Why are over 80% of school suspensions boys?

[ZenAgainWoo]

Watched a tv show not long ago looking at children who have been suspended from school, and I think it stated that near 85% of school suspensions are boys. Why is this? Am I missing something glaringly obvious?

Boys who get involved in criminal behaviour are more likely to have inappropriately high self esteem, than low self esteem.

Because boys aren't trained to express their emotions, and in all honestly, I think people (parents/teachers) are less likely to consider boys emotions than girls. So when boys feel anxious, scared or frustrated etc. it displays itself as anger. This isn't helped by boys being socialised into thinking that from an early age the only emotion it's acceptable for them to have is anger. As a teacher, it's very notable which boys are able to express themselves and manage their emotions when they start in year7 and which ones aren't..no surprises for which ones end up being the more successful students.

Also, I do think expectations are lower among some staff for boy students, especially those who present as non academic, and 'coasting' is tolerated more from them than it is from girls, all of which leads them to not take academic success seriously, but that's another issue.

I think many boys have their self-esteem well and truly eroded.

…And of course no girls ever have their self-esteem well and truly eroded by being treated as fuck-holes at the pleasure of men by the whole of society.

Honestly this post is giving me the rage at the moment.

I am sat here in tears reading the vile messages some girls have been messaging my son on WhatsApp, obviously deleted and blocked but the messages are totally uncalled for!! He doesn't retaliate to anything but if he did, I bet it would be him being classed as the unreasonable one!

Not all girls are sugar and spice and all things nice!

Girls seem to get away with their abusive behaviour but a boy does it, well the stats speak for themselves don't they!!!

@wheelz46 don't delete the messages, screenshot them and send them to the school even in the holidays. If they are serious they will be dealt with now and if they can wait they can be dealt with in September.

Some boys are really lovely and always do the right thing. However, that does not change the fact that the majority of violence in schools is carried out by other, less kind boys. We've had several bones broken of lovely boys in my school by the less pleasant ones this year which is disgraceful.

Girls should and do get in trouble but generally the unkind girls pick more subtle ways to be unkind (like text messages) and it's very difficult to stop. It depends on the parents being on board and removing their devices but often they do not.

You do realise you can’t look at one years stats and announce systemic racism isn’t an issue.
For the last four year (2015-2019) the rate at which white children have been excluded has been 0.1 whereas for black children it was 0.14 for the years 2015/17, 0.13 for 17/18 and 0.11 for 18/19. However if you look back to 2007/2008 black children were excluded at a rate of 0.24 compared to the rate of 0.12 for white children.

While the gap was closer in the last years stats when you look back you can see the pattern was and still is to exclude black children more often.

Can you share this research as for my memory of my studies at both A level and also during teacher training I don’t remember any studies that were cited?
I remember there being studies that debunked the belief boys developed later than girls, a belief that set the 11+ pass rate higher for girls than boys.

Boys have testosterone surges at certain times throughout their childhood. I know one occurs around the age of 5 and have seen that peak in energy levels in my reception classroom where they’re constantly on the go. As they get older and are expected to sit for much longer, must be very difficult during another hormone surge. There’s also a lot to be said about how emotionally illiterate boys may be compared to girls. What we may consider to be embarrassment, frustration, sadness, loneliness, etc comes out as anger in boys (and sometimes girls!) that haven’t been taught to identify their emotions.

Nowhere in the world has children skipping through the woods until they are six or seven.

They may not be in a building called school, it might be called kindergarten, but what they do is pretty much what our children do in reception.

Former teacher here. Every aspect of boy’s socialisation makes them more likely to misbehave. To me the answer is obvious.

While girls are told to be quiet, behave, help mum with cooking boys are told, even expected, to act out, make noise and defy authority. It’s just ‘being a boy’. Even feminist mothers do this, sometimes without realising.

Fast forward to adulthood and we see men behaving in the same way - it’s clear some of them have never been told no.

Boys also aren’t encouraged to share their emotions when they’re upset, so they act out instead to communicate their feelings. As teachers we know that bad behaviour often indicates a difficult home life, mental health issues, trauma etc. Unfortunately knowing this doesn’t change the fact that their behaviour is unacceptable and dangerous. We try to be considerate but if someone has had 1000 chances and continues to be openly violent and defiant the school will have no choice but to suspend or exclude.

Sometimes it cultural. I’ve known families who expect perfect school behaviour from their girls - neat work, good manners, compliance - and expect their boys to be confrontational to authority they don’t like and aggressive in conflict with peers. Where the ethos of school and home are poorly matched like this, kids are set up to fail.

@Alysskea
Agree strongly with your post.

I’m a teacher too. The problem with boys’ behaviour grows out of the way we socialise them. And that’s not easy to unpick.

There are some very low bars being set for boys on this thread though - boys “can’t do” this or that. Of course they can or could. Most boys are inherently capable of civilised behaviour. But it’s hard to enforce this at the mid-teen point when they’ve got away with all sorts for years.

A hugely disproportionate amount of my time as a teacher is spent focusing on the boys - dealing with their behaviour, answering their questions, trying to motivate them etc. Meanwhile the girls get on quietly. This is in large part due to boys’ sense of entitlement which has been fostered since day one by the whole of society. Low esteem my arse!

A hugely disproportionate amount of my time as a teacher is spent focusing on the boys - dealing with their behaviour, answering their questions, trying to motivate them etc. Meanwhile the girls get on quietly.

'The boys'? Every single boy in your class? And every girl is getting on quietly? Or is it actually that a group of children take up this time, all of whom are boys, but that there are other children both girls and boys who behave better?

I wish that most posters on this thread would be a bit less sweeping about what 'boys' and 'girls' do. 80% of suspensions are boys and that clearly points to a real problem worth discussing but of course the vast majority of boys are never suspended - from some of this thread you'd think that violence and disruptive behaviour was universal in teenage boys. It's really sad - and of course part of the problem - to see people talk about how 'the boys' behave; it's such a self-fulfilling prophecy.

@Hardbackwriter
I don’t really get what point you’re making. Of course it’s not every single boy. I’m not talking about, for example, your son (as I assume this is why you’re upset).

But analysis of group behaviour involves looking at the groups as a whole. Every teacher in my school would agree that it’s ‘the boys’ who take up most of our energy and time in the classroom. That’s a statistical fact. Of course there are some girls who misbehave too. I would have thought that was obvious.

Getting offended when people identify gendered behaviour - and slapping down people who speak their findings - is what allows male violence to flourish.

@Hardbackwriter is right, though.

More boys than girls might misbehave but that doesn’t mean most boys misbehave.

In most classrooms, most children behave well most of the time.

I also agree with a PP that violence is minimised on this thread.

I think this is true. I work with preschool aged children. The majority of girls who are going to school in September are more than ready but the boys not so much.
A lot of them would benefit from another year at nursery /home.

I think it doesn't help that some people judge girls so much more harshly than boys. How many times have we seen violence minimised by people saying "Girls are bitches but boys just sort it out with their fists then make friends again" The violence is spoken of almost fondly, even though in many cases the victim of the attack is not seeing it quite that way

Do you really not see how it's harmful to say that 'the boys' or 'the girls' behave in certain ways when you're agreeing that isn't actually the case - and how it could actually perpetuate the problem? You say that expectations are too low for boys and I totally agree but I think you're doing exactly that by lumping them altogether - do you think that is helpful to the boys behaving well? As you've said there are loads of societal messages telling them that it's not masculine to be polite, compliant and hard-working, it's just really sad that one of those voices is their teacher.

If the children who behaved badly all shared another trait - if they were all of one race, or from one socioeconomic background, or all from single parent households - would it be ok to talk about how 'the Black children', 'the poor children' or 'the kids with no dads' behaved badly?

i Think the reason is mostly biological but culture does play a role as @Newrumpus says. In east Asia in general I think classes are less rowdy because parents discipline thier kids for misbehaving at school. There are other problems like mental health issues from unrealistic parental expectations though.

Exclusions are rare so the majority of boys are behaving well and certainly do in the school I work in. The expectation of good behaviour is there hence children being excluded. Schools wouldn’t pass Ofsted inspections if it wasn’t.

Many exclusions have SENs involved.The pushing and expectations of girls and boys with SENs to be “polite, compliant and hard-working” regardless of needs being met or even addressed is wrong. Girls tend to do this more hence lower numbers of diagnosis and interventions. The mental health fall out later is huge. Please do not push struggling girls and boys to be “ compliant”.

I get what you’re saying, but, again, I think we need to stop being squeamish about stating facts.

If the question “Do you spend more classroom time on the boys or the girls” were posed, the answer would be “the boys”. It’s as simple as that. And once you’ve identified that, you can start looking at the causes. If you don’t identify that- well, where do you start?

Actually in the classroom you wouldn’t stand there and say “the boys are a problem.” Obviously. But we’re adults here having an analytical discussion.

Getting stuck on the term “boys” is only one step away from NAMALT. We know it’s not all men when we discuss male violence, but we discuss groups in this way.

By the same token, when sociologists and educationalists analyse various other groups like the ones you’ve mentioned (racial groups, single-parent families etc), they don’t necessarily feel obliged to throw in a “not everyone in this group” caveat every five minutes.

I'm quite concerned at the apparent teachers minimising the bad behaviour of the girls tbh. In every school I've been in, the online/WhatsApp/sharing unflattering photos bullying by the girls is treated just as seriously as the boy's behaviour.

Fwiw most suspensions at our school aren't for violent behaviour. They're for the type of bullying that some posters seem to be saying is fine because it's usually done by girls.
Verbal bullying (not physical bullying) is the biggest predictor of suicide ideation in teens. And that's especially true in girls. Perhaps it's time teachers started to take girls' bullying behaviour more seriously.

Who’s minimising this bullying? Any decent school takes all bullying seriously and suspensions reflect that.

Suspensions at my school that I can recall over the last year include:
-cyber-bullying (a boy threatening another boy online)
-punching (girl punching another girl)
-many cases of disruption and rudeness in class (all boys)

The denial on here by some about the fact that boys are the main cause of disruption and bad behaviour is staggering.
I can only imagine that they are the parents of such boys!
The stats speak for themselves. Deny and deflect all you want!
when your not so little darlings leave high school and go out in to the real world, nobody will be enabling or mollycoddling them!

Tbh the minimising and excusing on this thread seems to be coming from those who just don’t want to except that boys behave worse than girls.

We’ve had:

• it’s schools’ fault for being set up for girls (wtf?)


• the statistics must be that way because schools suspend for the wrong reasons


• girls are sneaky and mean and poor boys are being penalised for sorting things out sensibly with their fists


• stop talking about “boys” as a group as it’s unfair.

Maybe, just maybe, boys behave worse in school because men behave much worse in society and get away with it 🤷‍♀️