At Balcarras secondary school in Cheltenham, headteacher Dominic Burke felt the only way to tackle what used to be a 15pc gender gap in the GCSE results was to level with his students.
“We got the boys together en masse and said to them: ‘You’re going to underachieve. The girls are going to beat you hands down’. And then we showed them the evidence. Their ability profiles were the same. But we said the reality is girls are going to get better results than you and we challenge you to be the first year group to stop that. We called it the ‘effort challenge’.”
It worked. Competition and the offer of cold, hard cash was enough to encourage many to put the effort in. Boys who were judged to have done so received £20 at the end of term. The school managed to close the gender gap and a few years ago, the boys beat the girls for the first time.
“Competition does work I think, and it’s a good tactic for teaching because it becomes a rewarding experience to meet the challenge,” says Burke. “If you make something more engaging and enjoyable, people are more likely to do it.”
Healing
No survey of the state of boys and men in Britain today can ignore the changing ideas of masculinity.
Whereas men were once seen as breadwinners, American sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas point out that many women in poor US neighbourhoods have come to see them “as just another mouth to feed”. This is disorientating.
Yet perhaps the way to survive as a man in the job market of the future is to junk ideas of traditional masculinity altogether. Many of the jobs of the future will be in things like caring and education.
Reeves wants governments to spearhead a drive to get more men into health, education, administration, and literacy jobs – which he brands HEAL – just as they have ploughed efforts into getting more women into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics – or STEM roles.
Increasing the number of male teachers would also raise the number of role models for boys in class. Three-quarters of state school teachers are women, according to data published by the Department for Education.
The share of men working in state-funded nurseries is even lower, at just 14pc. Around 30pc of primary schools have no male teachers at all.
“I did actually get some funny looks when I first started,” says one male nursery worker who does not wish to be identified.
“Even now I tend to leave the cuddles to my female colleagues as I think there’s still a stereotype that any man who wants to work with young kids has to be some kind of pervert.”
Encouraging more men into these types of jobs would be no small undertaking. Perceptions that men are not suited to caring or creative professions are deep-seated.
Florence Nightingale, who in the 19th century established the principles of modern nursing, insisted that men’s “hard and horny” hands were “not fitted to touch, bathe and dress wounded limbs, however gentle their hearts may be”. The Royal College of Nursing did not even admit men as members until 1960.
Edward Davies, policy director at the Centre for Social Justice think tank, cautions: “It’s absolutely right to remove cultural, perceived and real barriers that keep men from certain careers, especially caring and teaching professions. But we also need to be careful not to pretend men and women are exactly the same.
“At a blunt population level women seem more interested in people and men in things. You would expect to see that reality play out in the jobs they do too. Imposing quotas or expectations that all professions should be evenly split between men and women will probably drive some people into careers they are not suited to.”
Fixing Britain’s boy problem may be harder than even experts think.
Additional reporting by Ben Butcher.
