Argh, this is why I'll never vote Conservative

[HeadFairy]

poor loves can't be the main bread winners and it's our fault!

Now i've seen interesting stuff about schools that use special male techniques on boys - active things like treasure hunts integrated into classes to get fab results.

Would love my boys to be able to access that.

The reason bys don't do well from what I recall is that education is in a female based model; plenty of siting down, etc etc etc. Boys need a dramatic reworking (obv not true of all).

Its not just this crud the Tories fall down on- on the Welsh news today theres talk of a dossier they released on Rhodri Morgan. Now the political stuff is up for debate but did they really have to include a discussion of his dress sense?

I feel fairly certain 'removing votes from your rivals: the trinny and susannah approach' isn't a module in the politics dept. at Bristol?

I've heard other mums say the same ie that they wish their boys could be taught in a more 'boy friendly' way. Fair enough, but how does this translate into academic learning and success?

Surely the boisterous stuff should be more of a social/ physical education and wouldn't work so well in teaching, say, maths.

The thing is - most jobs that pay a decent wage do require a lot of sitting down. And until the real world can find a way of rewarding grown men for larking about and playing outside (or the adult equivalent of same) then surely we just have to keep trying to engage boys academically?

I'm sure that girls too would love to have treasure hunts etc but this sounds like early years learning, and wouldn't apply at exam level.

We keep hearing that traditional methods used to favour boys, but those methods used an even more rigid sitting down policy then modern teaching.

Re the whole 'boys need more physical activity thing', I saw an interesting piece of research recently - press release here.

Briefly, children aged 6-7 were given a device to wear that recorded their levels of physical activity. On average, boys recorded 26 minutes of exercise a day, girls 22 minutes. So both are showing startlingly low levels of activity, and the difference between boys and girls is 15% - not insignificant, but not huge enough to justify a 'dramatic reworking' of an education system presumed to be biased against boys.

I can't say any more as I don't want to lose my anonymity, but I have written a lot about the benefits of single sex education for boys.

Some articles on the subject (culled from lefty Observer and the Torygraph, so it's not party political!)

www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/apr/27/schools.uk

www.telegraph.co.uk/education/main.jhtml?xml=/education/2003/04/01/tencoed30.xml

The Independent:

"Some schools believe that their experiments in teaching single sex have improved boys' performance
For example, the Pingle School, a comprehensive in Swadlincote, Derbyshire, first introduced single sex teaching two years ago because of concerns about a class of 12-year-olds who were behaving badly. The year group was segregated for 70 per cent of their lessons. After a term, 85% of boys and 82% of girls said they preferred being taught this way. Behaviour improved 'phenomenally' according to Mike Mayers, the headteacher, and 45% of the year group are now expected to achieve five grade A to Cs at GCSE, compared to a forecast of only 29% when the monitoring started. With monitoring by Loughborough University, the school now segregates all its 11 - to 14-year-olds for 80% of lessons and GCSE students are taught in single-sex classes for English, maths and science."

Whatever the reason, it seems to work!

D -thanks for links i asked as i herad a radio article suggesting that boys were disenfranchised and overlooked.

i was V interested. wondered what it was based upon. the article went on to state some parents,feelings boys are overlooked, chose single sex schools (apparently boys do better in SS school)

dottoressa - our local school has allegedly had similar results from seating pupils boy/ girl in all classes. it just prevents the showing off and bigging up that goes on as each sex tries to get themselves noticed by the other one, in pairs or little groups. of course it doesn't work if you've got a whole class of unruly kids, but the seating plans are v carefully worked out lol.

Oh really, all this 'waaah, it's so unfair that they expect little Algernon to sit down and pay attention at school' is so daft.

Plenty of boys did jolly well indeed in the '50s and '60s when schools were much stricter.

The key social change since then has been to remove SOME discrimination against girls. We no longer have blatant injustice such as funding fewer grammar school places for girls across the board, so girls had to get higher pass marks than boys if they wanted to get into a grammar.

Clearly there is still a strong vein of misogyny in society that makes some people protest when girls do well. Because female success is automatically unfair to boys, apparently.

Don't know why the people worrying about boys are panicking, frankly, didn't the Equalities Commission say at current rates of progress it would be another 178 years or something before we got equal pay? Being born male is still a huge advantage.

nonetheless it is interesting to explore apparent disparity and research into educational outcimes.

bit dismissive too say oh just because tarquil wont sit down. ah but girls are disadvantaged too.yes they are.surely all disparities and potential institutionalised stereotype are with looking at?cant just say oh lads always win, why bother

But Edam education was much different in the 5o's; also kids got moe exercise outside school- walkin g there for a start!
'Surely the boisterous stuff should be more of a social/ physical education and wouldn't work so well in teaching, say, maths. '

Ok- maths:
orienteering

treasure hunt where the solution co-ordinates are hidden as the answers to equations

any kind of engineering type project is based on maths- so integrating those would be easy

etc etc etc

I know boys need to learn to sit- that's obvious but there's a long time between 5 years old and 18 and no eason why a single sex school couldn't do that in stages.

And Edam when did I ever waaaah? There's a world of difference between wanting and getting, I know that as much as anyone. Doesn't mean I wouldn't pay for it if I could, mind. Likewise if I had girls I would pay for that too. Obviously the boys are likely to earn more in the long run but that doesn't mean you don't want them to be able to access education more happily! After all who gets mroe? a plumber or a teacher? But which is likely to have the educational background that just might enable career chane and dream fulfilment?

It's all academic (in both senses LOL) but still worthy of discussion.