would be interesting to see the extent to which the Harris Federation’s approach to education is having an impact on the gender gap.

It is important not to generalise. It is simply not true that all boys do badly and that all girls do well. For example, white British girls who are eligible for free school meals generally do much worse than white British boys who are not. Indeed, there is clear evidence that poverty is a much bigger predictor of poor educational attainment than gender, as the shadow Education Secretary pointed out. While gender imposes a relatively consistent educational performance gap across all ethnic groups, the impact is compounded significantly by deprivation. As the Prime Minister noted in her inaugural speech, the chances of going to university are extremely low for white working-class boys. In 2015, fewer than one in four white British boys eligible for free school meals achieved five A* to C grades at GCSE, including English and maths, compared with more than 56% of non-disadvantaged white British boys.

The question is: how are we tackling educational underachievement? The Government’s approach is to set high expectations for what all pupils will achieve by introducing an ambitious and stretching national curriculum and world-class qualifications. To deliver such reforms, we are building a school-led, self-improving education system, characterised by high levels of autonomy and strong accountability arrangements, through which the characteristics of high-performing schools, such as those referred to by the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden, can be shared and embedded across the whole system.

We want all pupils to secure the basics in literacy and numeracy by the end of primary school, and we have set higher standards in those areas of the curriculum. We have embedded the teaching of phonics in key stage 1, which we know is the most effective way of teaching reading for all children, and we are providing catch-up funding to secondary schools to support those pupils who do not achieve the expected standard at 11. As a result, 120,000 more six-year-olds are on track to become fluent readers. Our introduction of the English baccalaureate sets a strong expectation that all pupils will receive a rigorous academic education that prepares them for adult life and success in our modern economy. We have made clear our aim that, by 2020, the vast majority of pupils, boys and girls alike, will take those facilitating subjects as part of a well-rounded education that opens the door to education and employment.

Our new performance accountability measures are also intended to drive up attainment across the board. Secondary school performance tables now report on pupils’ progress from the end of primary school to the end of secondary school, as well as their GCSE attainment. The new measures, known as progress 8 and attainment 8, will encourage schools to focus their attention on the progress and attainment of every pupil, not just those at or near the borderline of a particular performance threshold.

Looking beyond the curriculum, our commitment to character education seeks to ensure that all pupils develop the essential qualities of resilience, perseverance and self-control, all of which are critical for success in both education and adult life.

[Angela Rayner]

In the spirit of this debate, and bearing in mind what is happening in the media, does the Minister believe that grammar schools will help with his aspirations or make things harder?

[Mr Gibb]

The Prime Minister and the Secretary of State have been clear that we need to build a country that works for everyone. We are looking at a range of options to allow more children to go to a school that helps them to rise as far as their talents will take them. We will, of course, say more in due course, as policy is developed under the new Secretary of State.

Our vision for a self-improving school system is fast becoming a reality. Our growing network of teaching schools and multi-academy trusts is ensuring that institutions can collaborate and receive the support they need to raise standards. We are working hard to create a sustainable and diverse succession plan of high-quality school leaders and headteachers, and our expansion of the highly successful Teach First programme—