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Evaluation & Research in Education

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Underachievement, failing youth and

moral panics
a
Emma Smith
a
School of Education, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston,
Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK

Available online: 10 Mar 2010

To cite this article: Emma Smith (2010): Underachievement, failing youth and moral panics,
Evaluation & Research in Education, 23:1, 37-49

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 Evaluation & Research in Education
Vol. 23, No. 1, March 2010, 37
49

Underachievement, failing youth and moral panics

Emma Smith*

School of Education, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK

(Received 27 July 2009; final version received 17 December 2009)

This paper considers contemporary ‘moral panics’ around the underachievement

of boys in school examinations in the UK and America. In the UK, in particular,
the underachievement of boys is central to current ‘crisis accounts’ about falling
standards and failing pupils. ‘Underachievement’ is a familiar word to those who
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work with young people, however, the term itself is not unproblematic. Indeed, for
such a widely reported phenomenon, it is perhaps surprising that different
perspectives as to the nature and importance of the concept exist. It is these
different perspectives on a seemingly well-established discourse, along with an
examination of the concept we call ‘underachievement’ that form the focus of this
paper. The importance of ensuring a fair and equitable schooling experience for
all students is implicit in many societies, and a consideration of current moral
panics surrounding the underachievement of boys provides a useful case study to
help us consider what it is that we can reasonably expect from our schools and
exactly which (if any) groups of young people are being let down by our education
system.
Keywords: accountability; achievement; equality

Introduction
Today, underachievement is a synonym for much that is perceived to be wrong in
today’s society, from low scores on international children’s reading tests to the social
consequences of underachievement, such as criminal behaviour, social exclusion, and
unsuccessful relationships and marriages (Bentley, 1998). Increased scrutiny of
examination performance as the most tangible outcome of schooling has led to
sections of the school population being labelled as failing or underachieving. The
emergence of sophisticated international comparative tests such as the Programme
for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Trends in International
Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) have enabled nations to look critically at
the achievement of their students in the international arena. This has led to many
nations re-examining their education systems in light of perceived failings in these
comparative assessments. In some countries, this has been used to further justify
dissatisfaction with the domestic school system and has led to accusations of
underachievement and a ‘crisis account’ of falling academic standards and failing
pupils (Francis & Skelton, 2005; Phillips, 1996).
In the USA, a long tradition of what has been perceived as mediocre
performance on international tests such as TIMSS, has contributed to a re-focusing

*Email: e.smith@bham.ac.uk

ISSN 0950-0790 print/ISSN 1747-7514 online

# 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/09500791003605102
http://www.informaworld.com
 38 E. Smith

of educational priorities away from policies that have attempted to resolve the
inequities faced by poorer children, for example by increasing access to education,
desegregating schools and reducing achievement gaps, towards ones concerned with
more testing, more accountability and market driven systems of school choice
(Orfield, 2000). Here, systems of high stakes testing epitomised by the ‘No Child Left
Behind’ (NCLB) legislation have been put in place in order to raise standards in
schools and to help propel the USA up the international education league tables
(Popham, 2004; West & Peterson, 2003). Even so, much of what is set out in NCLB is
praiseworthy; the Act is essentially equitable for it ensures that schools pay due
regard to the progress of those sections of the school population who have
traditionally done less well academically in school. That is, students from economic-
ally disadvantaged homes, as well as those from ethnic minority backgrounds, those
who have special educational needs and who have limited proficiency to speak
English (US Department of Education, 2002). However, as we often see with such
moral panics around the underachievement debate, there is another perspective on
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this seemingly equitable piece of legislation, which suggests that unproven systems of
testing, coupled with punitive accountability measures, can do much to reinforce
inequities and label many otherwise good schools as failing (Linn, 2003; Smith,
2005a). In the UK, unfavourable international comparisons have contributed to the
assertion that the performance of certain groups of students is characterised by
a ‘long tail’ of underachievement (DfES, 2001). As in the USA, recent UK
Government policy has its focus firmly on raising standards and eliminating all
forms of underachievement. As a result, we have a system of national testing and
target setting that is of unprecedented scale.
Within this context of national ‘crisis accounts’ of falling standards and failing
students sit contemporary moral panics about the purported failure or under-
achievement of large sections of the school population. In the UK, the focus has been
mainly on failing boys (for example, Bleach, 1998; Epstein, Elwood, Hey, & Maw,
1998), with some commentators raising concerns about the relative attainment of
certain young people from ethnic minority groups (for example, Gillborn & Youdell,
2000; Mac an Ghaill, 1988), and, to a seemingly lesser extent, the attainment of
young people from the least wealthy homes (for example, Gore & Smith, 2001). In the
USA, concern has tended to focus on the academic achievements of young people
from African-American and Hispanic backgrounds (for example, Flanagan &
Grissmer, 2003; Lee, 2002). In the next section, I look more closely at the problem
of ‘underachievement’ as it relates specifically to the performance of boys in schools
in the UK; and consider both the evidence and the explanations that are often given
for their relatively poor achievement in school examinations.

Evidence for boys’ underachievement

In the UK, the underachievement of boys has occupied a prime place in the
educational discourse for many years (for example, Francis, 2006; Gorard, Rees, &
Salisbury, 1999; Smith, 2005b). Theories have evolved to explain the phenomenon
and costly programmes have been put in place to try and ameliorate the issue. The
moral panic surrounding the academic achievement of the nation’s boys has come
about largely because examination results, especially for the General Certificate of
Secondary Education (GCSE),1 suggest that the performance of girls has overtaken
that of boys. Evidence for the purported underachievement of boys is readily
 Evaluation & Research in Education 39

available. For example, Table 1 shows the proportions of students who achieve 5 or
more GCSE passes at grades A*
C, as well as the proportions of those who achieve
at least a grade C in English language. In both sets of results, the performance of
boys is consistently lower than that of girls. Trends such as these are often used to
suggest that, ‘boys have failed to build upon their performance at the same rate as
girls in recent decades’ (Arnot, David, & Weiner, 1999, p. 23). However, notice also
that the scores of both boys and girls have risen throughout the past decade and that
the overall rate of improvement is faster for boys than for girls (Gorard, 1999).
Despite the trends in Table 1, relatively little attention has been paid to the
improvements in the achievement levels of girls and the fact that the attainment of all
pupils has risen steadily over the last 30 years is barely mentioned unless it is to decry
falling standards and a ‘dumbing down’ of the school curriculum (Smithers & Ward,
2004). In short, boys have fallen behind in this one crude measure of success and the
dominant view is that something has to be done about it. Numerous feminist
researchers have drawn attention to this ‘backlash’ (see for example, Epstein et al.,
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1998; Francis & Skelton, 2005; Salisbury, 1996) and have made it clear that any
attempts to raise the achievement of boys must not lose sight of the work done over
the last three decades to improve the lot of girls in school. However, according to
Raphael Reed (1998, p. 60), focusing on male ‘underachievement’ is not a case of
debating whether this ‘underachievement’ exists because ‘its reality is a measure of its
productivity in shaping educational policies and practices’. Indeed, there are a
plethora of explanations for the apparent ‘underachievement’ of boys and three of
the most prevalent are discussed below.

Changing masculinities
One explanation frequently offered for the apparent underachievement of boys is that
there are innate, natural born differences between the sexes: boys are more likely to
suffer from oxygen starvation at birth, they have poorer verbal reasoning skills, they
mature later than girls, their parents do not talk to them as much as they do to their
sisters and so on (for example, Arnold, 1997; Cohen, 1998). However, according
Table 1. GCSE achievements according to sex in England (1996
2007).

5A*
C grades English

Year Boys Girls Boys Girls

2007 57 66 56 70
2006 54 64 55 69
2005 51 62 54 69
2004 48 58 53 67
2003 48 58 52 68
2002 46 57 52 67
2001 45 55 51 66
2000 44 55 51 66
1999 43 53 50 66
1998 41 51 48 64
1997 40 50 46 63
1996 40 49 47 64
Source: DfES (1996
2007), Statistics of Education: GCSE/GNVQ and GCE A/AS level examination
results. London: The Stationery Office.
 40 E. Smith

to some authors, these theories are based on ‘crude versions of cognitive psychology’
and have little basis in published research (Raphael Reed, 1998, p. 61). Mahony
(1998, p. 42), on the other hand, links much of the ‘hysteria’ surrounding the
underachieving youth or ‘public burden number 1’ to a fear among the male elite that
men will lose ground to women in the workforce. In the UK, the collapse in the post-
war boom of heavy industry and the replacement (particularly in some working-class
homes) of the male as the main family breadwinner, have led to what some
researchers would call a change in the gender regime of these communities and
another explanation for the poor performance of young men in our schools (Arnold,
1997; Connell, 1994; Francis, 2006; Jackson, 1998; Spendlove, 2000; Yates, 1997).
This has resulted in, ‘traditional working-class masculinities being deconstructed by
impersonal forces whether men like it or not’ (Connell, 1994, p. 312). The influence of
the peer group appears to be central to the role boys adopt in school. There are many
examples in the literature of boys resisting working hard in order to avoid being seen
as ‘gay’ or ‘spoffs’ (Connell, 1994; Measor, 1999), or Mac an Ghaill’s (1988) so-called
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‘academic achievers’, behaviour that was evident even in the primary school where no
label was worse than that of being called a ‘girl’ (Renold, 2001). As Epstein (1998,
p. 97) points out, ‘the rejection of the perceived ‘‘femininity’’ of academic work is
simultaneously a defence against the charge of being gay’.

Assessment and the school curriculum

Another reason often cited for the apparent relative failure of boys in today’s schools
is the nature of the curriculum and the assessment practices that are currently
adopted in schools. For example: the manner in which children perceive questions is
said to be different
boys in isolation, girls in context; girls express themselves in a
more reflective way than boys
which may advantage them in subjects like English
and the humanities but less so in science and maths; the types of questions are
perceived differently
boys preferring more multiple-choice styled responses
(Murphy, 1988). Millard (1997) explores the notion of a gendered curriculum where
the non-fiction reading practices preferred by boys have no place. She sees this as
disadvantaging boys in the long term, as the narrative practices encouraged by the
school curriculum have little relevance in the workplace. One of the most contentious
methods of assessment has been coursework. Coursework is seen by some researchers
to favour the hardworking methodical girl (Arnold, 1997; Elwood, 2005; Murphy,
1988; Pirie, 2001; Sammons, 1995; Spendlove, 2000; Younger & Warrington, 1996), to
such an extent that the high coursework element of English was reduced in the early
1990s in an attempt to reduce girls’ lead in the examination stakes.

The classroom, the teacher, teaching and learning

Claims about the feminisation of the school curriculum have come hand-in-hand
with the criticism of female teachers for imposing female values on our pupils; these
claims, according to Delamont (1999), have a long history and little basis in fact.
Nevertheless, they are reworked as an explanation for the relatively poor perfor-
mance of boys and in calls for an increase in the number of male teachers in our
schools (Hayes, 2002; Platten, 1999, see also Mills, Martino, & Lingard, 2004). The
different behaviours and learning cultures of boys and girls are well documented (for
example, Barker, 1995; Holden, 1993; Measor, 1999). Boys are frequently considered
 Evaluation & Research in Education 41

to be ‘more concerned with preserving an image of reluctant involvement or

disengagement’ (Younger & Warrington, 1996, p. 303), while girls are increasingly
portrayed as being the ‘ideal student’. In the classroom, it is the boys who command
the ‘lion’s share’ of the teachers’ attention and receive a disproportionate amount of
the teachers’ time compared with the girls. Boys can bring another agenda into the
classroom, asserting themselves as jokers and as risk-takers, with a noisy approach to
their work and a dislike of the tedium of writing. As a result, they are frequently the
focus of classroom activity, whereas the girls are ‘marginalised’ on the edges. Some
researchers claim that this behaviour has a detrimental effect on the boys’ learning;
boys react against work they see as inappropriate and find open-ended tasks
involving discussion or collaboration difficult (Elwood, 2005).
Thus, there are three dominant explanations for the apparent ‘underachievement’
of boys in schools: the conflict of masculinity in contemporary society, the
curriculum and its assessment, and finally the every-day experience of both students
and teachers within the classroom. In response to concerns about male under-
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achievement, a plethora of strategies and initiatives have emerged. These range from
experiments with single sex teaching to networks of sports clubs aimed at
encouraging ‘failing’ students to do better in school (for example, Arthur, 2004;
DfES, 2004; Henry, 2001). However, the absence of rigorous trialling means that the
efficacy of some of these strategies remains largely unproven (Smith, 2005b).

What is underachievement?
One thing that the above explanations for male underachievement have in common is
the tacit acceptance of a common meaning for the term ‘underachievement’.
Underachievement is a familiar word to those in education; it has been described
as probably the ‘predominant discourse’ in education in recent times (Weiner, Arnot,
& David, 1997, p. 620). However, underachievement is a term over which there is little
consensus (Smith, 2003a). For example, how do you define underachievement and
how do you measure it? Simply labelling one group of students, such as boys, as
underachieving compared to another group, such as girls, tells us nothing about
which boys may be in need of additional support in school and nothing about what
the nature of this support might be. Frequently, the terms underachievement and low
achievement are conflated and the subject becomes even more complex if you were to
ask yourself what any underachievement might be relative to. Is it related to some
kind of innate ability on the part of the individual or is it achievement relative to that
of a larger group? In addition, the underachievement label is not only confined to
describing the relative achievement of groups of students, or also indeed individual
students; it is frequently offered as an explanation for the relatively poorer academic
performances of schools and of nations. Questions and confusions such as these are
fundamental to our understanding of the moral panics surrounding the under-
achievement discourse.
The wider perception of what is understood by the term ‘underachievement’ has
been further complicated with its adoption by the media as a synonym for much of
what is perceived to be wrong with education. In this guise, the term ‘under-
achievement’ is frequently confused with that of low achievement. For example, when
we read that smaller numbers of boys are achieving minimum proficiency levels
compared with girls, it is often suggested that the boys were ‘underachieving’.
Whether these pupils were underachieving or not is not evidenced by these results;
 42 E. Smith

what the results might tell us is that the achievement of boys on this particular
measure was lower than that of girls. This conflation of underachievement and low
achievement is important, as I have argued elsewhere: underachievement and low
achievement are not the same thing (Smith, 2003a). Consider for example the student
who, despite their best and most sustained efforts, fails to reach minimum proficiency
levels on a given assessment. In the current climate of high stakes testing, this
individual might arguably be labelled a ‘low achiever’ but, given their hard work and
sustained effort, he or she is surely not an ‘underachiever’? Consider another student,
whose past achievement has suggested them to be academically very capable but
whose relative lack of interest or effort has secured them a B grade, rather than a top
scoring A grade. Arguably this individual is ‘underachieving’ but is surely not a ‘low
achiever’? Conceptualising underachievement and low achievement in this way has
led us to re-examine what it is that we mean by the terms underachievement and low
achievement and so to identify groups of students who may be underachieving or
who may be low achieving (Smith, 2003b). Our results suggest that underachievers
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are a relatively heterogeneous group of individuals who, when they do appear to

underachieve, do so for a range of reasons, some transient, others more profound.
The results also provide limited evidence that working-class boys, for example, are
any more likely to underachieve than their peers from other social groups. This is not
to say that social class is not an important factor in educational attainment. On the
contrary, the low achievers in our study were a clearly defined group of students who
came from the poorest homes and who were more likely to be disadvantaged in the
school assessment system, in aggregate terms, at every level.

An alternative account of boys’ underachievement

In this section, I will re-examine some of the evidence often presented for the
underachievement of boys and consider some of the contradictions and incon-
sistencies that underpin the discourse. In the previous section, I summarised several
of the explanations often presented for the ‘underachievement’ of boys. Given the
complexity of the gender debate and uncertainties over what it is that we actually
mean by the term underachievement, it is not surprising that an alternative account
of the underachievement phenomenon also exists. For example, Delamont (1999,
p. 13) contends that, ‘it is pointless to be swept away by a moral panic about ‘‘failing’’,
anti-school working-class boys. This is not a new problem’. Schools, she argues, have
never been able to deal with the working-class boy. According to Delamont (1999,
p. 3), the whole standards debate is surrounded in a ‘discourse of derision’,
compounded by a lack of understanding of the academic gains made by all pupils,
and coupled with the media’s resistance to hearing good news. That ‘under-
achievement’ is not a new phenomenon has also been demonstrated in an historical
study by Cohen (1998). She noted the seventeenth-century academic John Locke’s
consternation that young men found it difficult to succeed in Latin, while their
younger sisters would ‘prattle’ on in French having had little or no formal
instruction. The standard of the young men’s English also gave him little joy. In
England and Wales, concern over falling standards is well established, with influential
government-commissioned reports having a long history of criticising school
standards as being in crisis. For example the Black Papers, published in the late
1960s, reported that achievement in reading was lower than in previous years, older
children did not know their tables, examiners were appalled at the poor levels of
 Evaluation & Research in Education 43

English and the standard of the 11 intake into grammar schools was in decline
(Cox & Dyson, 1969). For example, in the 11 examinations in Wales, the results of
boys and girls were adjusted to ensure equal proportions would be successful and so
gain entry to the grammar schools. If the top 40% had been selected for these schools
regardless of sex, two-thirds of the pupils in grammar schools would have been
female (Rees & Delamont, 1999). Gorard (2001) also disputes the fact that boys have
ever attained higher grades than girls in compulsory education at any time over the
past 25 years. However, underlying these concerns about gender bias in the way that
students are assessed is the assumption that our assessment system is gender neutral
and that boys and girls ought to achieve the same levels in school examinations. This
is a key issue when considering gender equality in examination outcomes. If
researchers are writing about how gender differences are encouraged by social
conditioning (Millard, 1997), how they can be reinforced by schools (Delamont,
1990) or, more controversially, how they can arise from innate differences in the
structure and development of the brain (Gurian, 2001), is it still realistic to cling to
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the notion that despite everything that happens in schools, the examination system
should somehow remain gender neutral?
As we say above, one important piece of evidence supporting the underachieving
boys claim is the differential performance of boys and girls in English and language
examinations. In the next section, I will consider student performance data in
literacy-based subjects. Evidence from three sources will be presented: national tests
in English in England and Wales over a 30-year period, nationally representative
longitudinal assessments of reading in the USA and the results from international
comparative tests. The acquisition of literacy skills is important and is sometimes
seen as a highly gendered activity. For example, research tells us that throughout
school, girls are the keener readers who are more likely to be ‘devoted’ to their books
(Elwood, 2005; Millard, 1997). When boys do read, their favoured genres
action
and adventure and non-fiction
can leave them disadvantaged in the school
curriculum, where narrative accounts that emphasise personal responses are
favoured. However, although the English curriculum may well disadvantage boys,
there is little correlation between achievement in English examinations and success in
later life (Millard, 1997), but as success in English examinations can act as a gateway
to education and employment opportunities, the disadvantage that boys have in
acquiring the ‘right’ literacy skills can be compounded.

Reconsidering the gender gap in literacy-based subjects

That boys underachieve in literacy-based subjects is of fundamental concern to those
engaged in the ‘underachieving boys’ debate (for example, Francis, 2000). Here the
evidence from three assessments will enable us to consider achievement gaps between
male and female students in literacy-based subjects across time as well as across
different cultural and educational settings.

England and Wales: achievement in English at age 16

Figure 1 shows the achievement gap2 between the number of 16-year old male and
female students who gained a grade C or above in national tests in English between
1970 and 2006. The results for English show a steady achievement gap in favour of
the girls, but it is a gap that has hardly changed since the early 1970s. There is little
 44 E. Smith

Figure 1. Achievement gaps in English language examinations.

Source: Welsh Joint Education Committee (WJEC) examination board.
evidence here of any differences over time in the relative performance of boys and
girls in English; indeed the current gap is the smallest since the early 1980s.
Similar trends have also been noted for other subjects. For example in History,
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French and Welsh, the performance gap has consistently been in favour of girls, with
little fluctuation for almost 30 years. Mathematics was one subject that has seen a
decrease in the achievement gap. From favouring the boys in the 1970s and 1980s, the
trend changed in the early 1990s and both groups now enjoy almost equal success.
What caused this change to a well-established trend is not easy to uncover, but it does
appear to coincide with the introduction of compulsory coursework in mathematics
during the early 1990s (Smith, 2005b). Similar patterns emerge when trends in the
proportions of students achieving grades at C or above in more than one GCSE
subject are considered (Gorard & Smith, 2004).

USA: achievement in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) at age 13

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is a large-scale national
test that is used to monitor achievement trends in the USA. Also known as the
‘Nation’s Report Card’, NAEP has been undertaking nationwide annual assessments
of student achievement in various subjects since 1969. In addition, the NAEP long-
term trends assessment has been administering the same set of tests to 9-, 13- and 17-
year olds since 1971 in reading and since 1973 in mathematics, so making it possible
to track educational progress over extended periods of time (NCES, 2005). Table 2
below shows the trends in average reading scores for 13-year old students between
1971 and 2004. The same pattern in male/female attainment in reading occurs here as
in national examinations at age 16 in England and Wales, and reflects an achievement
gap in favour of female students that appears to have existed over the last three
decades.

International: the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)

The PISA is a series of international comparative tests which are designed to, ‘assess
student performance and collect data on the student, family and institutional factors
that can help explain differences in performance’ (OECD, 2001, p. 14). To date, there
have been four waves of PISA: the first, in 2000, focused mainly on reading; the
second, in 2003, focused on mathematics; and the most recent wave, in 2006, focused
on science. The latest wave of PISA was scheduled for 2009 and again focused on
reading. As our concern in this discussion is with differential attainment in literacy,
 Evaluation & Research in Education 45
Table 2. Average reading scores among 13-year-old students, according to sex.

Gap between Total

Year Female Male male and female students students

1971 261 250 11 255

1975 262 250 12 256
1980 263 254 9 258
1984 262 253 9 257
1988 263 252 11 257
1990 263 251 12 257
1992 265 254 11 260
1994 266 251 15 258
1996 264 251 13 258
1999 265 254 11 259
2004 264 254 10 259
Source: NCES (2005).
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I have presented data from the 2000 wave of PISA. As you can see from Table 3, girls
are performing consistently higher than boys in the PISA reading assessment: a trend
that is replicated not only across all countries presented in Table 3, but also across all
countries participating in PISA 2000.
Notwithstanding the technical and conceptual problems of comparing test data
across different years, cohorts and nations (for example, Bracey, 1996; Newton, 2005;
Prais, 2003), it does appear that achievement gaps between male and female students
in literacy-based subjects are relatively well established across time, as well as
appearing resistant to various cultural and educational settings. This constancy might
make us re-consider some of the explanations given for the apparent underachieve-
ment (or perhaps differential attainment might be a more apposite term) of boys in
literacy-based assessments.

Discussion
Several issues arise from our re-examination of some of the issues surrounding recent
moral panics about the underachievement of boys. They lead us to question whether
boys are actually underachieving and challenge the very nature of the term
Table 3. Student performance on PISA combined reading assessment, according to sex.

Mean score Mean score Mean difference Mean score

Country (boys) (girls) (boys and girls) (all pupils)

Australia 513 (4.0) 546 (4.7) 33 528 (3.5)

Brazil 388 (3.9) 404 (3.4) 16 396 (3.1)
Canada 519 (1.8) 551 (1.7) 32 534 (1.6)
Finland 520 (3.0) 571 (2.8) 51 546 (2.6)
France 490 (3.5) 519 (2.7) 29 505 (2.7)
Germany 468 (3.2) 502 (3.9) 34 484 (2.5)
Japan 507 (6.7) 537 (5.4) 30 522 (5.2)
Korea 519 (3.8) 533 (3.7) 14 525 (2.4)
Mexico 411 (4.2) 432 (3.8) 21 422 (3.3)
UK 512 (3.0) 537 (3.4) 25 523 (2.6)
USA 490 (8.4) 518 (6.2) 28 504 (7.1)
Source: OECD (2001).
Note: Standard error values are given in parentheses.
 46 E. Smith

‘underachievement’. Indeed, one of the enduring ‘myths’ about standards in

education has arisen from ‘moral panics’ about the perceived underachievement of
boys in school examinations. This ‘moral panic’ has come about largely through
interpretations of examination data which suggest not only that girls are out-
performing their male peers, but also that the performance gap between them is
widening. But, as some of the evidence presented here has shown, the reality is not so
clear-cut. There is no evidence to suggest that the gap in male/female performance is
increasing, that girls are becoming more likely to achieve higher grade passes than
boys or that boys are underachieving in school examinations. What is clear is that the
achievement of all students continues to rise and, in addition, what achievement gaps
do exist between the performance of male and female students appear to have existed
for some considerable time and appear resistant to different cultural and educational
settings. In fact, the very constancy of achievement gaps in literacy-based subjects
over time and place suggests that it is a phenomenon that transcends cultures,
curricula and education systems. This historical focus on male ‘underachievement’ is
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interesting. As these results suggest, it may well be the case that girls have out-
performed boys for some considerable time. However, the changing function of
education in today’s society and its relationship with work and family life has
arguably meant that, from a male perspective at least, the stakes of educational
failure are now much higher.
That boys are performing less well than girls in certain literacy-based subjects is
indeed a cause for concern: ‘the issues surrounding boys’ achievement are real and
should not be underestimated but the question of gender and performance is more
complex, affecting different sub-groups of boys and girls in different ways and often
reflecting the influence of class and ethnicity’ (Arnot, Gray, James, & Rudduck, 1998,
p. 1). But the focus should be on which (if any) particular groups of pupils appear to
be failing to reach their potential and why. This would herald a move away from the
traditional binary notion of boys versus girls to include an assessment of other
variables such as ethnicity and home background which may have a more profound
effect on an individual’s learning. For example, if it is the case that boys are
underachieving in school, then labelling boys as underachieving does little to help
explain or remedy the issue
we cannot change the fact that they are boys. Another
issue is the assumption that our assessment system is gender neutral and that boys
and girls should achieve the same outcomes in school examinations. Of course, it
could become gender neutral by ensuring equal success for boys and girls, in much
the same way that places in grammar schools in England and Wales were allocated
40 years ago, but is that really what we want from our school assessment system?
In short, that boys are less likely to reach expected proficiency levels in literacy-
based subjects should not be taken as evidence for their underachievement. As we
have seen, notwithstanding the evidence presented above, underachievement is itself a
concept over which there is much confusion and little consensus. This is not merely
a semantic difference between how we use the terms ‘low achievement’ or ‘under-
achievement’. Both terms appear to describe a very different population: low
achievers tend to be those who come from the poorest homes while underachievers
represent a far more heterogeneous section of the school population.
Arguably, underachievement is a term that has probably outlived its usefulness.
The lack of clarity in its use has led to multiple meanings that sometimes disguise the
true nature of patterns of learning in schools. Its conflation with low achievement
presents further complications and obscures the fact that there are clearly defined
 Evaluation & Research in Education 47

groups of young people who fail to achieve minimum levels at each stage of their
education; these of course are the young people who come from the poorest homes.
Perhaps it is here that educational reform programmes ought to be targeted first.

Notes
1. GCSE is the national examination in England and Wales taken by the majority of students
at the end of compulsory schooling (aged 15
16). Grades are awarded in the range A*
G,
with C being the notional minimum proficiency benchmark grade.
2. The achievement gap is defined as, ‘an index of the difference in an educational indicator
(such as an examination pass rate) between two groups (such as male and female)’ (Gorard
2000, p. 203). It is calculated by analysing the gaps in entry and in performance between
two groups as shown in the equation below:

Achievement gap  performance gap  entry gap

Downloaded by [188.82.149.88] at 07:23 04 October 2011

(GP  BP) (GE  BE)

Achievement gap  100 100
(GP  BP) (GE  BE)

GP, number of girls achieving that grade or better; BP, number of boys achieving that
grade or better; GE, number of girls entered; BE, number of boys entered.

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