You have to enjoy this.
The BBC reports that there have now been 30 years of UK exam results where girls have consistently out-performed boys.
I can’t claim the credit (or blame?) but I do remember when I joined the National Foundation for Education Research (NFER) in the early 1980s, that the future was in the air. At that time, boys pretty well out-performed girls in exams at every age. This is a massive shift that has lasted 30 years!
In the early 1980s, the people at NFER who were still designing and implementing the 11-plus exams for some areas happily told me that the 11-plus results were ‘adjusted’ behind the scenes, before being returned for Local Authorities to use them in allocating grammar school places.
Why? Well, there was a theory that because of differences in boys’ and girls’ maturity, with boys allegedly developing intellectually later than girls, the boys’ scores on the 11-plus had to be systematically ‘adjusted’, i.e. every single score for a boy was raised. That was for fairness, you understand. Later developers still deserved a grammar education. And the Local Authorities were quite happy with this idea because they usually had a lot more boys’ grammar places available than girls’.
For ‘adjusted’ scores, read ‘doctored’.
As the UK went through the 1980s and 1990s developing more and more external, objective testing at all ages (some at 5 and then a lot at 7, 11, 14, 16 and 18), the weight of evidence of girls’ sustained higher performance piled up. Year by year by year.
The doctoring had to stop partly because, once you started, you could never justify how much adjustment was needed later and you could never make the figures join up from end to end. Plus, nobody had any supporting research to back up the initial assumption.
Girls showed they could out-perform the boys at every single milestone. Even checks of performance at 21 and older failed to show any catch-up on the part of boys. Basically, one of the strongest predictors of future performance in any education dataset is past performance.
Forgive me for being a nerd, but I love the way data can do that to you. Given time, it can rip away the disguise and make you face the facts. Perhaps we should have worked it out sooner.
And perhaps, now, we can start to build a broader school system in the UK that finds authentic ways to help the lower-performers, the boys, stay engaged. And I don’t mean, change the testing so that it suits boys better! It’s much better to change the educational experience so boys and girls can both feel they have a stake.
Much more outdoor education, anyone?
