ABSTRACT
As we spend a considerable amount of time throughout this book talking about boys’ underachievement it might seem unnecessary to then devote a specific chapter to the subject. However, the reason for doing so is to allow us to directly ask and answer the question ‘are boys underachieving?’ We have shown at various points how debates and discussions about boys’ underachievement pervade government and media discourses, and how the topic has inspired interest, concern and critique amongst educationalists, reporters and pro/feminist academics. What we do in this chapter is scrutinise the information that has been used to spark off the ‘crisis of boys and schooling’ debate and assess what the valid and invalid arguments are. To do this the first section will look at data from national and international studies of pupil achievement. Here it will be shown that despite the widespread contention that all boys are underachieving in all subjects, many boys in the UK are, in fact, doing well in examinations.1
