The intersectional feminist rewriting the national curriculum

she has been dedicated to breaking the link between family income and educational achievement.

If this is a fair summary, it's a fools errand. Unless she can break the correlation between parental IQ and family income, or between IQ and educational achievement, or between parental IQ and student IQ. None of those seems either feasible or desirable.

The voodoo belief system of blank-slateism strikes again. Absolutely, try to improve the life chances of people of all types and backgrounds. But don't start from such an extraordinarily unsupported scientific basis.

WarriorN she came into the DoE to do a presentation on inequalities. She was fantastically articulate and persuasive, and insistent on the centrality of class (not popular at DoE at the time). But also spoke brilliantly about sexism. I contacted her a couple of times after for help with work I was doing on girls in school and she was very responsive and generous. Memories are fading, but I think she also chaired a meeting we did on sexual harassment.

Anyway, I don't know her well, and don't know her views on everything, but I found her a class act.

UK GCSE results (not including resits) 2023:

English GCSE grade 4+
Boys: 65.9%
Girls: 77.6%

Maths GCSE grade 4+
Boys: 72%
Girls: 71.4%

There is a massive disparity between girls and boys performance at English GCSE. This lack of literacy will feed into almost every other subject (looking at 2023 stats boys also slightly outperformed girls in physics, economics and statistics).

Construction, engineering, computer science, food tech, design tech, drama, PE, all the subjects that are meant to 'engage boys' - girls do better. I don't think progressive teaching methods are to blame there.

Structure and order, explicit teaching of the 'I do, we do, you do' format, and inclusion of the arts and humanities in the core of education rather than just STEM subjects, would help raise achievement.

Speaking from the 'chalk face,' this describes the approach we take in MLD send, most of the children are male, autistic and have varying level of learning difficulties and/ or speech and language, social interaction and emotional regulation difficulties.

There's too much demanded by the curriculum though. We need to include general self care and life skills too.

They might have gone into construction

Therein lies the issue though, not enough vocational courses. And that's not to say that literacy and numeracy isn't hugely valuable there, especially if you wish to run your own business. A big issue for education is that some children need more of a context and 'reason' to learn. They need to see the point of the academic stuff.

When I was doing GCSEs in the 90s in a rural area the school i attended had some sort of gcse type qualification for kids who wanted to go into agriculture. (Meant we had a number of easy farm animals on site! Including lambing.) all disappeared when the school became an ICT school or whatever they were called.

How so? Explicit teaching should appeal to boys since it lays down a framework. Girls are 'supposed' to be 'creative' and do well at coursework, which is less structured. (No me - hated coursework because you must put in continuous effort with no time for anything else.)

Some of the statistics sound very meaningful like the difference in higher education participation, but this relates a lot to women wanting to be primary teachers and nurses. They make up a lot of female undergrads. It doesn't mean men are doing badly. They might have gone into construction and be earning well.

The SEN comments below are interesting. 75% of ehcps are awarded to boys.

Before we get too carried away on the underachievement of boys, let’s not forget there is still a big pay differential between men and women once they are adults … ;)

What was it that impressed you?

Progressive methods are still alive and kicking - witness 'balanced literacy'.

I am not a primary school teacher, but I know that synthetic phonics (thanks to Nick Gibb) is the prescribed method for teaching reading in primary schools.

While the arts have definitely been downgraded in importance in schools (not convinced about humanities - they are an EBacc subject) I am unaware of any evidence that this has led to greater disengagement in school by ethnic minorities in particular.

Progressive methods are still alive and kicking - witness 'balanced literacy'. Also, the arts and humanities have been downgraded by the Conservative government as not useful (Sunac actually said that degrees which did not gain a high salary should be de-funded).
On the topic of reading, I agree, though 'poor literacy skills' and 'not reading' are not the same thing. But poor literacy skills - that is not being able to automatically lift the word from the page - play a huge role in not reading. It's no pleasure if your reading method is 'hunt and pick', or having a guess at the word. A strong knowledge base is required to read well, but also the ability to decode. Also, books you might like to read.
Boys tend to like non-fiction or adventure stories. It is quite hard to find them, and since girls are more likely to read, finding heroes rather than heroines is as difficult now as the reverse was in the 50s and 60s. I am trying out a series called 'Great Battles for Boys', which I found on an education blog I follow. Hoping these may encourage step-great-grandson to read more.

I think this "absent father" line is just not true.
I agree. Absent fathers in Caribbean culture are not the source of the problem but a symptom. It is the lack of positive male role models but also the growing of a 'gangsta' culture among young boys, fuelled by Black American ghetto culture, which is seen as being 'authentically' black.

Also:
the whole notion that education is just about reading, writing and arithmetic, excludes a huge number who have capacity to achieve
This is the cultural attitude that prevents Afro-Caribbean boys (but not boys of e.g. Nigerian descent, or South Asian descent) and also white working-class boys achieving. It's an attitude to what one might call 'academic' education that discards its worth as not useful in 'real life'.
Education is the transmission of what has been found worthy and long-lasting to the next generation. (In contrast, skills are often time-specific e.g. the ability to program a BBC computer - much taught in the 80s - is now useless, but knowledge of the mathematics which produce programs remains relevant.)
Reading is an unnatural skill that needs to be taught, especially when the language targetted has, like English, a complex phonetic code (English has 26 letters to express 44 sounds, leading to needing to recognise something like 70 different letter combinations).
To dismiss 'reading, writing and arithmetic' is to dismiss the entry into all other skills to which they are the gateway. Without a knowledge base upon which to draw, creativity cannot bloom.

• *Also, there is the attitude being brought in from the US (again) that academic success is 'white' and to be avoided. ln this scenario 'European' ideas such as the scientific method, objective research and a preference for facts to back arguments rather than emotions is seen as 'colonial', as 'white supremacist', as against indigenous cultures and thus to be discarded as both not worthy and also as oppressive of other cultures. By taking this line whole swathes of children who could succeed and lead good and happy lives are disadvantaged. There is a reason why teachers explain, demonstrate and have students practice to automaticity: it works. Finally: If you do not see people like you being recognised as having worth, or getting the "better" job, then it is very easy to say / think why bother. Many people overcome this. You do not have to 'say/think why bother', you can say 'stuff it, I am going my own way and I will achieve'. Many from the working-classes have done so (think of Faraday, a blacksmith's apprentice who became a famous scientist) by leaving the ethos which oppresses them.
  I remember my now late DH, brought up on an estate known as 'candle town' because of the number of people who did not/could not pay electricity bills. He was surprised to learn it was the most deprived estate in Europe. He went to university and became a qualified Youth Worker, helping many others from the hole he found himself in. He went on to become a crofter in Shetland, and when he had to return to England because of an injury (attacked by a cow) he worked with community theatre, for which he wrote plays, directed and performed. Finally, he researched and wrote historical novels about Shakespeare and Richard III.
  He did not look around 'candle town' and say that he could do nothing because no-one else was - he got up and did. The difference was, of course, parental support for 'reading, writing and arithmetic' being both useful and enlightening.

In my experience just Becky, I cannot speak for other deriatives. Though given the motherwell is poisoned...
Evil beeches 😂😎

I've met Becky Francis through work and was deeply impressed by her.

Are you including Rebecca Adlington (peace be upon her) in that?

Certainly Harry Potter has been a great way to get reluctant children to read (obviously had to hide the fact that it was written by a woman for fear of putting the boys off). Becky Francis is pretty well-regarded in education though.

This prattling on about a 'woke' review of the curriculum reminds me that one of Reform's manifesto proposals was to overhaul the curriculum to weed out any hint of woke and big up the Empire.

Teachers are mainly hoping that stuff will be taken out of the curriculum and not replaced with anything else, giving kids room to breathe a bit.

The thing is there is clearly something else underpinning boys’ under achievement. I've been teaching in a send school for a long time and boys out number girls around 9:1 (not PMLD and there is a different ratio there from what I've experienced.)

None of the parties have ever been radical enough to address that elephant. Libdems weeevthe only ones who vaguely mentioned send.

Bringing back vocational subjects at gcse might go some of the way to helping matters.

There's an enormous boom in private send schools, which the LAs are then paying for places at rather than building a new school. Children with ehpcs or difficulties accessing education has increased dramatically in the last decade (for several reasons.)

Someone I know has taken on the management of 3 local settings that cater for teens who've been expelled and is curating the curriculum to be more apprenticeship oriented, and they make a lot of links to local business and factories etc. he said many are getting diagnoses of asd and adhd in his setting, after being failed by mainstream.

Labour need to get a grip on this as it's this particular group of students who end up getting into county lines. And it's mostly boys.

@noblegiraffe There are lots of factors in boys' underachievement at school, but one of the main issues is that they don't read. Reading regularly leads to better GCSE results

So what your saying is... that JK Rowling has done more for boys education than Toby Young or Becky Francis could ever dream of. The terrible, man hating feminazi.

@IwantToRetire
Its also hard to seperate cause and effect regarding absent fathers.
Mentally stable, well educated women from secure homes with childhoods free from abuse are more likely to form long-lasting attachments with the fathers of their children (and to get married). They are also more likely to have children that do well in education.
Women with complex mental health issues or PTSD, who have dropped out of school very young are less likely to form long lasting healthy relationships with the fathers of their children. In general, they are also less well equipped to help their children navigate education. That's not to say mother's and their children can't break the cycle because they can and do and good for them.

I do think fathers are important, and I think its possible to get into a negative generational cycle. But the new trend (JD Vance being a prime example in the US) of seeing the solution to all problems as mothers staying with the father at all costs is misguided - its treating the symptoms not the cause. In the case of someone like JD Vance whose mother was a mentally ill drug addict I can see its tempting to think life would be better if his father was around. But unfortunately, statistically, the type of men who father children with mentally ill drug addicts are less likely to be a positive influence if they are prevailed upon to stick around.

Roma/Gypsy children are the lowest attaining ethnic group, but I can't see Toby Young caring much about that.

Either way, progressive methods of education disadvantage the already disadvantaged. Structure and order, explicit teaching of the 'I do, we do, you do' format, and inclusion of the arts and humanities in the core of education rather than just STEM subjects, would help raise achievement.

Rosenshine is all the rage, progressive methods fell out of favour probably a decade ago.

There are lots of factors in boys' underachievement at school, but one of the main issues is that they don't read. Reading regularly leads to better GCSE results. Boys achieve way lower than girls at GCSE English, and obviously those poor literacy skills impact all other subjects. The only subject where boys reliably outperform girls (by a very small margin) is maths, one subject that requires very little writing.

@Grammarnut Either way, progressive methods of education disadvantage the already disadvantaged. Structure and order, explicit teaching of the 'I do, we do, you do' format, and inclusion of the arts and humanities in the core of education rather than just STEM subjects, would help raise achievement.

They might well raise achievement across the bard. However, they would probably increase the gaps between girls and boys since girls in general do better in that system than boys.

White working class boys outside of London incidentally.

It seems higher spending on education (and classroom sizes) have an impact!

But - while I would be in favour of giving extra support/real research driven interventions into that, byt Young's own metric that would be "titling the playing field". If Labour did spend lots of money on disadvantaged boys, its the likes of Young writing in the Spectator who would be complaining about social engineering/class warriors with a chip on their shoulder who just hate the upper class. This is exactly the rhetoric that was around a few years ago when efforts were being made to increase working class participation at university. When that stopped being as fashionable, and the focus shifted to other groups, people like Young effortlessly shifted their rhetoric and became champions of white working class boys. The idea that we should be supporting both white working class boys who are falling behind AND helping girls realise their potential in science/maths or helping young women pursue careers in those fields isn't considered. But they are different problems. And the solutions to both problems aren't contradictory.

But its not really "I want to improve things for X group". Its "X group is suffering, therefore all females must suffer at least as much as them or its wooooooooooke" or "X group is suffering so you must never talk about girls issues."

White working-class boys have one of the lowest levels of achievement, whether on free school meals or not. This may have something to do with the fragmentation of working-class families, and absent fathers. There is also a real belief that education is worthless in some working-class families - something their Victorian and early twentieth century forebears would be both astonished and appalled by.
I think the lowest achievers are boys of Caribbean origin, whose family structures are built around absent fathers who have multiple families.

Either way, progressive methods of education disadvantage the already disadvantaged. Structure and order, explicit teaching of the 'I do, we do, you do' format, and inclusion of the arts and humanities in the core of education rather than just STEM subjects, would help raise achievement. As would excluding permanently disruptive pupils at all stages of education - for why should those who want to learn be stopped by those who do not?
Sitting in rows, being taught by the teacher and following a knowledge-rich curriculum, which is rehearsed and tested so that it is internalised, has worked for millenia. The reason it works is that it imposes both order and achievement. Being able to do the sums on the board because you have been taught how to and have practiced to automaticity, works wonders for motivation in ways that trying to re-invent what Euclid did does not.

Toby Young is an insufferable dickhead who lost his high-profile jobs in education because of posting misogynistic tweets and attending an invite-only conference on eugenics also attended by a neo-nazi.

His days of having any influence on education are well and truly over, thank fuck.

Incidentally "By that metric, the lowest-achieving demographic in England are white British boys on free school meals" is incorrect.