I'm very concerned about this week's A-level results. Not because of falling standards or chance mis-marking, but because I'm the mother of two sons. If bold statistics are anything to go by, my boys are now second-class citizens, at least educationally.
In this year's Financial Times League Tables only three boys' schools made it into the top 20 and, though the high-ranking independent schools are not typical of the country as a whole, girls are doing better than boys at all levels of the school system in both the state and private sectors.
"Girls now outperform boys at Grade A in every major subject except modern foreign languages," said Ellie Johnson Searle, director of the Joint Council for Qualifications, after the release of this week's A-level results.
As recently as 30 years ago, boys still outstripped girls in many subjects. So the question has to be asked: are girls really cleverer than boys or do we now have an education system that is skewed against boys?
Dr Tony Sewell, formerly an education lecturer at Leeds University, feels that both schools and exams, with their emphasis on coursework and continual assessment, are currently disadvantageous to boys. "We have let boys down over the years. In the 1970s we changed the story for girls and our attitude was that the boys can get on with it. It's a question of balance and I believe it has gone too far the other way."
Those who successfully educate boys, however, are not unduly despondent.
"It's reasonably true that the exam system has been feminised," says Andrew Halls, headmaster of Magdalen College School in Oxford, who in the eight years of his headship has led his school to the top of the league tables. "Boys tend to do better in a system that is frightening and sudden rather than one that rewards slow, steady application. But we teach our boys to play the exam game and use their competitiveness to assert their superiority over the system."
David Levin, headmaster of the successful City of London School for boys, believes that the statistics don't tell the whole story. "When it comes to selective schools, you have to remember that most of the top-ranking girls' schools are, in fact, smaller than the boys' schools and that reflects in the calibre of their intake."
He feels that the current exam system is unsuited to his pupils' needs - and he intends to abandon it. "From next year we've decided to opt out at GCSE," says Levin. "We will be doing International GCSE in six subjects to get rid of this wretched course. So much coursework is mindless 'getting your head down', and clever boys tend to be less patient and accepting of it than girls."
In general, the heads of schools where boys succeed use teaching methods and tailored curricula that play to their charges' interests and strengths.
Levin, for example, has turned computers to educational advantage. "We introduce as much technology as we can, so that boys can be proactive in the classroom rather than merely passive recipients. In Maths, for example, we'd set problems and have boys feed them into the computer so they can get instant answers."
Barry Sindall, headmaster of Colyton Grammar School in Devon, one of the country's top-performing co-educational state schools, achieves good A-Level scores for boys and girls and has monitored any discrepancy. "At 11-plus, boys' performance is lower than that of girls, particularly in language. But by A-Level in our school that difference has entirely disappeared."
Colyton uses an imaginative range of "personalised learning" to get the best out of every child. "We have programmes of targeted support. Many boys are not good at extended writing but if they use writing in the subjects they're confident in, such as science and technology, they learn to apply these skills to other subjects."
At Magdalen, too, the school day has been adapted to a masculine learning style. "Boys can't take eight periods in a row," says Halls. "They hate being shut in and if they can't rush off, they become frustrated little beasts in the classrooms. In many schools the lunch hour has been made as short as possible because it's seen as not being cost effective. Here we've kept the lunch period to an hour and 20 minutes. They need a proper lunch and they need to get out to play."
Motivating boys to work towards exam success is undoubtedly the issue that most concerns teachers.
"Girls have an interest in doing well but the peer pressure for boys is about not being considered swottish," says Helen Turner, head of the sixth form at North London Collegiate, a leading girls' school. "Also, boys mature later and sometimes don't register the importance of qualifications until it is too late."
Colyton has found strategies for making boys see the light in time. "A few years ago we did a study on our students to see why the girls were doing better than the boys and found that the majority of boys were not actually underperforming," says Sindall. "Only about half a dozen were distorting the results. This small group of boys were being influenced by people outside the school and made to feel that the culture of work was not acceptable. We worked individually with these boys to raise their aspirations."
In selective schools most boys are reasonably well-motivated - if not by their peers then at least by parental pressure - but everywhere the hidden persuaders are suggesting that school is just not cool.
And the prevailing culture outside the ivy-clad walls and iron gates is still something that many schools find impossible to overcome. "Schools like Magdalen are completely untypical," says Halls. "Twenty-first-century culture is depressingly banal. There's no passion for abstraction, no sense of spiritual, cultural or national values. As a society we are all about shopping and consuming as our only way of getting pleasure. The boys in particular are disenfranchised but male yob culture is moving across to the girls."
Perhaps what needs to be changed is not the exam system but the society we live in.
