Boost their 'cultural capital': It might be tempting to get boys in a sports-mad school to write essays about big match finals, but it can be better to open up students' minds to the world and help them find interests and passions they may never have known of.

Be clear on exactly what you want everybody to produce and praise boys discreetly when they meet your demands. Often boys will opt out of doing work because in the status-driven world of toxic masculinity it’s easier to not try and fail, than it is to try and risk failure. In their new book, Boys Don't Try? Rethinking Masculinity in Schools, teachers Matt Pinkett and Mark Roberts examine the research and drill down to a core conclusion: boys are not hitting their heights because of a fear of failure. In Boys Don’t Try? Matt Pinkett and Mark Roberts directly link boys’ relative educational underachievement to mistaken attempts to aspire to an “outdated, but nonetheless widespread idea” about what it means to be a “real man” and “a brand of masculinity that leaves many boys floundering” - and make no mistake, it is a brand, sold hard yet often unthinkingly, with very real casualties. The message is clear: we have a lot of work to do.Secondly, Roberts invokes Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital to argue that teaching boys content they find relevant does them a disservice by not giving them access to “certain knowledge, behaviours, and skills” that are “highly valued in society”. Teaching only highly relevant content also reinforces low expectations of what boys can and need to learn.

Chapters on violence, sexism in schools, peer pressure and relationships offer evidence-based and practical information for schools wishing to lift the schooling outcomes and behaviours of boys. The topics are grounded in real-life scenarios, which also help to give the views credibility and a sense of familiarity for teachers. The language is alarming for parents and teachers of boys. We hear of “a crisis in masculinity” in schools and about how “failing boys” are not reaching their academic potential. If we mask this fear with the bravura of ‘not trying,’ it allows us to hide our vulnerabilities and provide an excuse for underachieving. Setting by ability is more counterproductive than productive. The implication is that it should be avoided wherever possible. (For more on this, see NACE Trustee Liz Allen CBE’s review of Reassessing ‘Ability’ Grouping: Improving Practice for Equity and Attainment.)I was teaching poetry to a low set year 9 class, many of whom had previously expressed very negative ideas about the police, often in reference to their own dealings with them at the weekend. As a department we had already selected a collection of ‘disturbed voices’ poetry, perhaps in an unconscious attempt to engage some key boys in the year. In this lesson, I decided to get students to respond to Armitage’s ‘Hitcher’ in the form of a police interview. I asked their opinions and they helped me rephrase the writing frame to make it ‘more realistic’. As I had hoped, the boys showed interest and produced more writing than they often did. Yet, clearly I was guilty of the becoming a ‘cultural accomplice’, merely reinforcing the idea that they, as disadvantaged boys, were natural ‘troublemakers’, certainly not analytical thinkers or, god-forbid, the kind of students who might actually like poetry. The inspector, incidentally, told me that the task was excellently engaging, but clearly judged the students for their in depth knowledge of police procedures.