From The Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey. It's Thursday, April three, twenty twenty five. It's tea day for the global economy, with exporters around the world waiting to find out who will be smashed by Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs. The Australian government is considering taking the fight to the World Trade Organization if Australian producers are on
the receiving end. Another day, another candidate for Victoria's Chief Police Commissioner, the acting top cop, has declared he doesn't want the job, and now a former senior officer, Sir Ken Jones, has put his hand up. That's an exclusive live now at Beaustralian dot com dot au. What's going on with Boys? A new study shows boys slipping further behind in schools as debate about the mental health and
online influences of boys dominates the culture. With Netflix's smash hit series Adolescens Today, how young men became the focal point of a society's anxieties.
Netflix has made its hit series Adolescence free to watch for secondary schools in an effort to help pupils understand the impact of misogyny and the dangers are being radicalized.
Online addresses the very real dangers of knife crime, misogyny and online content. Girls are now outpacing boys in the classroom and it's having long lasting effects, as the.
Performance gap between boys and girls has widened nationally since twenty sixteen.
Boys, they're the topic of the moment, are our sons, nephews, little brothers and grandkids. Okay, while the adult world is still distinctly male dominated, from earnings to representation in parliament to CEO jobs, there's a shift in the younger years, with reports showing boys and young men are falling behind girls and women at school, in universities and in early
career earning potential. The latest evidence a report from Catholic Schools New South Wales showing boys are over represented in the lowest performing cohort.
Australia has done such a great job in getting girls to succeed in those traditional boys subjects like maths, science, technology, those stem subjects. However, it has come at the expense of some boys.
Natasha Beta is The Australian's Education editor.
This study from the Catholic Schools New South Wales says that boys do worse in disruptive environments. So the classrooms rowdy and there are a lot of distractions. The boys are more easily distracted and their education suffers as a result. They're more likely to be top performers in STEM. However, they're as likely as girls to be the poorest performers in STEM. And what I think is the most worrying thing is that they are twice as likely as girls
to score in the lowest performance bands in reading and writing. Now, that is fundamental to every part of your education. So if boys aren't learning to read and write really well in primary school, they are going to struggle in all other subjects. Another issue is that the curriculum has now been designed so that everything's sort of about an essay really, so even maths and engineering and technology. I'm surprised by how much of that is not sort of hands on
experiments or doing equations under exam conditions. It's about writing an essay sometimes you know, thousands of words on a mathematical concept. Now that is something that inherently will advantage girls who are better at reading and writing, whereas boys might have much better skills at those perhaps logical or technological subjects. But there be being performance punished because they're being assessed on written examinations.
Yeah, so there's change happening in the way subjects are taught and in the expectations of students. But is there also something happening do you think with this generation of boys, who I guess are Generation Alpha.
Look, I think part of the issue is that schooling in particular is a very feminized profession and boys need male role models. They need really good adult role models. Unfortunately, a lot of them are finding them on the Internet. So the andrew Tates of the world, the conspiracy theorists, the misogynists.
I think being a female would be a disaster.
I mean, what do you really do You get a guy, you love your guy, Maybe you get some nice meals, you buy a handbag, you get pregnantly. There's no conquest, there's no domination.
This is very worrying because boys weren't exposed to that in previous generations, because they would be exposed to their own family members, or their teachers or their footy coach, et cetera. There's a teaching method known as explicit instruction, which is essentially old school teaching methods, which really benefits boys in particular. Benefits all students, but particularly for boys.
They thrive on having things explained to them very clearly, very sequentially, and then having the teacher let them practice getting immediate feedback.
There's a lot of information here.
Let's step through it slowly and make sure we digest everything properly.
Part of the punt.
You've got one hundred kilograms of potatoes which are nineteen to nine percent water. Now I've got a really great question. This is Eddie Woo, a New South Wales high school math teacher who puts his lessons on YouTube. He calls it Woo Tube and has nearly two million subscribers.
Hold on a second.
Wait, you're right, You're still not quite there yet. He's engaging style, credited with transforming the education of countless kids, is fun and effective because he's clearly the teacher. He's not asking the kids to work it all out for themselves. He's teaching them how to get to the answers. Some of you are there, but others of you are not, so I want to make sure we all get there together.
Okay, they're left out.
To dry and then this is very important for children's learning. It's something that the coalition. The federal opposition Education spokeswoman Senator Sarah Henderson is adamant that every school must be compelled to use explicit instruction. It is up to the states and territories to do this. It's slowly gaining traction. I think the dominant teaching method of the past couple of decades, which is choose your own adventure. Here's a problem, you go off and solve it on your own and
ask any questions that you might have. That does not serve a lot of children, and particularly for boys, it's disadvantaging them.
One of the things that has changed in schooling since say I was at school, maybe you were at school, Natasha, is that discipline has changed. So once upon a time it was corporal punishment, then it changed to being about exclusion. You know that if you did the wrong thing, you were sent out of the classroom, or maybe you were suspended. We hear teachers saying that they don't feel empowered to
actually discipline kids anymore. Is that part of the picture with boys that perhaps they responded better to a much more binary form of classroom management.
Look, I've just spoken to a principal who was telling me about the importance of structure, routine, boundaries, and consequences for boys even more than girls. And he is saying that they thrive in a structure when they know what they're supposed to do. They step over the line, there's a consequence. Nobody wants to bring back the cane or
corporal punishment. I think they were horrible times. However, the pendulum has swung back the other way, and we have some very entitled parents out there who will automatically take the side of their child. They will threaten to sue teachers or schools. They will become physically violent, they'll punch teachers or principles. I think it is just shocking that they should be standing behind the teachers and giving the
teachers the authority to manage classrooms. Another issue I think, though, is it inherently is with the curriculum that we have a curriculum that rewards sitting still and looking straightforward and being quiet the whole time. It doesn't reward doing things with your hands or asking Lots and lots of questions.
Coming up. Are all boys schools doomed? And will education shift any votes at the federal election?
Well, I'm an old boy. The school and my son is also an old boy, and the intention was always that i'd have a grandson, but I won't bringing to a co ed school.
Last year, new students attending the prestigious Newington College in Sydney's Inn West were greeted by a throng of parents and old boys at the school's or Nate front gates. But it wasn't the welcoming committee. It was a protest. Basically, they've been setting the parents a lie for many years. The schools plan to go co ed by twenty thirty three prompted a backlash from alumni and parents, and it's
even the subject of legal action. Stan Moore's Newington College is being sued in the Supreme Court after a student claimed it's violating its one hundred and fifty two year old trust by admitting female students. Newington's move to co education is a sign of the times. Are we going
to lose something there? Natasha? Do you think if boys' schools essentially die out because boys' parents don't want the boys to be surrounded by only male influences, that we disadvantage some boys who might have done better in that environment.
I think we need to be creative about this. I've spoken to schools that are co ed, but they will have girls only classes and boys owned classes. Now, I think that's brilliant that they can study in an academic environment that is a same sex environment, but they can mingle in the school yard. I do think that we live in a world that is co ed. It can be quite artificial to segregate boys and girls, and I do think that it's healthy to learn how to get on with the other sex.
If there was one thing that schools could do better for boys, what would it be? Is it, for example, getting more male teachers back into classrooms.
I think having more male teachers would be fantastic. I think also celebrating other things that boys are good at. We have too much emphasis on just the academic outcomes. I think we need to change our assessment methods AI. What is going to happen, and what is happening is kids are just cutting and pasting everything out of AI. That is not learning right. So if we can go back to more practical hands on learning, we have more tests where kids are doing things without calculators, etc. I'm
very old fashioned this way. I do believe that human brains need to learn how to do things themselves.
So what's the election arithmetic on this.
Jason Clair, the federal Education Minister, has done some magnificent work in trying to fix teacher training programs, introducing phonics. He's put all of these targets into school funding agreements, so that schools have to have a phonics test and a numeracy test in near one. They have to have literacy coaches, they have to have small group tutoring, better mental health. It's the first time we've ever had in
any targets tied to funding. Now, the Coalition agrees with all these things, but thinks that Labor has been too slow and too soft and too inefficient in imposing it. So they just plan to do the same thing, but on steroids.
Right.
So the other issue is funding. Labor is saying that the Coalition will cut funding. The Coalition is saying it will not cut funding. Labor is claiming that it's pumped all of this extra money through school agreements. However, that money was not in the federal budget. It's written in an invisible ink. So I think the debate will not
be so much over money this time. It will be about the curriculum and about what parents see as a failure of systems to ensure that children are mastering basic skills and learning to think for themselves.
There needs to be now is The Australian's Education Editor. You can read her exclusives and her analysis anytime at the Australian dot com dot au