Schools Eliminate Gender Learning Gaps for Boys at No Extra Cost or Funding.

Boys’ educational failure has been documented for years without a fix, yet six British schools closed the gap using only the budgets they already had.

Boys’ education is in global crisis: Boys are more likely than girls to repeat grades, fall behind and leave school for good. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization counts 140 million boys out of school, against 133 million girls.

The problem has been described for years without producing a remedy that schools can copy. Australia’s House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education is now examining why attainment differs between boys and girls.

International Council for Men and Boys (ICMB) Board Director David Maywald attended the inquiry’s first hearing, where members pressed federal education agencies to name programs with strong evidence of success. “The inability to point towards proven, scalable interventions was striking,” Maywald wrote.

Schools That Solved It Independently

Six secondary schools in the United Kingdom (UK) have done it, using the budgets and staff they already had. Their methods are documented in Yes, He Can!, published by Routledge on August 3, and in free guidance online. Author Mike Bell led the research for the UK’s 2023 parliamentary inquiry into boys reputed “underachievement.” Finding no proven solutions, he went to the schools that had already succeeded and recorded what they did.

The schools acted independently — they didn’t know one another and didn’t read the same research, yet arrived at nearly the same approach. For example, Balcarras School in Cheltenham had a gap above 20% in English and mathematics at its worst, in 2006, and none by 2022. Heathfield Community College closed a 25% gap in the same subjects and has held it for three years.

The six schools’ interventions include:

• Literacy first. Weak reading and vocabulary were treated as an urgent, solvable problem and addressed in the first year of secondary school.
• Equal standards. Internal observation exposed staff rewarding weaker work from boys and punishing them more harshly than girls for the same offence. Several schools found the bias endemic, and unconscious.
• Visible role models. Older boys were placed in leadership and paired as tutors with younger boys falling behind.
• Reliable discipline. None of the schools call their systems strict. What they share is certainty and consistency, applied to both sexes.

Australia already has an example of its own. Balgowlah Boys Campus, a non-selective public school in Sydney, moved from seven points below comparable schools in standard senior English to nine points above them, crediting explicit teaching of writing and regular, actionable feedback.

Girls were not disadvantaged by these interventions. In no school did girls’ results fall as boys’ results rose. Maywald makes the same point. Improving boys’ attainment “isn’t about taking opportunities away from girls,” but about “ensuring that every Australian child has the opportunity to reach their full potential.”

A Policy Roadmap for Lawmakers

International Council for Men and Boys (ICMB) urges lawmakers to:

• Require educational attainment to be reported separately for boys and girls, school by school.
• Emphasise literacy screening and intervention as students enter secondary school.
• Require schools to audit reward and discipline records to eliminate unequal treatment of boys.

The International Council for Men and Boys (ICMB) is a non-governmental organisation working to end the 12 sex disparities that affect men and boys worldwide. The ICMB is a leader of the emerging global movement to address these disparities. Visit https://www.menandboys.net/ to find out more. Donations are welcome: https://www.menandboys.net/donate/

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