Boys: getting it right: report on the inquiry into the education of boys

This document reports on the inquiry begun in 2000 by the Employment, Education and Workplace Relations Committee into the social, cultural and educational factors affecting the education of boys in Australian schools, particularly in relation to their literacy needs and socialisation skills in the early and middle years of schooling. The inquiry also examined the strategies which schools have adopted to help address these factors, those strategies which have been successful and scope for their broader implementation or increased effectiveness. In 2001, the name of the Committee was changed and the Standing Committee on Education and Training readopted the inquiry in 2002. Evidence suggests that boys are not achieving as well as girls across a broad spectrum of measures of educational attainment and that this is a pattern which is reflected in almost all other OECD countries. The key findings include: (1) in terms of post-school outcomes, young men have better access to full-time employment than young women but they are also more likely to be unemployed. Young men are also less likely to be undertaking higher education but they are far more likely to be involved in employment-based training such as apprenticeships; (2) a range of labour market, social and education policy changes have impacted on the educational experience of boys and girls but appear to have more adversely affected boys; (3) in terms of curriculum and pedagogy, boys are more likely than girls to respond negatively or overtly to irrelevant curriculum and poor teaching; (4) boys do not perform as well as girls in literacy tasks; (5) the quality of the relationships between students, teachers and parents is crucial to achieving optimal educational outcomes for all students, and this is particularly true for boys. The inquiry concluded that while some educational authorities and many individual schools and teachers are responding effectively to these issues, approaches are still too fragmented. The Committee recommends that the Commonwealth review the adequacy of published national education data and that the Commonwealth and States and Territories work towards better coordination of approaches and policy frameworks. A number of recommendations are made in the areas of labour market, social and policy change, curriculum and pedagogy, literacy and numeracy, and schools, teachers and role models. Show less