Exploring the "boy crisis" in education

In the mid-nineties this changed and by 2005 women composed the majority of the post-secondary student population in 16/18 of the OECD nations, with an average female share of 55%.5 In Canada (2005) women made up 58% of the student population, while the percentages in the U. K. and the U. S. were 57%, with 50% in Germany and 54% in Australia, leaving men in a minority position on most campuses. [...] The challenge becomes how to interpret the statistical differences and how to determine the significance of the role of gender in analyzing the results. [...] As well, the issue of the value of single-sex education was not authoritatively commented upon in the report, given the “relatively small numbers of students and because PISA does not measure either the social environment or the social development of students which is also an important goal of education.” (48) The central findings of the OECD report are very much consistent with those in many of t [...] More recently, the government launched the “gender agenda”, an 18-month program begun in spring 2008.29 The Department of Children, Schools and Families is responsible for the initiative, and their “gender and achievement” website states that the “boy problem” in education is “nothing new—it is mentioned in the 1868 Taunton Commission and 1913 pedagogy texts—and has persisted to the present day. [...] In the 1970s and 80s, schools were responding to evidence of the patterns of girls achievement while in the 1990s, they were responding to widely publicised statements about boys' underachievement." The Department’s view is that the key to addressing boys’ underachievement “lies in the teaching and learning approaches adopted by schools.