Girls and Exclusion

Rethinking the Agenda

Audrey Osler, Kerry Vincent

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134412822
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The widespread view that girls are succeeding in education and are therefore 'not a problem' is a myth. By drawing directly on girls' own accounts and experiences of school life and those of professionals working with disaffected youth, this book offers startling new perspectives on the issue of exclusion and underachievement amongst girls.

This book demonstrates how the social and educational needs of girls and young women have slipped down the policy agenda in the UK and internationally. Osler and Vincent argue for a re-definition of school exclusion which covers the types of exclusion commonly experienced by girls, such as truancy, self-exclusion or school dropout as a result of pregnancy.

Drawing on girls' own ideas, the authors make recommendations as to how schools might develop as more inclusive communities where the needs of both boys and girls are addressed equally.

The book is essential reading for postgraduate students, teachers, policy-makers and LEA staff dedicated to genuine social and educational inclusion.

Part I
The policy context

Chapter 1

Girls: not a problem?

Over a five-year period, from 1995 to 1999, in England alone, over 10,000 secondary school-aged girls were permanently excluded from school as the result of disciplinary procedures. This amounts to the equivalent of the population of a small town. In this chapter we begin by drawing attention to the scale of the problem. Second, we stress how these officially recorded disciplinary exclusions are the tip of an iceberg, hiding a much wider and complex problem of girls’ exclusion from school. Third, we demonstrate how girls’ exclusion often has long-term harmful consequences because of when it occurs.

Officially recorded, permanent exclusions form a small proportion of the total numbers. Many more students are subject to fixedterm disciplinary exclusions or are unofficially excluded, as when parents are asked to find an alternative school for their daughter. Yet others engage in a form of self-exclusion, when they withdraw from learning, perhaps truanting but sometimes remaining physically present in school. Despite these various forms of exclusion, very little attention has been given to their impact on the lives of girls and young women. Most disciplinary exclusions (over 80 per cent) are from mainstream secondary schools and about two-thirds of the total number of excluded pupils are aged 13–15 years. They are expelled from school during the period leading up to public examinations, with potentially devastating consequences for their future. Girls make up one in four of all students excluded at this stage in their school careers. They are therefore a very significant minority. Although the government aims to provide permanently excluded pupils in England with alternative full-time education from 2002, many young people will drop out of school altogether or reach the official school-leaving age before these plans can be implemented.

Despite the British government’s stated commitment to develop policies and practices which promote social inclusion, and official recognition of direct links between exclusion from school and social exclusion (Social Exclusion Unit, 1998), there has been little consideration of the specific needs of girls. Girls are still not taken seriously; boys are the cause for concern. Most policy-makers appear to have accepted the dominant discourse that girls are succeeding at school. Rather than acknowledge a problem of ‘underachievement’ and exclusion which affects both boys and girls, albeit in different forms, concern has continued to focus on ‘underachieving’ boys. There has been a distinct lack of interest in the problem of girls’ exclusion from school, from policy-makers, research funding bodies and professional groups. When we set out to research girls’ exclusion from school, a number of funding bodies indicated that as girls form a minority of excluded students, this was not a priority issue. And when we started the project the initial response from the majority of professionals whom we approached reflected this perspective: girls are simply ‘not a problem’.

The launch of our research report Not A Problem? Girls and school exclusion (Osler et al., 2002) in January 2002 attracted considerable media attention. Our study was not only reported in the educational press, but was also featured in a wide range of national newspapers, various BBC and independent radio news bulletins, BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour and on BBC television’s Breakfast News. The research, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, draws on girls’ own perceptions of school life, their perceptions of the ways in which exclusion occurs and their strategies for resolving problems. In this chapter we consider various features of recent media constructions of girls’ and boys’ experiences and achievements at school. We reflect on the ways in which the media accounts of our research followed some of these established patterns and on how they differed from other recent media stories.

Although education policy debates have been prominent in England in recent years, with the government engaging in a range of consultation exercises, young people’s voices have not been prominent in these debates. It was for this reason that we designed our research in such a way that girls’ perspectives on inclusion and exclusion would be at the heart of our project. Our research sample included girls and young women who were judged by their teachers to be doing well at school as well as some who had been excluded or were thought to be at risk of exclusion. A total of 81 girls were interviewed individually and in small groups. We also sought out the opinions of a range of professionals from education, health, social services and voluntary sector agencies. We investigated a number of alternative education schemes aimed at those who, for various reasons, were not in mainstream education.

Some previous research examining girls’ experiences of disruption in one mixed inner-city secondary school concluded:

There is much to be learned from hearing what girls have to say for themselves. Teachers’ and theorists’ views do not reflect the complexity, the detail, the level of insight, the vigour and the feelings that girls express when they talk about their experiences. . . . Reflecting on and talking to girls and about girls should not be seen as a luxury item. They deserve an equal place in the spotlight.

(Crozier and Anstiss, 1995: 31)

We concur with this viewpoint and argue that there are three specific reasons why girls’ views and perspectives should be incorporated into developments in educational research, policy and pedagogy. These correspond to what we might call the three Ps, namely, principle, policy and pedagogy. First, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989 (CRC) sets an important international standard on the participation rights of children and young people and has wide ranging implications for education policy and practice (see, for example, Newell, 1991; Lansdown and Newell, 1994; Osler and Starkey, 1996; Verhellen, 2000). We argue that girls’ viewpoints and perspectives need to be incorporated into educational research in recognition of the principle of young people’s participation as set out in the CRC. Adherence to this principle has direct implications for policy and pedagogical practices.

Secondly, research projects which draw on young people’s perspectives have the potential to inform and influence policy. Research which has drawn on the voices of young people from marginalised groups, such as children with special educational needs or girls from specific minority ethnic groups, have sometimes challenged the assumptions of education professionals concerning those groups (Osler, 1989; Tisdall and Dawson, 1994). Such approaches provide policy-makers with the opportunity to hear and to take into account the voices of otherwise marginalised young people. This was certainly one of the goals in carrying out this study. In a sense we may even claim that these girls are enabled to influence policy and practice. By seeking out the views of young people, including young children, researchers may uncover how social processes and educational practices operate to exclude or discriminate against certain groups (Troyna and Hatcher, 1992; Connolly, 1998).

Thirdly, research and consultation with children and young people may also inform pedagogy and enable teachers to find practical solutions to everyday challenges facing schools. For example, researchers have shown how such consultation processes inform and strengthen school improvement strategies and support schools in addressing questions of discipline (Ruddock et al., 1996; Osler, 2000). As Crozier and Anstiss (1995) point out, the focus of attention has long been on boys’ disruption. They argue that the Elton Report (Elton, 1989) legitimised this emphasis since it identified ‘verbal abuse’ towards teachers, ‘physical destructiveness’ and ‘physical aggression’ as the most serious problems; this emphasis on physical and noisy behaviour prioritises predominantly male behaviour. Our study seeks to redress the balance by focusing on girls’ behaviour and their experiences of inclusion and exclusion at school. The girls in our study suggest how pedagogical and school organisational practices might be improved to enable greater inclusion.

Gender, schooling and the media

The issue of exclusion from school is closely linked to that of achievement; students who are barred from school or who absent themselves for significant periods of time are unlikely to realise their full academic potential. Not only will they miss key lessons but they may also experience loss of self-esteem and/or difficulties reintegrating into school life which are likely to have both direct and indirect impact on attainment.

Since the early 1990s, in Britain the media have drawn attention to boys’ ‘underachievement’ in public examinations, first at General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) level, which marks the end of compulsory schooling at 16 years, and then at General Certificate of Education Advanced level (GCE A level), the examinations required for university entrance, normally taken at age 18. The impression given is that girls have overtaken boys in what is often unquestioningly presented as a competition between the sexes. This is illustrated in such headlines as ‘Girls on top form’ (the Guardian, 6 January, 1998), ‘It’s a girl’s world – they beat boys in best-ever exams’ (the Sun, 20 August, 1999).

Girls’ academic achievements are turned on their head. Instead of being seen as a cause for satisfaction, they are presented in the media and in popular discourse as a widespread problem of failure among boys, about which the educational community in general, and teachers in particular, should concern themselves. The improvement in the examination success of (some) girls provokes concern about boys, whose improvement rates are slower. Indeed, an article by a prominent academic in the Times Educational Supplement asserted: ‘it is the under-achievement of boys that has become one of the biggest challenges facing society today’ (Wragg, 1997: § 2 p. 4). Effectively, girls’ relative examination success becomes a contributory factor in what is portrayed as a crisis of masculinity.

Table 1.1 draws on official statistics (DfES, 2001a) to show the relative performance of girls and boys at GCSE level over the threeyear period 1998/99 to 2000/01. In 1999/2000, for example, 54.6 per cent of girls obtained five or more of the top (A*–C) GCSE grades compared with 44 per cent of boys. Girls’ average achievement was thus more than 10 percentage points ahead of that of boys. Media attention focuses on the majority of girls (54.6 per cent) who achieve the top-grades. Government and media concern is expressed about the majority of boys (56 per cent) who fail to get these grades. Very little of the public discourse addresses the substantial minority of girls (45.4 per cent) who are also leaving school with less than five top-grade GCSEs. These girls, who are less likely than their male peers to have attracted attention to themselves by engaging in behaviour which leads to disciplinary exclusion, are nevertheless leaving school without marketable qualifications. In the eyes of many professionals they are simply ‘not a problem’.

The discourse is about boys’ ‘underachievement’ in relation to girls; the categories ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ are monolithic and there is little recognition of the vast differences in achievement which exist between girls and between boys, according to class and ethnicity (Epstein et al., 1998; Griffin, 2000). It has been demonstrated that the ‘gender gap’ between the average attainments of boys and girls in GCSE examinations is, in fact, much smaller than those associated with ethnic origin and social class (Gillborn and Mirza, 2000). The girls’ success story reflects improving examination success rates among particular groups of girls: those girls that are now outperforming their male peers are largely from middle-class backgrounds (Plummer, 2000; Walkerdine et al., 2001).

Table 1.1 Percentage of female and male students attaining grades A* to C in GCSE examinations

The apparent success of girls at school is not necessarily reflected in post-school experiences. Mirza’s (1992) study of African Caribbean girls in London showed that even when they adopted strategies to succeed at school and achieve examination success, they were subsequently disadvantaged as they moved into the labour market. In Australia, 12 per cent more girls than boys complete secondary school. Among students who complete Year 12, girls achieve a higher average performance in most subjects in most states. Yet school success does not guarantee girls an advantage in the labour market. Researchers found that:

Taking boys as a single grouping and comparing them with girls as a grouping, concern for boys’ life chances on the basis of their schooling performance is misplaced. There is surprisingly little carry-over effect from the average girl’s better performance . . . Indeed, the only evident effect is that a somewhat higher percentage of young women are proceeding to higher education. Boys’ lower achievement levels in Year 12 subjects and even their lower level of literacy have no evident depressing effects in their employment chances if we are looking for effects across males as a single grouping.

(Collins et al., 2000a: 39)

In England there are also considerable differences in the relative achievement of each ethnic group across local education authorities (LEAs), with the percentage of ‘Black Caribbean’ heritage students achieving 5 or more A*–C grades ranging between 16 per cent and 59 per cent, depending on the LEA. It is unlikely that these variations in achievement can be explained solely in terms of class; more research is required to understand the specific strategies and related resource allocation which is enabling some schools and LEAs to narrow the attainment gap between ethnic groups. Despite efforts to address differentials in attainment, there is still considerable inequality: in 2000, just 27 per cent of Black Caribbean heritage students obtained five or more of the top (A*–C) GCSE grades. These students were thus more than 20 percentage points below the national average (Tikly et al., 2002).

International studies confirm the importance of considering the intersection of ethnicity and gender in order to understand achievement. Alton-Lee and Praat (2001), drawing on the IEA Third International Mathematics and Science study (Garden, 1997) and a study of literacy (Wagemaker, 1993), found that Year 5 students in New Zealand scored well above the international average in literacy, well below in mathematics and approximately equal in science. Nevertheless, they noted that achievement differed more by ethnicity than by gender.

Unfortunately, the official statistics for England do not allow us to examine gender differences within each ethnic group, as the Department for Education and Skills has not required LEAs to provide this breakdown. This is a curious and significant omission, given the general official concern about gender differences in achievement. It may reflect a more widespread trend among government officials and agencies often to overlook the intersection of gender and ethnicity when addressing questions of achievement.

When differences in achievement between ethnic groups are ignored and when assumptions are made about the homogeneous nature of the categories ‘girls’ and ‘boys’, the issue of which boys or girls may be underachieving, which boys or girls are causing concern, and which boys and girls are needing additional support is obscured. For example, when we conducted research into the ways in which OFSTED, the school inspection agency for England, was carrying out its government-assigned role for monitoring how schools were addressing and preventing racism, we noted that a number of senior OFSTED personnel gave race equality a low priority. One member of the OFSTED senior management team told us: ‘Race equality is not a priority. Our priority is underachieving white boys’. Although this stated priority was subsequently denied by the chief inspector of schools (Osler and Morrison, 2000: 58), the comment makes explicit what is often not stated, that public discourse about male ‘underachievement’ is often in fact about white male ‘underachievement’.

Black boys’ ‘underachievement’ or exclusion from school only becomes part of the discourse when the area of policy broadens to include questions of social cohesion, crime and violence.
Researchers, black families and communities have long been concerned about the failure of schools to recognise and realise the academic potential of black children, both boys and girls (see, for example, Coard, 1971; Troyna, 1984; Eggleston et al., 1986). Popular concern about (white) boys’ ‘underachievement’ is much more recent. Not only was the OFSTED leadership unwilling to recognise race equality as an essential element in its campaign to raise standards, it also appeared unconcerned that significant numbers of girls might be ‘underachieving’. Media and professional obsession with boys’ ‘underachievement’ and the success of some girls obscures the educational difficulties of a significant number of other girls.

From Table 1.1 we can see that both sexes have continued to show improvements in examination results in the three-year period from 1998/99 to 2000/01, but girls, as a group, are generally outperforming boys. The official statistics also confirm that among 17–18-year-old students taking A and AS levels, girls are outperforming boys, with an overall higher point score¹ (see Table 1.2). The picture can be seen to be more complicated if we consider examination results in particular school subjects. As Murphy and Elwood (1998) show, children’s learned gender preferences lead them to respond differently to different school subjects, which in turn leads to differential GCSE outcomes and access to particular A level subjects. Recent statistics confirm their findings that at A level, certain GCSE trends are reversed. For example, in 2001 around one in five of the students entering the traditionally male subject of A level physics was female (5,935 girls out of a total number of 27,704). Yet these few girls enjoyed a statistically significant higher success rate, 92 per cent, compared with 89 per cent for boys (DfES, 2001a). Such findings are replicated in New Zealand where far fewer girls than boys study sixth-form physics, but this relatively small number achieve a mean score of 63 per cent – considerably higher than the overall mean of 50 per cent (Alton-Lee and Praat, 2001).

Table 1.2 Average point score for 17–18 year olds entered for GCE A and AS levels in schools and FE sector colleges, 2001

Before the 1990s, the average performance of boys was better than that of girls in both sets of examinations. Yet this inequality seems to have been largely unquestioned, both by the media and by the academic community in general, the only exception being a small number of feminist academics (for example, Spender and Sarah, 1980; Weiner, 1985). The relative silence that existed when boys were generally outperforming girls suggests that this was somehow seen as normal or natural, whereas when girls started to outperform boys, there was suddenly a cause for concern (Arnot et al., 1996; Epstein et al., 1998).

Gender and exclusion

Media representations of school exclusion have been constructed in the context of a more general concern about disaffected youth.
Youth is, of course, a gendered concept, and most media portrayals of disaffected youth have highlighted examples of boys’ disaffection. In England, the official statistics suggest that around 83 per cent of those permanently excluded from school for disciplinary reasons are boys (DfES, 2001b). From such statistics it is easy to conclude that exclusion is largely a male problem. Yet, this is to ignore the significant numbers of girls permanently excluded from school each year; at the peak age for exclusion, 14–15 years (Year 10), one in four permanently excluded students is female (DfES, 2001b).

An examination of media coverage of a number of cases of exclusion in the mid-1990s (Parsons, 1999) revealed the tendency to emphasise the violent nature of the excluded students and the danger they posed to other students and to teachers. One such 13-yearold was repeatedly referred to as violent and a ‘thug’ by a number of national newspapers, with one paper characterising the student’s family as ‘The Family from Hell’ (Parsons, 1999: 130–1). All the examples cited from the media are of boys and this reflects the general tendency of the media to portray school exclusion, more or less exclusively, as something which happens to boys.

Media portrayal of disaffected male youth and their vulnerability to exclusion from school is also reflected in policy initiatives.
The House of Commons Select Committee on Education and Employment presented a detailed summary of the evidence on disaffection in its fifth report covering the 1997/98 session of parliament. The report focused on young people excluded from the benefits of education, whether by absenteeism, formal or informal exclusion from school or by failure to achieve basic skills and minimum formal qualifications. These young people were estimated to be 8 per cent of all 14–16 year-olds and between 9 and 16 per cent of 16–19 year-olds. They are characterised as predominantly male and disproportionately from African Caribbean backgrounds. The report makes a direct link between criminality and schoo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I The policy context
• Part II Girls in and out of school
• Part III Including girls
• Notes
• References