Asses the Significance of School Factors on the Differential Progress of Boys and Girls.

Gender and differential achievement is a major factor that influences how well people do in school. In the 1980s sociologists spoke about how girls are underachieving due to education being controlled and dominated by men, (Spender, 1983) but more recently years there have been worries that it is the boys who are falling behind. In recent statistics it is shown that girls are gaining better results at GCSE and also are more likely to go on to higher education. The curriculum has also become very gender bias, for example certain subjects are seen to be for either boys or girls. For instance girls tend to go for communication subjects such as English and Sociology whereas boys tend to go for technical ones such as Maths and Physics. It is said by many sociologists that the different achieving levels can be due to factors occurring in the school.

Firstly boys may be underachieving due to the feminisation of education, more often than no there is few male role models inside the school environment which does not set a good example for males as they see education as feminine. For instance Melanie Phillips (2002) talks about how society in general is becoming much more feminist, which is why boys find education less easy to engage with and they begin to associate success with femininity which can cause an upsurge in anti school subcultures. Also it is said that teachers generally have lower expectations of boys. These teacher expectations may lead to negative labelling which could lead to a self fulfilling prophecy of poor behaviour. Also it is said that the way of teaching has become more feminist which can cause males to not get along with teachers or understand as well as the girls in the class may. Also it is known that to boys reading is often seen to be ‘uncool’ or