Girl / Boy Divide - any ideas why?

[IamnotStiller]

Just had a closer look at our local comprehensive's statistics showing that girls perform much better in every single subject (including maths and science). Is this normal? DS goes to a very good primary where boys and girls perform the same (in his years more boys are in top sets than girls). Does anybody know if something drastic happens when they go to senior school?

Yes I think it happens in most schools - not sure what happens to cause it. Hormones? Peer pressure? Teaching and assessment in a style which favours girls?

At DCs school the are two boys to every girl in the top band in year 10 and DD says there are more boys than girls in top set in year 8.

Girls outperform boys in English from age 7. They are more successful than boys at every level by the time they take their GCSEs. So what you are seeing at your local comprehensive is perfectly normal.

Beyond age 16 girls tend to turn away from subjects such as maths and science, even if they do well in those subjects at GCSE. Also, in A and AS level there tends to be a much wider spread of scores for boys than for girls - in other words, most of the top performers will be boys and most of the poorest performers will also be boys.

There has been a lot of research into this but the reasons for these differences in performance are unknown.

I find this interesting.
It seems to have changed since I was at school in the early 1970s. The boys then achieved better results than the girls. The exam system was very different of course but the boys seemed more motivated than the girls IIRC.
There were no controlled assessments and no course work. My DS1 is in Year 10 and thankfully he is very well motivated but he has a definite preference for exams and tests rather than continuous assessment.

There is also huge peer pressure on boys not to be seen to work hard at school, it makes me . I'll never forget him coming home in tears because he'd been teased for getting top marks in Maths.

Thank you for the replies - as DS1 will be heading for secondary school next year (local comp has an outstanding OFSTED but is our last choice) I am a bit concerned about this, especially as I know a few boys who had excellent GCSE result and then bombed at A-levels, which makes me wonder if only an A or A* will give children a reasonable chance of doing ok at A-levels.

As I am not British and my education took place in Europe I find it all very much of a minefield (if that's the right word for it) .

I teach in the Student Support dept of a large secondary school, so I exclusively teach pupils with literacy problems. In Year 7, I teach 32 kids and only 5 of them are girls. I have no girls in my Yr 11 group at all.

I think it's a mixture of factors, social, environmental and relating to how their brains work. I have a dd and a ds and "school" type activities such as reading and writing seem to come so much more naturally to dd.

I'd second LC200 - two main isses are in play.

Girls brains have been found to develop at a slightly different rate compared to boys(better than, not worse than), so they invariably score higher on the type of tasks most school subjects are.

Then there is the later peer group issues of it's not cool to be clever that pulls boys back from being a 'geek' etc.

This is why some schools run single sex lessons - boys can take 'cissy' subjects as they might have described them, without being picked on and girls can take science, IT, Maths subjects without similar bitching from other girls.

The research is out there, but schools don't like to talk about it too much.

Don't knwo whether this is relevant, but it interests me. Dd goes to a girl's grammar. The boy's grammar is half a mile away, has an identical catchment and selection process - but the boys' results are better than the girls'. And in all subjects - not just the traditional boy-y ones.

Same here - two boys grammar schools perform very well (higher in the ranking than the girl's ones). There is also a comprehensive on our list where the divide is not so big (focus on modern languages).