Girls are continuing to outperform boys in GCSE results, leaving a leading education expert to conclude that perhaps girls are just more clever than boys.
The gap between girls and boys achieving one of the top grades rose from eight to nine percentage points this year. According to a report by the Centre for Education and Employment Research (CEER), the gap is now “extraordinarily large compared with the differences of the past decade”.
Last year, a higher percentage of girls (30 per cent) were awarded at least a grade seven – equivalent to an A – compared to 24 per cent by boys.
Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University, said that it was “striking” how well girls have done since GCSEs were introduced in 1988.
In the report, titled GCSE 2021: Another Year of Teacher Assessment, he wrote: “They are, and have been, ahead overall and in most subjects by a substantial margin. This is but one aspect of female dominance in education.”
Girls emerged far ahead in many of the popular subjects, such as engineering (32.8 percentage points), art and design (20.6 percentage points), design and technology (18.6 percentage points), and a number of others. In contrast, boys were top in just four subjects and only by a small margin.
“Such is the extent of girls’ lead over boys that one wonders if they just might be cleverer,” Smithers said in his report.
He said that data showing how much better girls do in education is “rarely taken at face value”, and is instead “explained away”.
“When it emerged that girls did better in the 11+ selection tests, so that more would have had to be admitted to grammar schools, it was explained away as them maturing faster.
“Since few continued in education after the age of 15 or 16, it was assumed that they peaked early. This was used to justify admitting boys on lower scores.”
He also noted that although there was little difference between the sexes in the old O-level exams, girls “leapt ahead in GCSE” – however, this was explained as being down to the new modular structure of the GCSEs.
Smithers also noted there were suggestions that teachers “tend to favour” girls as an explanation for why girls have pushed ahead of boys again this year in teacher-assessed circumstances.
Asking why it seems “so difficult to accept that females are cleverer”, Smithers said there were two possible explanations, one being that girls “tended to fade away in adult life” despite doing well at school.
“But much likely was that it was in the script society wrote for them,” he continued. “Happily the script has changed and now girls and women are able to fully develop their talents and progress to where these talents will take them.”
