Livid

[threesixnine]

So my Yr 11 daughter has come home today. The school has decided to no longer have a Head Boy and Head Girl and instead 2 'Head Pupils'
Today the winners were announced.

Yep you guessed it. 2 Head Boys

I am flipping fuming. She's in sixth form next year and said what's the point of even running for it.

Why is that an issue? The two best students get the awards

That's how the corporate world works - you don't get a role based on your gender

Actually, many men do. I'm a corporate lawyer and have been working in that role for well over 20 years. The number of times I have seen really quite mediocre men progress, because there is a presumption that they are competent, while extremely good women have to prove themselves over and over again is shocking. These beliefs start to be formed in childhood and that is precisely why schools need to ensure that girls are visibly in leadership positions too.

While I think the world has gone mad right now, I don’t have an issue with this. It should be the right pupils for the role rather than picking someone because they have to kind of thing.

To be honest I can’t be bothered with all that preppy Head Boy/Girl/Pupil nonsense anyway.

I think that if you think it is nonsense anyway then it's understandable that you don't care too much.
But what if it was something you cared about?
Would you remove male/female awards in acting, sport, music, etc?
And if you did, would it bother you if the awards were always given to men?

I would be surprised if in any school, there were only exactly 2 pupils who could do a good job of being head pupil.
And I do also think it's important for girls to see girls leading. If they get the idea in school that two boys were the best candidates, then it doesn't really give them much hope for going for leadership roles later on.

Whenever you remove the boundaries it's ALWAYS the girls that lose out though. Work, sports, being sexually assaulted.....During a recent RE / ethics class she was the only one (including the teacher) to stand up against a boy arguing women should be paid less then men as they're not as good at their jobs.
Surely now more than ever we need to have strong female role models. Protected.

A part of the responsibility for these roles is to represent students and to ensure their voices are heard.

Hiw can a boy really represent girls? They know nothing about what it is to be a girl and the issues they face.

They are also a peer mediator to younger pupils. Again how can a child understand the complexities of being the opposite sex?

One of mine was head girl many moons ago. One of the younger girls reported her abuse to my dd. Had there been 2 boys, the girl wouldn’t have said a thing. She told my dd because of the trust my dd had earned, similar age etc. The poor girl was crossed examined brutally about how she disclosed in court.

And let’s be honest just because it happens in the cooperates world is a puss poor excuse.

These things will not change if we continue to normalise the obvious disparity. Older generations aren’t in a hurry to make changes. So it’s down to the younger generations who shouldn’t be indoctrinated into the old boys club ways.

School child are our future leader. Future board members, scientists etc.

We should be encouraging them that no sex is better than the other sex.

You have no way of knowing that. Nor do I, but it is surprising how often in life generally the best person for the job just happens to be male.

I think their mistake was in having just two head pupils. DD's school switched to head students, but had about six. I don't remember the balance, but definitely a mix, including non-binary. If you have more, you can have "at least one male and one female" but otherwise go on merit.

Yup. And if the best person for the job happens to be a girl it is because of 'quotas'.

Or because the job requires some level of menial skills.

I think both boys were better than any of the girls .I think it's a lot fairer to have the 2 best students without considering which genitalia they have

In my son's mixed secondary school it was always girls picked for almost. absolutely everything. Boys were massively under represented. Wrong as it was I didn't raise it.

No they won’t. Though it’s possible one of the boys will be calling himself a Theodora next year.

I must admit, I thought the whole point of having 1 Head Girl and 1 Head Boy in a mixed school was so that ALL the younger pupils had a role model, someone they could look up to and hope to emulate (in theory, at least), and possibly go to to confide in as a previous PP suggested.

I don't see how that works if both the head pupils are of the same sex, either sex, or am I missing something?

No they won’t. Though it’s possible one of the boys will be calling himself a Theodora next year.

I assumed that was the case this year. Op, are they two boys with one identifying as female or just two bog standard boys? Either way I'd be livid too.
Who'd have thought a 100 years later we'd be fighting for our rights all over again eh?

No. As far as I know it's two boys.
Essentially from what my daughter tells me there's no way any of the boys would vote for a girl. The two boys that won did a funny skit that all the boys voted for. The girls vote was Split between the candidates .. first past the post yadda yadda yadda.
So regardless of what the girls said in their speeches it was overshadowed by the funny boys skit.
Democratic.. yeah fair enough.
The right thing? I know what I think.

Well, there you have it. That's the real world, in a microcosm. The boys have a totally different agenda, they are a simple hive mind (I have a son, I've seen it with my own eyes) and the girls - far more intelligent and considered and hardworking (I also have a daughter, and have seen it with my own eyes) - lost out to a bunch of clowns. This is going to happen to your daughter again and again and again.

What she does now, and how she reacts to this 'injustice' could shape the way she goes into the adult world in a couple of years.

My approach with my DD is to not share my personal opinions but to let her reach her own conclusions. She has to figure out for herself whether she's going to beat them or join them. It's not my life, I won't always be around to help her deal with the consequences. Simultaneously, I ensure I point out to my DS what a bleeding idiot he and his friends can be at times when there are serious issues on the table. They're all good kids; they just don't see it necessarily.

I'd guess this has been done for the benefit of trans pupils, and as usual its the biological women and girls who dip out.

That's a problem with the selection process, then. Some schools avoid going with it being purely down to a pupil vote, tempering it with a teacher vote as well, or a two-stage process so "popularity" only plays a role in one stage. If you've got strong gender polarisation, the number of candidates of each gender is also a problem.

(I used to have to hold elections for my tutor group's school council rep. Nobody told me what the voting system had to be, so I used to decide after I saw who was standing. If it was one boy and three girls, giving everyone two votes stopped the boy automatically winning.)

Thanks for the replies everyone. Some good information garnered. I'll chat it through with her when she comes home.

The corporate world is not something to aspire to replicate. Women are under represented in so many sectors and at so many levels and paid less for doing the same job. By your logic we shouldn’t tackle misogyny in schools because girls just need to get used to it.

OP you are right to be angry about this. It’s the gender neutral Brit awards all over again. It just leads to worse representation for women.

You need to ask yourself why there was a head girl in the first place.

No doubt this is another ill thought out policy to appease gender neutral people rather than just introducing a new category. Getting rid of women and girls in the name of inclusivity.

Most decent school leaders mitigate this by ensuring that students get a say but school leaders and teachers also contribute to the decision about student leadership teams. This is a failing of school leadership and I hope they learn from it.

@SpaceMonitor At best you have misread my post, at worst you have completely misconstrued and misunderstood it Most odd.

Yep. And to avoid trans discrimination, which should not happen, people who are trans identifying should absolutely be able to stand for election within their biological sex. The issue has nothing to do with identity and everything to do with biology.

@threesixnine hi OP- any update about this .. interested in school response to any complaint/concerns you made. Thanks