ABSTRACT
Throughout the book we have drawn attention to how the domination of the boys’ underachievement agenda has given rise to recommendations for practice that have not necessarily been proven to be effective in raising achievement. Several of these recommendations are based on essentialist notions of a ‘typical boy’ and thus fail to take account of the differences between boys. Also, the implementation of such recommendations by schools means they would continue to reinforce conventional constructions of masculinities rather than challenging these traditional modes of ‘doing boy’. A further concern created by the dominance of boys’ educational needs within policy discourse is that there has been a tendency to forget about girls who underachieve, or indeed who achieve well but at a cost to their physical and mental health (see for example the discussions on middle-class, successful girls and self-harming behaviours, Chaplin (2000); Walkerdine et al., (2001)). What teachers need to know is what the effective strategies for working with boys and girls are that will enable them to perform to their best.
