Educational Attainment of Boys

Steve Double Excerpts

Tuesday 5th March 2024 Westminster Hall

[Steve Double (St Austell and Newquay) (Con)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Paisley. I begin by wishing everyone a very happy St Piran’s Day. St Piran is the patron saint of tin miners and we have adopted him as our national saint in Cornwall, hence my attire.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Nick Fletcher) on securing this debate on a very important issue—one that he feels passionately about, as do I. He opened the debate by laying out the case very clearly. Although this debate is about academic attainment, and that is clearly important, it should not just be about that. I stand before Members as someone who left school at 16—as I often say, most of my teachers thought I left long before that—and could not wait to get out of education, although I did quite well in my O-levels. I am a great believer that, although academic attainment is important, it is by no means the only important thing in life. The most important lessons I learned in life, I did not learn in the classroom.

We need to keep things in perspective. As a country and as a Government, we sometimes put so much emphasis on academic attainment that that becomes counterproductive for those, particularly boys, who do not achieve it and then feel that they have not quite come up to the mark and may become demotivated as a result. The debate needs to be about more than just academic attainment.

Having said that, I think we have a real challenge in this country when it comes to how we educate, support, equip and enable boys to fulfil their potential in life. Some recent figures showed that there are now 83,000 more boys not in education, employment or training than girls. That should raise a number of questions. Why is there such a big disparity between the number of boys who drop out of education or training and are not in jobs and the number of girls who do the same?

We need only look at the suicide rate among men, particularly young men, to wonder what is going on in our country and our society today. Three quarters of all suicides involve men. Suicide is the biggest killer of men under 50 in this country, and that should really concern us. What is going on with the way we support, help and treat men that means so many of them decide to take their own lives?

I think there are a number of factors. I speak as a father to two boys, who are now grown men in their own right, and as a granddad to three, two of them boys—for the avoidance of doubt, the other one is a girl. I am so grateful, actually, that I am not a young man today because we seem to bombard our young men with so many negative messages about being a man.

The whole thing about toxic masculinity pushes negative messages all the time to young men, who then wonder what they are meant to be, who they are meant to be and how they are meant to behave. We need to take a long look at ourselves. I absolutely understand and agree that we have needed to address the inequality that many women have experienced in our society for a long time, and we have made huge progress on that, but we should not be putting men down as a result. I feel sometimes that that is what we have done, and we need to think carefully about it.

I am also concerned that we seem to put so much expectation on teachers. I am a great believer in the family and that having a stable, loving and positive family environment is the single thing that determines the outcome for boys and girls—for all children. Teachers clearly have an important role in providing education, but so often we expect our teachers to do far more than educate; we expect them to be social workers and mental health professionals and all sorts of other things. The state cannot do everything. I worry sometimes that we are always looking for the state to provide the answers to these challenges, whether in education, through schools and teachers, or other parts of the public sector, when I believe that most of the answers actually lie within the family. The Government have made some positive steps to support families and parents. That is hugely welcome, but we could do more to help parents to fulfil their role, rather than expecting teachers and other parts of the state to do it for them.

One thing I have noticed—the Minister is aware of this, and I am grateful for our meeting to discuss it—is that Cornwall, like other parts of the country, is seeing a huge rise in schoolchildren suffering with mental health conditions or who have neurodiverse conditions, and the education system is struggling to support them properly. Many parents are taking their children out and off-rolling them as a result. My observation is that disproportionately more boys are affected than girls. We need to look at what more we can do to support children struggling with these challenges and their parents.

As the Minister knows, I think fining the parents is not the answer. I have to put on record that I was disappointed that the Government are going to increase unauthorised absence fines for parents; that is not something I agree with at all. I think it is definitely the wrong thing to do. We need to provide help to ensure that children struggling with these conditions get the support they need, rather than threatening their parents with fines for the children not being able to attend school.

Finally, on the point about the underachievement of boys, a report into race and ethnic disparity in this country was commissioned by my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) when she was Prime Minister. It found that one of the most disadvantaged groups in our country was white working class boys in coastal towns. I would ask the Minister: what have we done with that information? In Cornwall, where we clearly have many coastal towns and villages, it is young people, and particularly boys, growing up in those communities who consistently underachieve.

My Cornish colleagues and I worked hard to get Cornish included as a recognised national identity in the recent census. That has been really helpful, because we now have real data on how Cornish people are faring. The census found that only 14% of 18 to 24-year-olds who identified as Cornish went on to further or higher education, whereas nationally it was 34%. The Cornish are 20% behind the national average. Again, I would say to the Minister: what are the Government doing about that?

We are very much aware of the underfunding of schools in rural areas, which the Government have begun to address, but there is still a long way to go. We need to look at the funding of schools and other services in coastal areas. Many young people growing up in our coastal towns and villages find themselves disadvantaged because of the very nature of the challenges that coastal towns face. That is feeding through into the underachievement of those young people, particularly young boys.

I ask the Minister: what more can the Government do to support coastal communities and to ensure that schools in coastal communities get the resources that they need to close that gap or disparity, so that young people growing up in our coastal towns and villages do not suffer the disadvantage that they have done for far too long? I believe that this really should exercise the Government, particularly Ministers in the Department for Education, to look at what is going on and provide the support that we really need in Cornwall and other coastal parts of the country.