Girls, boys and school
It may be useful to view current concerns about boys' education in the context of Australia's recent educational history for girls:
- Up to the mid 1970s in Australia, more boys than girls completed high school.
- In 1972 there were two males for every female in tertiary education.
- In 1975 the Girls, Schools and Society report cited four areas of clear difference between boys' and girls' participation and outcomes (p. 154):
- Lower participation by girls in post-compulsory school
- Girls' subject choices were more limiting
- Lower full-time education participation at every social level by females 16-20 years
- Males strongly outnumbering females in every sector of post-school education
- Girls' retention rates increased substantially throughout the 1970s. According to the Commonwealth Schools Commission (1984:6) this was due in part to 'a narrowing range of alternatives as the job market for female juniors declined (and) changing social attitudes towards education and career needs for females'.
- Girls increased their use of school dramatically during the second half of last century. While boys strongly outnumbered girls in senior secondary schooling in the early 1950s, by the mid 1990s girls formed the majority. Over these decades, male enrolments increased by eight to one, while female enrolments increased by sixteen to one. (Teese et al. 1995:3)
- The National Policy for the Education of Girls in Australian Schools (1987) placed strong emphasis on getting more girls into maths and science. While this broadened the choices of some (mostly middle class) girls, there has been no parallel push for boys to expand their post-compulsory studies beyond traditional fields. (Collins et al. 1996)
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Curriculum change over time new window 47k  traces patterns of subject selection by Queensland students over the last decades of the twentieth century.
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In examining questions of boys and girls at school an awareness of history helps us to put current issues in context. Investigating gendered differences at school provokes us to reflect on our teaching practice and act to encourage more and better participation and achievement by all students.
Such reflection and action are the focus of much current work in Education Queensland, including QSE 2010, Literate futures, QSRLS, Framework for Students at Educational Risk, New Basics and The Teaching of Reading.
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