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18 hours ago
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Girls in England say they feel less safe at school and are more disenchanted with their education, research has found.
Using data from an international study of pupils at primary and secondary schools, researchers said the steep fall in girls’ “emotional engagement” compared with the years before the Covid pandemic has become a pressing issue for schools.
While the results from the international survey showed pupils’ feelings of belonging, safety and pride have fallen in many countries since the pandemic, researchers from University College London (UCL) found that England had one of the biggest drop-offs among girls in year 9, when they are aged 13-14, and was significantly lower than among boys.
John Jerrim, a professor at UCL’s social research institute, said: “Our research points towards something happening during the pandemic – quite possibly school closures – that has particularly impacted teenage girls.
“This may have particularly impacted girls’ enjoyment and confidence at school and their peer relationships.
“What is really worrying is that there are signs from other evidence that this may well be feeding into greater school absence rates amongst girls and on to their educational achievement.”
Jerrim said that pupils who did not feel safe at school were less likely to be emotionally engaged and therefore less likely to attend.
In 2019, 43% of girls in England strongly agreed that they were safe at school, but in the most recent survey, carried out in 2023, that fell to 21%. For boys in England over the same period the percentage fell from 41% to 31%.
At the same time, girls’ sense of belonging at school fell by 17 percentage points and pride in their school by 20 percentage points – falling by twice as much as among boys in both cases.
Jerrim said the girls in year 9 when the survey was taken would have been in the final year of primary school as the pandemic hit, with prolonged school closures for many children.
“I think there is increasing evidence this is a particularly vulnerable time for girls, [the] first stages of secondary school. And to have it so disrupted has clearly led to long-lasting issues,” Jerrim said.
Research by UCL published last month found that boys in year 5 and year 9 in England “scored significantly higher than girls in maths and science” in recent international assessments, compared with tests conducted before the Covid pandemic.
In the years before the pandemic, girls’ school absence rates were similar to boys. But since 2020 persistent absence – missing 10% or more of school sessions – has risen more among girls: at state secondary schools 26.8% of girls were persistently absent compared with 24.3% of boys in 2023-24.
UCL’s researchers said there was likely to be a strong connection between declining emotional engagement and pupil absences, “with those who feel less engaged being more likely to skip school”.
The study revealed similar sharp declines in attitude in Finland, Ireland and Sweden, while in the US there has been speculation that the post-pandemic worsening in behaviour has led teachers to give more attention to boys.
Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, said in a speech on Thursday that the behaviour of boys was “a defining issue of our time” and laid some of the blame on smartphones.
Phillipson said that “disinformation can slip quietly into the pockets of our children, and young boys can fall under the spell of toxic role models online.” She added that smartphones “have no place in the classroom, they’re disruptive, distracting, they’re bad for behaviour”.
She also called for more male teachers to combat “toxic” behaviours, with only one in four teachers being men, or just one in seven in nursery and primary schools.
In recent weeks the Netflix series Adolescence has been credited with triggering a debate about misogyny among school-age boys.
