Anyone else thinking what I'm thinking? Boys outperform girls at A Level

[musicalfrog]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c62707l4lwvo

It's the BBC. How do we know what they even mean by boys and girls?

I hate that I can't trust them.

I thought funding was simply per pupil or is that not the case?

Nope. Funding formula depends on region and NE consistently under funded compared to other regions plus large areas of huge deprivation and low aspiration that is just ignored as we are too far from London.
FYI The North doesn't stop at Manchester!

As per pp, I think regional disparities are the main concern, not whether it's boys or girls who perform better ( when the difference is only around 0.2% anyway).

If it's in any way reassuring, even though the field in schools' MIS and collected by the DfE said Gender, it was used to record Sex. The same field was corrected to Sex in the MIS systems last year and the DfE data records it correctly as Sex (in a separate field/column to the historical Gender, which is now blank, but that's a database mapping issue on their part, it doesn't change the fact that it's Sex recorded in both).

There is an optional setting in schools' MISs to record pronouns, but it's not compulsory to use it and it isn't collected in any census return or in the live links to the DfE. It's most definitely staying switched off here.

Therefore, the information held by the DfE regarding examination grades, as the exam boards' systems have to integrate fully with the DfE and MIS (otherwise nobody's getting their results), is all relating to Sex, not Gender Identity.

Education press is mainly around the regional divide and the disadvantage gap. Boys v girls is silly season mainstream press stuff.

One of the major reasons for more girls than boys going onto A-levels will be that boys don't get the grades at GCSE for progression to A-level. The main one is GCSE English Language - only two thirds of boys got a 4+ last year where over three quarters of girls did. If you don't get the 4+ in English you have to resit, affecting subject choices and will mean that you don't meet the grade entry requirements for a lot of A-levels.

Thanks noblegiraffe. So, perversely, this trumpeted ‘boys outperform girls at A level’ is largely an artefact of them underperforming at gcse?

Yes, pretty much - they're being filtered into more appropriate (possibly could be argued by those taking them as more interesting) qualifications that aren't A Levels, leaving only the strongly academically inclined, such as those who are very able in Maths, to take Maths.

There's also the aspect that achieving top grades in Maths requires a literacy level able to decode the questions to then remember/understand the Mathematical processes and apply these to answer them correctly - so again, this means that the smaller number of boys with literacy levels able to understand the questions are already higher ability in multiple areas.

It's like saying in a 1983 comprehensive of 200 kids 'Boys are better than girls at O Level' when the boys less likely to get the very highest grades and could well have difficulty reading had all been filtered off into CSEs along with the very lowest ability/dyslexic/persistently absent/ill girls.

CSE 1-4: 95 boys
CSE 1-4: 10 girls

O Level A: The 5 highest ability boys. So 100% of boys that took the exam achieved the highest grade.
O Level A: 4 girls. Only 4% of girls achieved the highest grade.
O Level ABCDENUX: 90 girls of all but the very lowest ability.

And yes, it is mixing the percentage calculations as well. But it makes the boys look better whether you're looking at just those five or the proportion of the cohort (5%), doesn't it?

Surely the absolute best outcome is one where girls and boys perform equally well across the subjects, which is more or less the case this year.

It is a tragedy working class boys, are so poorly served at GCSE, and this feeds all kinds of lifelong inequality, and creates the perfect breeding ground for problems which then spill over onto women and girls in return.

This yah boo ‘girls are better than boys’ stuff is unpleasant. I would like education to serve all children equally well, wherever they live, whatever their background and whatever their sex.

Any sources for your claims?

This.

The clue is in the word 'equality'

As I said, the archives of a major exam board, which are the old fashioned sort and not available to the public. No one ever saw fit to write about it in the press, as it wasn’t perceived as a problem.

Boys and girls results are similar in maths (though at the top end boys have always done better) but there is a massive difference in participation. Boys participate in maths in much greater numbers than girls. Interestingly, maths gets ever more popular as an A-level but - even if more girls are doing maths - more boys are also doing maths!

Boys are over-represented in maths A-level rather than girls being under-represented. Due to girls doing better than boys across the board at GCSE except in maths and sometimes physics, and because of the issue of more boys not getting that 4+ in English, girls have a much greater choice of A-levels available than boys.

I remember this. Both my brothers went to the local grammar. I did not. The pass mark was higher for girls in my local authority and also girls' results were adjusted down. (There were other factors, as I had a speech impediment which led to me being in the remedial reading group - one reason I know that when teachers say phonics disadvantages children with speech impediments they are misled - and when I changed schools this led me to be in the non-11+ stream. I remember hearing my teacher apologise to my DM that he had not pushed for me to be in the 11+ stream. Even so, apparently I only 'just' failed.)