Gareth Southgate: we need to teach boys differently to girls to get the best out of them

[WarriorN]

Gareth Southgate: We need to teach boys differently to girls to get best out of them https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgp5g34kzpo

interesting article …

No they're not.

It’s well-known that as a cohort boys and girls benefit from different teaching styles and perform better (and worse) under different testing regimes.
Again, why does the education system treat all students the same, with the one grade at GCSE / A Levels, etc. I would like to see a grade for coursework and another grade for exam result. It would tell you much more about the person.

Not sure I rated him as a football manager, but he’s been spot on with his campaigning around the dangers of young boys and role models

I know a bright lad who has gone into a trade because he is looking at uni and AI and doesn't see much of a future in traditional middle class careers.

He's working crazy hours but earning really well. He knows putting in the hours now mean he will get a supervisor role pretty quickly and that's his plan.

He comments on the other young lads he works with and how they are dicks and the culture is poor in terms of behaviour generally.

He will do well but he has to put in the effort and put up with the idiots in the short-term.

The head of BlackRock said a few months ago about smart young people not going into professions like law in the future because there just isn't going to be the jobs or high incomes and that trades will be safer and better paid.

With this in mind, we are going to see effectively gentrification of trades and a massive cultural shift in these industries I suspect.

It's scary, but Gareth's program needs to also address this reality too. Where did all the boys who once upon a time would have been labourers on farms or down the pits or working in manufacturing go? It's customer service and delivery drivers. The issue is only going to get worse I suspect as jobs are squeezed.

Same old bullshit.
The education system was DESIGNED for boys. Girls weren’t even allowed to go. And when they were allowed to go, their education was initially less academic / less sitting around/ more active. Eventually girls got an equal right and access to the education boys were getting. It was in no way designed for girls.
The difference is societal expectations of the two sexes. I don’t know if there’s been any studies to confirm, but it seems boys are far more likely to have more screen time/ be allowed to play video games etc after school. Instead of that all important active play parents want to blame schools for! Expectations of boys has really deteriorated in many regards.

Maybe that is is because manual work has been so downgraded in status and so the only boys going into it are the ones who have no other routes or options available, and they tend to be the 'basic' and uneducated ones.

Skilled trades with proper apprenticeships with time served crafsmen and tradesmen need to be brought back. Working with your hands and building and making things is a very worthwhile occupation; and you can earn a very good living at it if you are any good.

It is difficult now to find skilled tradesmen. Plasterers that cannot plaster curved ceilings or architectural features ( can only plaster in straight lines); decorators who can't and won't do walllpapering; very few stone masons around, only bricklayers etc

You're overreaching for extremes.
Children can learn and they can learn in response to all sorts of things - being whipped and caned is an extreme example.

Children will never learn if they are not given the opportunity to learn, and that's one of the negatives about gender stereotyping: 'boys will be boys' and 'girly girls' limit the full development of an individual child, who may or may not want to run around on a muddy football pitch/dress up as a princess/neither/both.

A child can learn to sit still and pay attention without the threat of punishment - I am living proof of that, and I expect the majority of posters are too, we all went to school and learnt to sit quietly at certain times, not speak at certain times, to use our indoor voice at certain times, and then to run around like a wild thing - but only at certain times.

It was just a process of self-regulation and socialisation, and on the whole it was a positive experience, it meant that I was becoming 'a big girl' instead of a 'baby' and that was something to be proud of.
I was never threatened with being whipped or caned - did that happen to anybody on here, I wonder?

Probably not, but we all learnt self-regulation anyway, and all grew up into the wonderful well-adjusted members of society we are today

1. Many of the "fundamental" differences are probably just statistical ones. What works best for most boys doesn't necessarily work best for all boys. Some will do best under a system that generally works better for girls. We don't want to be forcing people into sex-stereotype boxes.

1. The system is basically designed for boys, as others have said. Maybe it was designed badly, but there is a popular narrative that education worked great until they started trying to accommodate girls too, and we need to combat that.

1. It's always "let boys run around more", never promoting a positive ideal of masculinity. Working hard and obeying orders used to be considered masculine virtues (look at soldiers, who were considered the most manly men of all). We've somehow decided to get rid of that. If we must treat the sexes differently, at least give boys something positive to aim for, rather than just telling them "boys can't sit still" and acting all shocked when they never amount to anything.

Our education system was never designed as such. The system that worked for boys 50 years ago has evolved significantly. The evidence of this evolution is boys used to perform significantly better than girls and now that has reversed.
Boys can sit still and focus and many do but to get the best out of boys - and many girls - this needs to be surrounded with focused additives. These activities can be as simple as walking to school as @RedToothBrush pointed out.
When educating boys we are failing and this is also true, and compounded by, the way many boys are parented. It isn’t either or, it’s both.

Of course boys can sit still. Including those with ADHD. They have to learn to do it and they have to have the expectation that they can do it. If they are told they can't and excused they don't learn.

Management strategies for ADHD include distraction and refocusing energy at other time or in other directions. So sit still with a fidget toy mixed with understood times of when it is appropriate to move around.

Let's face it, if a man with ADHD wants to fly to the USA then he's going to have to be able to manage sitting still for hours if there's turbulence. You don't hear of grown men saying they can't fly because they have ADHD and can't sit still for that long do you?!

Of course boys can sit still. Including those with ADHD. They have to learn to do it and they have to have the expectation that they can do it. If they are told they can't and excused they don't learn.

Management strategies for ADHD include distraction and refocusing energy at other time or in other directions. So sit still with a fidget toy mixed with understood times of when it is appropriate to move around.

Let's face it, if a man with ADHD wants to fly to the USA then he's going to have to be able to manage sitting still for hours if there's turbulence. You don't hear of grown men saying they can't fly because they have ADHD and can't sit still for that long do you?!

This is such a good point.

So many people sticking their oar in who clearly haven't spent 5 minutes in a classroom in the last 30 years. Schools have literally never been more dynamic and tried harder to engage pupils' interests.

It's weird that people are only criticising the 'sit down quietly and learn' style of teaching now that girls are doing better - for the hundreds of years a far more regulated and restrictive style of teaching was the norm and nobody was bothered or thought it was unfair when it was boys and men benefitting.

If anything following the logic of 'until recently educational outcomes were better for boys' should result in going back to far stricter teaching - Victorian style sitting in silence for hours or Elizabethan rote chanting Latin out loud. Strangely Southgate doesn't seem to be recommending that!

But yes, what are men going to do about it? The easiest thing if they actually wanted to take ownership and help the men of the future would be to start working as teachers - be the change you want to see, etc. Yet it's currently very much a female dominated profession, so, yeah, sorry, I see a man with no qualifications and direct experience in a profession pontificating on what a largely female workforce are doing wrong, quite insulting, actually.

If Angela Raynor or Adele started opining about everything wrong with men's football and how they thought it should be changed, would everyone treat their opinions with such reverence? Or would they say stick in your own lane, love?

Don't be dat! Gareth Southgate is perfectly entitled to comment on general principles as he sees them - based on his own observations. It is not about men versus women.....or it shouldn't be. Andrew Flintoff did a really good series of programmes in recent times, trying to set up cricket teams in deprived areas.....including girls's teams, and he found there were general differences between teaching girls and teaching boys.

Boys do tend to do better with male teachers and positive male role models and unfortunately not all schools have many, or even any, male teachers at primary level anymore. When I was at primary school in the early 1970s there were quite a few male teachers - not so much at infant level, but certainly at junior level.

Of course, it is also good for girls to have positive male role models and teachers. My favourite teachers at primary were always men, and that is definitely the case for my granddaughter now who has been fortunate enough to attend a school which has an equal number of male and female teachers.

All this nonsense that the "education system was designed for boys" etc.

50 years ago the education system was designed so that most children would leave at the age of 14 (particularly boys) and go into a manual labour profession with an apprenticeship. It wasn't designed to keep boys who weren't academically interested in school throughout their teenage years.

It may have been designed for boys a century ago, but it was designed for a certain type of boy.

As others have said there is too much sex stereotyping here, believing that there's a certain type of boy. Even Southgate experienced stereotypes in football as he was judged too middle-class to be a footballer and was told to be an estate agent instead.

No wonder so many of the quiet boys end up with gender dysphoria with this sort of stereotyping.

Of course boys can sit still. Including those with ADHD. They have to learn to do it and they have to have the expectation that they can do it. If they are told they can't and excused they don't learn.

Management strategies for ADHD include distraction and refocusing energy at other time or in other directions. So sit still with a fidget toy mixed with understood times of when it is appropriate to move around.

Let's face it, if a man with ADHD wants to fly to the USA then he's going to have to be able to manage sitting still for hours if there's turbulence. You don't hear of grown men saying they can't fly because they have ADHD and can't sit still for that long do you?!

In Victorian times and even 50 years ago, children left school at a much younger age, so the children that didn't like it left!

You have to target the right group of boys. Academic boys do extremely well in school and don't struggle to keep up with girls. Girls outperform boys overall, but boys actually outperform girls at the top A level grades.

Love all the people on this thread complaining that men need to take the lead on this in response to a man trying to offer leadership.

I think he’s right. I also think that schools should be offering more physical opportunities to both sexes - not just running around playing football but physical work of all kinds. Not because most kids are going to end up with physical jobs- they probably won’t- but because much of both physical and mental development is rooted in the body.

DD is at a strict school which is something like 65% boys. Parents deliberately send boys there more due to the strict approach, which does seem to be working from my observation. They are not allowed to get away with bad behaviour. Good behaviour is rewarded and encouraged. When I've been to the school the boys have been respectful and polite. The school has a high exclusion rate and there have been complaints about it because of this.

I do agree with the physical activity side of things. One thing DDs school does is make the kids do school chores rather than always getting staff to do it. I think this is good for them. Even though they complain. They could probably do more to burn off all that excess teenage energy.

One thing I think is a problem in other schools including primary schools my children have been in is that there is a lot of excusing of behaviour problems in boys at a young age. Maybe throttling someone IS due to an 'unmet need' but there's probably bog all likelihood of that need being met in non tick box way in a mainstream setting and not disciplining that sends a message it's ok to throttle people to all the other children. Ultimately giving the impression that everything can be explained away by SEND isn't preparing children for life and isn't kind (not least to the children with SEND who don't do such things).

I won't be drawn into whether the system was designed for boys: I'll just point out that in the 1950s when I took the 11+ girls had to achieve higher marks than boys to get into grammar schools. This was because the system wanted to achieve roughly a 50/50 ratio of boys/girls. If entrance had been solely by results it would have been nearer to a 40/60 split in favour of girls. Yet we are often told that girls thrive under conscientious course work and boys under sudden death exams. Make of that what you will.

Nothing much new under the sun really....

How much has education changed over the centuries? My understanding is that it was always sitting in a classroom doing lessons, taking exams? Perhaps there was more outdoor time and I do think this has been cut and is an issue (for both sexes). So it hasn’t really changed that much, biggest change is girls being educated the same as boys).

Schools as we know them now haven't even existed for two centuries for the vast majority of young people. So there's been a huge change in the way we educate young people. Only a tiny fraction of everyone who's ever lived went to school.

Such an interesting point. My OH is a painter and decorator and he says the same; outdated sexist and racist views from nearly everyone on every contract. An ex teacher friend who has moved into working for a gas company told me that he cannot believe the casual racism and sexism of the men he works alongside. The polar opposite of a school environment.

Definitely this.

Part of the problem is that lots of kids will do well in a stricter environment with high expectations but they don't have this environment because someone makes excuses why they can't have that environment.

And the kids who don't do well in that environment don't have anywhere else suitable to go anyway. So they just disrupt all the kids who would be otherwise fine and cause a huge amount of stress in the process.

The SEN issue is a big fat elephant in the room no one really wants to talk about. It wouldn't surprise me if a huge part of the programme ultimately comes down to it being less about boys and more about SEN provision (or lack of) and how girls don't have the same issues because girls with SEN needs are socialised differently which means they ultimately conform better.

Add onto that all this education until 18 nonsense really is unhelpful for a significant number of kids for this reason, because they are not getting other opportunities they would have in the past. There's simply not technical colleges in most places (and those that exist are in centralised locations meaning those who would benefit most probably have the most accessibility issues). In the past these kids would have taken on manual and labouring jobs within the local community within walking distance.

There's also not things like paper rounds for kids anymore. So there's little chance to get experience or prove yourself that way. Even volunteering is difficult if you are under 18 now because lots of places won't take on kids.

Well we’ve seen on this very thread posters insisting boys need to roughhouse, be allowed to run around, can’t sit still etc, play fighting helps them to learn their strength boundaries (!) etc..

as long as people think like that, we will have boys who think that being disruptive, fighting in school and needing to run about is normal. They’ll learn they don’t need to listen when being told to sit down, shut up, listen and you know, learn.

meanwhile girls are told no, they can’t run about, they need to sit nicely in lessons.

then people wonder why girls do better.

My husband always says that there is no excuse for rough play or fighting. It’s a civilised society and whether you think it’s natural, or testosterone, or whatever, boys can still stop. They have control over their bodies and their actions.

i mean these people that excuse boys behaviour. The desire for sex is natural in males, but we insist they don’t act on that. They’ll learn can also not act on the need to use their strength, not to fight, and not exhibit behaviours that aren’t appropriate in a learning environment.

Its not an extreme. You used strict schooling as your example but that strict schooling was at a time corporal punishment was common, and that is how children were forced into compliance. Besides you can get kids to sit still but that doesn't mean they are learning. There's a reason why the phrase ' you can take a horse to water' exists.

But this is all by the by unless we have boundaries in what we are talking about. Early years in this Britain is dreadful. There are other countries who think we are cruel. I've worked in both 'normal' and (the very few) exceptional early years settings so I know first hand the difference and active, interesting engaging environment makes to learning. Kids start school far too early in this country,

Junior schools largely have shit playgrounds that are barren deserts. There is a lot that can be done to increase both the enjoyment and educational value of play grounds for children. At times, I've literally seen children wandering around doing nothing in the playgrounds as there is nothing to do.

Our education system is far too academic. That only suits the most academic children. We need far more variety in our education system, both of the offer and methods of learning.

As for have I seen anyone caned or whipped? No, but I went to school in the 80s and on more than one occasion I saw teachers physically assault children. As in beat them up. And that wasn't allowed even then, but there were no repercussions for the teachers. No one would have even thought of reporting them and I doubt anyone would have been interested if they had been reported.