Examine the reasons for changes in the educational attainment of males

Examine the reasons for changes in the educational attainment of males

and females in recent years (20 marks)

For the past recent years girls have significantly outperformed boys

in educational attainment and this is due to a number of factors. The

GCSE results for 2000 and 2001 shows the degree to which the

percentage of girls achieving grades A*-C exceeded that of boys. In

2002, 62.4% of female GCSE entrants achieved grades A*-C, compared

with 53.4% of males. Research published in 2003 shows that the gap

between girls and boys widens as they grow older. The most recent

barrier which is being broken down is that of university entry. The

most recent official figures for a gender breakdown in university

admission are from 2001. These show that while 43% of all young

people entered higher education, the figure for girls was 46.7% and

for boys 40.4%

Joan Gannod drew a number of conclusions as to why this was. One

reason is for the ‘lad culture’ that resides in numerous schools. The

attitude that school is “uncool”, an anti-social culture working

against learning. Keith Shipman and Keith Hicks identified that the

presence of friends in a group make you work less. That boys saw

looking cool as being more important than being studious. Also, Paul

Willis identified that working class boys were much susceptible to

this as it was the middle class values that were prized in the

classroom via the hidden curriculum which influenced the boys into

working against the education system. Another theorist, Peter Woods

In The Divided School (1979) argued that boys are more concerned with

the approval of their peer group than the approval of their teachers.

Another further reason is the lack of role models for boys,

p...

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...he number of girls expressing professional career hopes

such as doctors, lawyers, scientists, etc. Sharpe has argued that

these changes in attitudes towards marriage and work are factors in

explaining why girls are performing better at school than they were

twenty years ago.

I think that the interactionist perspective for example, Peter Woods

is successful in theory, as he believes that it provides information

which could lead to better teaching and a reduction in conflict and

deviance within schools however this Marxist approach has its

limitations and its main focus is from a macro perspective and does

not appear to focus on each individual. The relative uniformity of

meanings that lie behind what counts as knowledge and ability,

suggests that such meanings are not simply constructed in the

classroom but rather they have a wider and fundamental basis.