Education of Boys

Earlier this year a national Commission was established to look into the education of boys. The focus of the work of the Commission is clearly about the issue of the underperformance of boys from the schooling system. It does look like there is a problem to be addressed.

My take on this is that the schooling model is demonstrably faulty and it will be interesting to see if the Commission accepts this.

In our work we don’t find a problem because we respond to the needs of each individual. At one level therefore I would not want to see support for one gender over another. However given that there is some serious support for this Commission and it has members with some standing in the educational world, it seemed too good an opportunity not to make a case for radical change.

Below are the two main sections of my submission. The first is what the Commission asked for about the diagnosis of the problem. The second was in response to their request for excellent or innovative practice. In the latter I submitted some cases from our work.

I will start with some comments on my lived experience to indicate why I have wished to respond to your survey. Then I comment on the general issue of boys and education.

Class & Poverty

I came from a working-class area in the south of Manchester into a grammar school and then the university system. What I resented was to see how the class system worked to keep out people from what are seen as top jobs.

During the late 1950s I was a member of a gang. It didn’t seem to me to be anything unusual because that’s just what you did if you lived in an area like mine. In the gang were people with equal ability to me, but somehow did not escape the council estate and its constrictions. I remember a boy, Mike, who died at the age of 17 in a motorbike accident and the person who was closest to him said he pretty much killed himself through his recklessness. What was interesting was that he was amazing at making bombs. I should say that he never used such bombs against people but did make use of the destructiveness of bombs for vandalism purposes.

 These were the days when there was no Internet and no computers. And yet somehow not only had he found out how to make simple pipe bombs, but he also made nitro-glycerine.  I have no idea how he learned that because it’s complicated stuff. I could not think that there were books to access and certainly there were no other sources that I knew of how to do this. However somehow, he had learned this. I thought what a waste it was that someone with the ability who had had a difficult family situation and never been helped to get out of his own situation.

My own experience in attending a very selective boys grammar school from 1954 was that it was a real cultural shock. I never felt that I fitted in – and some of the teachers made that clear to me that they certainly didn’t welcome my presence in the school. I almost had to learn a new language and way of communicating. I felt that I lived in two worlds; the gang outside school and my artificial life in school.

Since that time I have learned much more about the impact of the class system and how even to this day there has been no real improvement in supporting working-class boy through the education system. Schools are designed as middle-class institutions and if you don’t fit then you have a problem. Mike was better than me at chemistry (clearly), yet I managed to get onto a chemistry degree, and he didn’t have a chance.

I want then to pick up on the notion of class and poverty because clearly that is a factor. The evidence is pretty convincing on young working-class males. I want to draw on the research and analysis of Blower (2025) as an example. As he shows ‘the premise that young working-class men have deep deficiency which needs to be corrected’ underpins far too much of the action addressed to such groups. He goes on to say ‘young working-class men, many of whom have already experienced acute marginalisation, are positioned as problematic through their very existence. Activities and interventions are designed on the premise that they are perpetrators of misogyny and gender-based violence in waiting, even if they are not aware of it yet.’ (P 16).

He identifies with Barnett (2018) in his concerns about the negative impact of the classroom and boys being labelled as class clowns or troublemakers. He cites a teacher who has drawn on the research of Jones and Myhill (2004) and Jackson (2010) and who has recognised the reality of the systemic bias in the average secondary school classroom against working-class boys. He shows that confronting teachers with the extensive research has not been easy and the rejection of these findings has been common.

Response to this

Having had a successful career in academia and in business including having been chief executive of a business school I was persuaded to do work with young people 25 years ago. Given my background as a researcher I wanted to look at the evidence about young people and learning and then create something in response to that.

I recruited other people and we set up what would now be called a learning community. In the community we took young people who had either been excluded from school or excluded themselves and those who schools sent to us because they didn’t know what to do with them. The community operated on the basis that the young people aged 9 to 16 could learn anything they wanted and in any way they wanted so long as they didn’t hinder the learning of others.

Obviously it was a bit more complicated than that and having developed a methodology which I call Self Managed Learning when working in both academia and in business I modified that methodology to suit the work with young people. I currently chair the Self Managed Learning Alliance CIC which has a website with information about Self Managed Learning on it. Having earlier written a number of books for the business world in 2021 I wrote ‘Self Managed Learning and the New Educational Paradigm’ (Routledge) specifically about Self Managed Learning College, the name for our learning community.

In what follows I will comment on how we responded to specific issues and then under later headings that you have in this survey such as examples of excellent or innovative practice and will go into a bit more detail about specifics. This will include work done in schools to help young people manage their own learning within that context.

Literacy of Boys

Research by Creese (2016) and others has suggested a figure of almost 50% of prisoners lacking functional literacy.

This information, of course, specifically applies to working-class males. What is interesting is that probably 99% of them attended school or at least were on a school role even if their attendance was not great. This is a shocking indictment of schooling which creates a large numbers of males unable to cope in what might be classed as normal society.

If you think of the options available post-16 for someone who is illiterate, then there are not many jobs these days where you could remain in employment and be unable to read. Even if you’re a cleaner you have to be able to read the labels on products you use. A life of crime is then fairly obvious as a solution for many of these working-class males.

Given the current crisis relating to prison population and the desire for the government to spend large sums of money creating ever more prisons it is staggering that nobody seems to have looked at the opportunity to do something about schooling for young working-class males. The notion that schools can with impunity turnout young people unable to cope in society is a staggering in justice and produces huge social costs.

Sherwood, 2019, quotes research that says: ‘It is estimated that 9 million adults in the UK are functionally illiterate and one in four British five-year-olds struggle with basic vocabulary. Three quarters of white working-class boys failed to achieve the government’s benchmark at age 16. Research also shows that functionally illiterate adults are more likely to be socially isolated and lack self-esteem’.

In comparison to this evidence from schooling, the research evidence from home educated children is much more positive. The best research on this is Pattison, 2016. She showed from her in depth research on home educating families that children are not taught literacy, but develop it through practices in the home and the opportunities they are given to manage their own learning. The children in her study might learn at different ages, but they all became literate without the use of classrooms or formal teaching. In some cases, the parents themselves did not know how the child came to be able to read and write. Because the parents responded to the needs of children, then in the absence of a uniform approach children could learn in ways that suited their own predilections.

Response to this

Our approach in our learning community was first of all to find out about the person and why they were with us. Then we could help them learn whatever they needed. We had a number of young males who came functionally illiterate including one boy who could only write his name and no more. Since our model was to start with the person and then help them to learn what they needed all students leaving at 16 were functionally literate and over 24 years we had no NEETs.

Mental Health of Boys

In relation to the mental health of boys, we now have a wealth of evidence from the USA that is undoubtedly relevant to other rich countries, like Britain. This shows that there is a direct link from the mental health and suicide issues of young people to their school.

Gray, 2018, has an excellent summary of rigorous research studies. As he points out he had, four years earlier, provided evidence from a mental health facility in Connecticut. This data revealed that the average monthly number of emergency mental health intakes for school-age children, declined from 185 in May (the last full month of school) to 102 in June, (the month in which school is finishing), and then down to 74 and 66 respectively in July and August (the two full months of freedom from school). In September, the rate starts to climb up again. This is very clear evidence that when young people are out of school, they are less likely to have emergency mental health requirements - and that school quite clearly has a negative impact on the mental health of many young people.

Since Gray’s earlier evidence he cites other studies now that support what he found. Lueck et al, 2015, studied the rate of psychiatric visits to a large paediatric emergency mental health department in Los Angeles. They found that the rate of such visits in weeks when school is in session was 118% greater than in weeks when school was not in session. In other words, the rate of emergency psychiatric visits was more than twice as high during school weeks as it was during non-school weeks. Plemmons et al, 2018, found the rate of hospitalisation of school-age children for suicidal ideation and attempts increased dramatically by nearly 300% of the seven years of this study from 2008 to 2015 and each year the rate of such hospitalisations was significantly higher in school months than in the summer. Gray summarises these research studies by saying ‘increase in suicidal ideation and attempts over time is the result of the increased stress from this of school over this time period, and not attributable to some factors independent of schooling.’ (P.  2)

Although the figures above are for young people in general we know that for instance in terms of suicides it is a much greater issue for males.

Anecdotal evidence from UK supports this more thorough research from USA. For instance, Jack Goulder working as a doctor in an ADHD clinic for children wrote an article (‘A diagnosis can sweep away guilt: the delicate art of treating ADHD’, 16 July 2024, The Guardian)).

 In one paragraph he stated: “The clinic was open every day, but during the school holidays a predictable calm would come over it. The waiting room sat mostly empty, the phones rang less and appointments tended to be cancelled at the last minute. Why children needed us less when they were on holiday was not always clear, but we took it as a stark lesson in the stresses of going to school.”

It’s fascinating that this was just a throwaway statement in a much longer piece about mental health issues related especially to boys with ADHD. This phenomenon is known to many other practitioners, yet it doesn’t seem like anybody has bothered to take seriously the notion that the evidence is that schools are one of the major causes of mental health problems in boys.

Response to this

Independent researchers studying our students indicated that the majority had mental health problems with increased anxiety levels featuring for almost 90% of the students. Given that we were not a school and did not have classrooms or an imposed curriculum or indeed the authoritarian rules common in schools we were able to respond to each individual in terms of their needs. The community created its own rules and we had strong support structures in place to attend to the well-being of every individual student. Most importantly all students knew that they were all equally valued as we did not engage in inappropriate testing, for instance.

Violence by Boys

Assumptions about the inevitability of violence by boys are rife. As I write this there has today been a press report on the trial of a young boy attacking a teacher with a knife.

Firstly, though, I can summarise some of the more psychological evidence that comes out of school shootings by boys in the USA, though there have been school shootings in other countries. Clearly the USA has had more problems with this partly because of the easy access to guns. However, school shooters (boys) there clearly had some of the following problems: fragile identities; a lack of social skills; depression; anxiety; loneliness or isolation; suicidal tendencies and a lack of empathy towards others. These factors have been identified in research by Langman (2009), Newman et al (2004) and Cullen (2009). Note that not all school shooters had all of these characteristics.

There are interesting interpretations as to why these shootings occurred and the Alternative Education Research Organisation in its newsletter after one of the school shootings explained that the main factors seemed to be that it’s shootings in schools. The newsletter said. ‘We don’t have teenagers doing mass library shootings, museum shootings or park shootings. What is the difference? Libraries, museums and parks are not compulsory or authoritarian, you go there when you want. You do what you want and leave when you want. They don’t judge you, test you, grade you, suspend you or kick you out. Schools need to change. Democratic and learner centred schools don’t have mass shootings. Statistics verify that’ (1).

Research by Langman (2009), Newman et al (2004) and Cullen (2009) confirm the opinions expressed above. Newman et al point out that the ‘attacks have been on institutions’ (P. 264). Langman is convinced that the ‘murders they [boys] committed were not inevitable outcomes of their personalities, but actions they committed in a state of crisis. Had they been safely maintained through their crises, there is no reason to assume they would have become murderers later in life’. (P. 154) He goes on to suggest that a strategy is that boys who are struggling socially need to have connections to adults to help them through that. But he also points out that boys need to feel safe in school and that while ‘bullying itself does not cause student school shootings anything that contributes to students’ misery, fear and rage can play a part in driving them to violence’. (P. 193).

Newman et al point (2004) out that the social structure of the schools leads to what they call ‘information loss’, and that there were warning signs such that tragedies could have been prevented if the information that was available had been shared. The problems that they identify are problems about the system itself and structural arrangements of secrecy - and that information that doesn’t fit the operating paradigm is dismissed. As they point out ‘problems can go unnoticed in school precisely because they do not disrupt its basic function. Individual student problems often do not interrupt daily routines and may therefore fester unnoticed until a major eruption, such as shooting, thrusts it into view.’ (P. 102).

Further ‘that the culture and social structure of public schools leads to information loss, which in turn obscures the pain and anger inside some students - emotions that, in rare cases, boil over into rampage shootings. The question is not how individuals could have missed the warning signs, but rather how the organisation of public schools prevents them from recognising and processing the information correctly.’ (P. 79). This evidence ‘of systemic distortion: information that does not relate to an organisation’s ambitions or survival gets filtered out. Important information “disappears”, not because of intentional decisions to ignore it, but because “people deliberately do not seek out unfavourable information.”’. (P. 88)

Response to this

What I have described above is, of course, on the dramatic end of the spectrum of school problems. However, this notion that boys take out their anger on schools as an institution is relevant. In the UK we don’t have easy access to guns, but there is easy access to incendiary devices such that we find that boys do attempt to burn down their school and, in some cases, succeed. The evidence is that around one school per week is subject to an arson attack and where the perpetrators are tracked down they are generally current or ex-pupils of the school. These boys don’t feel that they really belong in the school. Head teachers typically talk about ‘my school’ and classroom teachers talk about ‘my classroom’. They know that for many teachers their job would be wonderful if it wasn’t for boys.

For us as a small learning community we worked hard at making certain that we did know what’s going on amongst all our students, and this can sometimes mean being appraised of issues that might occur away from the community. But if one is taking a stance of working with the whole person, then these other outside influences may need to be accommodated. 

Conclusion

There is more evidence on issues affecting boys and young men. However I hope that the case I have made here, based on solid evidence, is sufficient to support the concerns that I have discussed.

Note

1.        The Alternative Education Resource Organization produces an excellent newsletter on alternatives to school. The quote is from the edition of February 2018. The site is www.educationrevolution.org.

References

Barnett, L. A. (2018) ‘The education of playful boys: class clowns in the classroom’, Frontiers in Psychology, 9: article 232

Blower, A. (2025) Lost boys: How Education is Failing Young Working-Class Men, Bristol: Policy Press.

Creese, B.  (2016) ‘An assessment of the English and maths skills levels of prisoners in England’. In London Review of Education, Volume 14, Number 3, November 2016

Cullen, D. (2009) Columbine. New York: Hachette

Cunningham, I (2021) Self Managed Learning and the New Educational Paradigm. London: Routledge.

Gray, P. (2018) ‘Children’s & Teens’ Suicides Related to the School Calendar’. Posted May 31, 2018 at https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/freedom-learn/201805/children-s-teens-suicides-related-the-school-calendar

Jackson, C. (2010) ‘ “I’ve been sort of laddish with them…one of the gang” teachers’ perceptions of “laddish” boys and how to deal with them’, Gender and Education 22(5): 505-19

Jones, S. and Myhill, D. (2004) ‘ “Troublesome boys” and “compliant girls” : gender identity and perceptions of achievement and underachievement’,  British Journal of Sociology of Education, 25 (5): 547-61

Langman. P. (2009) Why Kids Kill. New York: St Martins Griffin

Lueck, C., et al (2015). Do emergency paediatric psychiatric visits for danger to self or others correspond to times of school attendance?  American Journal of Emergency Medicine, 33, 682-684.

Newman, K. S., Fox, C., Harding, D. J., Mehta, J. and Roth, W. (2004) Rampage. The social roots of school shootings. New York: Basic Books.

Pattinson, H. (2016) Rethinking learning to read. Shrewsbury, UK: Education Heretics Press.

Excellent and innovative practice

In Martha Lucas’s publication on ‘Purpose and Agency’ (CPRMB, 2026), she provides an excellent case for her statement that ‘personal fulfilment and societal progress come from individuals making choices that lead towards goals.’ Her analysis of Aristotle and Mill provides support for her analysis of agency with comments such as ‘intrinsic goals pursued via personal autonomy’ are crucial and that as Aristotle points out essentially ‘the highest and most virtuous way of living is achievable only via personal agency used to achieve one’s true capacity’.

I want to give some examples of the practical application of this analysis and why she’s right that ‘denial of freedom is a form of poverty and freedom should be measured in what people are actually able to be and do’ in this case citing Amartya Sen.

Case one

This is an example of a programme in a secondary school in East Sussex. Our team had been running some successful Self Managed Learning groups in the school, initially with what the school identified and labelled as gifted and talented; and then with some pupils who were seen as low achieving.

I was asked to work with a group of six year 8 boys who were in and out of exclusion and where the school predicted that probably most of them would end up permanently excluded by the end of the year. At the start of the programme I invited in parents and the students who’d been put forward for the programme. As might be expected not all the parents came. However one boy, Michael, happened to live close to the school and ran home and dragged his mother in saying that he wanted her support for what we were going to do.

What we were planning was to work with groups of six for a couple of months. Note that we never work with groups larger than this. The group would need to work within the rules of the school; however individuals would have freedom to learn anything they wanted and in any way they wanted as this is part of the Self Managed Learning model and is linked to issues that Martha Lucas identifies in terms of goals and agency.

Clearly for the individuals the notion that they would get out of the classroom every couple of weeks for an hour or so was attractive. We launched a programme where I teamed up with a member of the school staff who was an assistant to a year head. Her background was as a school receptionist and therefore she tended to know all the students, as much as one can in a large secondary school. She and other school staff working with other groups attended a workshop to help them understand how we operated and our role in the group as that of a learning assistant.

 If we want to be more formal we might label the role as ‘group mentoring’. But note that the emphasis is on working with the group and that one of the key underpinnings of research is that the biggest influence on teenagers is the peer group (see e.g. Blackmore, 2018). Our aim is therefore to develop a peer group which works for good rather than for ill and which can support each individual during the time of the group but hopefully continuing beyond it.

We had the first meeting of the group after the initial programme launch with parents and we held it in a local youth centre. The first thing we do in such a learning group is to agree ground rules. As there was a tendency for them to be climbing on the chairs and generally messing about we agreed one of the rules would be no climbing on chairs and we also, at their own insistence, agreed on a three strikes and you’re out rule.

I wrote on the whiteboard the list of agreed ground rules most of which would not be controversial. As the group progressed there were some transgressions of these, so I would put a check mark against that rule and the name of the student. After a while Tim had three marks against him for climbing on chairs. I asked the group if they then agreed he would need to leave the group. They agreed and my co-learning assistant (staff member) took him out.

What surprised the group was that this was a collective decision as opposed to a decision by teacher. The individual who was sent out was shocked to have had to this feedback from his peer group that what he was doing wasn’t acceptable. Incidentally in the following group meetings he was the one who was most diligent in making certain we kept tabs on breaches of the rules, though after that first meeting there were no major problems.

The second thing we needed to agree at the first meeting was how the group would operate and what its role was.  One interesting thing was the boys said that they really liked football that they figured it would be great to play football for an hour when they came in. I offered them 10 minutes and we negotiated 20 minutes – and that was agreed by the group. It seemed to be a sensible decision given that they tended to come in having spent their lunch money on Red Bull, cigarettes and sweets and that they were not therefore in a good state to do significant learning.

When we met then for a second time we went down to the gym and they played football for 20 minutes. All I did was to stand on the sidelines and call out when it was five minutes to go - and then when it was 20 minutes. They organised themselves perfectly and behaved well and happily came back to the room after 20 minutes.

At a subsequent meeting we were going down to the gym and they were somewhat ahead of me as they were hurrying to get playing. A teacher challenged them as to what they were doing and what was amusing was at the time I had a professor titled so they said ‘Professor Cunningham is taking us to the gym. So my professorial status trumped anything that the teacher had and that is interesting example of how one can use status.

One of the features of the school was the use of report cards - that is if they misbehaved but not sufficiently to be excluded, they would have a card which they would take to each class and have to have it signed off as to their behaviour. At the second meeting four of them came in with their report cards, as the other two were only allowed back into school from their exclusion in order to come on the programme. They asked me to complete the forms at the end of the meeting and I said no this is a decision for the group. At the end of the meeting you will make a self assessment as to what you think should be on the form and the group will then decide whether they agree with your self-assessment and if so I will then agree it and fill in the form appropriately. This was again somewhat novel for them, but it worked perfectly and once they got into the routine it was how we handled things at every meeting.

The third thing we did at the opening meeting was to talk about what we call a learning agreement. This is the notion that they could come up with what they wanted to learn but it needs to be agreed by the group - and myself and the school staff member would be part of that agreement. The first question we ask is about people’s history given that every person today is 100% result of the past. It’s either in the genes, you’ve learned it or you gone through some physical change. Whatever it is that’s always past and therefore to know something about someone it is important to understand their past. We use a technique called lifelines - they draw the line of the ups and downs of their life up to now. It’s good because the person does not need to be literate to do it. It is fascinating hearing their histories and the experiences that they’d had through life and through schooling and why to some extent they were in this position they were in.

The second question we ask is about how people see themselves now. The members of the group tended to have negative views about how they saw themselves - for instance as failing in school and not necessarily being very able etc. Part of the problem was that they were developing an identity as rejects and of not being valued within the system. Part of my role in these situations is very much to challenge their general sense of themselves in order to look at what precisely happened in their lives that has caused them to end up where they are.

After asking them about their past and present my question after that is where they see themselves going in the future. This then leads to setting up goals. One boy had come in in a troubled state and was running around the room saying that he was never going to do this and it was all stupid. The other five were somewhat passive and I think they had a sense of why he was angry. (We knew that his mother had moved out before Christmas and his father was a busy taxi driver-and he felt angry with both of them, with himself and with the school.)

 I ran around the room with him and then said ‘I can’t help you unless I know what you’d like to do and who you like to be in future’ and he was not exactly being polite in responding to it and I knew that he had been trouble earlier for some violent acts that he’d perpetrated in the school and that school was edging towards a permanent exclusion with him. I said from the research if you leave school with no qualifications and you have been excluded there could be limited options for the future. In five years time you could be dead of a drug overdose, you could have killed yourself, you could be imprisoned, you could be in a mental hospital - pick one of these outcomes. This rather shocked him and the group - but eventually he calmed down and did start to come up with things that he wanted to do.

The initial thing the group got into about goals was they’d like to be professional footballers and so I took their suggestion seriously and I arranged for the England under 16 National Coach to come to the group and talk to them. I had been doing a project with the Football Association on the development of young players and so luckily I had this contact.

When he visited he took them onto the playing field and he did some football drills and talked about what it was like to become a professional footballer. They pretty much came to the conclusion that this wasn’t for them, but they enjoyed being able to ask about lots of the well-known footballers that he had been involved with as his job was to develop coaches of younger players and also to coach the England under 16 team.

Gradually the group started to think about the fact they could come up with things that might be of value. They said ‘I think that we are pretty practical’ so we agreed that we would have a trip to the local further education college. That was arranged and they really enjoyed seeing the plumbing and carpentry and particularly the car body shop. This led them to understand that it was possible to pursue a career in some of the examples they saw in the college.

To follow the trip to the college the group decided to go down to the local garage. There the supervisor showed them, for instance, how he was working off a laptop to order parts and that working with cars is not about being under a vehicle with a spanner and oily rag - that in this day and age it’s electronics and computers that are the key issue. He told them that if you are going to work with cars you really need to know science and obviously be literate and numerate.

When it came to Sean he then started to think about goals. He came up with the notion that he really wanted to work in a garage and that he needed to respond to the supervisor saying that he wants people with NVQs and not just an unskilled labourer.

Interestingly at the end of programme review, which we always have, the Principal was talking with a number of students and said to Sean ‘why are you now taking learning seriously and being in the classroom learning science, English and maths’. He replied that he wanted to work in the garage and he needed these subjects to be able to do that.

Apparently his change of heart was a bit of a shock for teachers. His usual habit was to come into school, tell the teacher to F off and on his way home steel some booze from a supermarket and sit at home playing on his Xbox drinking and smoking. And in the process laughing to himself that he was enjoying himself while the idiots in the classroom were being bored.

For him to change he needed to have an opportunity to think about the realities of what he could actually do. Sean also set the goal of giving up smoking and at the penultimate meeting of the group Michael was sniffing at Sean saying ‘you’ve been smoking’. Sean said ‘I have just been with people who smoke and I haven’t been smoking’. So the group searched him and searched his bag and, in the end, came to the conclusion that he was quite probably telling the truth. I know that the American terminology will say this is ‘tough love’ -  to me it was more about the power of the group in supporting individuals and showing the value of the group process.

I have mentioned one student as an example of the process but all six set goals and worked towards these. None of the group was permanently excluded.

Case two

I was asked to run a pilot programme for boys in years eight and nine in a special school. I was given the files on the six boys ahead of time and they all had a plethora of labels such as EBD, ASC, ADHD, OCD etc. The process of forming and developing the learning group was similar to that described in the previous case.

In early group sessions we had to explore and agree ground rules. In one incident one boy who was seen by the school is very much out of control was on his screen and was accessing some inappropriate images. Even though the school claimed to have proper controls. This was against a rule that we had agreed and so I asked the other five and they agreed this was a breach of the rules. We had planned a trip to the local fire station so I then said to the group would it be appropriate if the boy Sam did not come on the trip unless his behaviour changed and he kept to the rules. The group agreed to that. Sam was, of course, shocked at this feedback from peers and whilst he was always lively at least after that we had no explicit breach of rules. And therefore he came on the trip.

In one meeting Sam had talked about his interest in goals which might lead him to join the army. He opined that, of course, this wasn’t the kind of thing for women. I asked if the group would like to visit from the army recruitment people to which they agreed. I made certain that for the visit there was by a male private, a male lance corporal and a female sergeant.

As a treat, at the end of the programme, we went out to the local hotel to give everyone a nice lunch. It was quite a surprise for the group to have this privilege and there were only a couple of glitches one being a boy who insisted on doing Michael Jackson moonwalks in the restaurant and another was where a boy actually did pass out. He collapsed into his meal, and we had to arrange to get him back to the school safely.

After the programme one of the boys did a PowerPoint presentation to the morning school assembly, which was quite a shock to the head and staff because he was seen as a very withdrawn autistic boy. And he did a brilliant job in describing the programme and what people had learned from it. I’d assumed that was my last attendance at the school as is often the case with schools. However I learned that I was being invited back to the morning assembly and I while was sitting there Sam got up and asked me to come forward. He’d made for me a rather nice batik which he presented to me.

Case three

I will give here examples of three boys in the group in the very early days of our learning community as examples of dealing with difference within the programme.

Darren was sent to us by a school because he was a selective mute, as they labelled him. He was a 15 year old who had never spoken to staff in the school, never done any work, never made eye contact with people and school had really no idea what to do.

I found out from his mother that in primary school a teacher had said to him; ‘you’re stupid Darren’. Darren had quite rationally, as far as he was concerned, decided not to talk to teachers again if they had that view of him. It was, of course, a terrible thing for a teacher to comment on him in making such a generalised statement. He was a very introverted boy and did have what is seen as some learning difficulties, but we were able to help him. At that time the statementing approach was used, replaced now by Education and Health Care Plans. After a couple of terms with him we had to go into a statement review meeting and he rather shocked the staff by speaking up, making eye contact and explaining what he had been learning with us.

___________________

James had come to us because his parents took him out of school; they could see he wasn’t learning anything there. He was a 14-year-old boy who was completely illiterate. He could just about write his own name, but he certainly couldn’t read even the simplest text.

He had absorbed an identity of again a failure - someone who was not valued within the system. What we found out was that he was highly skilled technically. He had, for instance, been making money for himself by asking other boys about what kind of bikes they’d like and then he would buy the parts and make the bike - and made a nice profit from the process.

We also encouraged him to develop these abilities whilst at the same time helping him with his literacy. He described working with a friend on a local farm where they found an old truck and they managed to take apart the engine, clean it up, repair it, put it back together and make the truck go. I remember saying what a great job that was because I couldn’t understand how he could achieve that given that he couldn’t read a manual As I explained to him when I used to service my car I had a manual and a knew from reading the manual what I was supposed to do and the way you take parts out then you put them back. How did he do it? He said it was simple that he just took things out and fixed them and put them back where they came from. I explained to him that probably 99% of the population couldn’t do that. He also talked about working in the pits at banger racing, probably illegally, and similarly helping erect and take down the local fair.

We managed to help him develop his literacy enough to be able to go to a further education college when he was 16 and he was welcomed with open arms because of his technical ability.

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Tim was introduced to us by his mother. He had been out of school for two years - technically home educated but had been doing little apart from drawing. He was a Goth and dressed totally in black. When we were able to look at his drawings they were all in black and white. One of our team had a background in psychotherapy and was convinced he was clinically depressed. However, we encouraged his art and also his ability to come out of himself and engage with others.

When he reached what would have been year 11 in school, we arranged for his mother to take him to the local further education college with his portfolio. They were hugely impressed and said if he could get four GCSEs they would take him on a BTEC course. In reality he got a C two D’s and an E under the old GCSE system, but the college accepted him anyway because of the quality of his portfolio. And by that time he had started to move on and made friends and was starting to be able to deal with colour.

After his first year on the BTEC course he got the prize for the best student. He ended up going to university to do a degree in illustrating. After he graduated he did a mural for Guy’s Hospital, which won the award for the best use of visual arts in the health service. He also won the award for best new blood in a design award. He then went on to a very successful career as an illustrator working with major international companies as well as pursuing his art.

These three examples were all cases in the early days of our learning community and were part of the model that we had of Self Managed Learning which included the notion that the person could learn anything they wanted and in any way they wanted - with our help and support.

Lessons from these cases.

Self Managed Learning and the use of learning groups does work. We had independent evaluations of the schools programmes and also those in our learning community (see Cunningham, 2021).

Some features of the approach that seem particularly important in working with boys include the following:-

• Respecting boys and assuming that we can work with them.
• Trust
• Teenage boys are not a problem per se. The myth about teen years being particularly turbulent is exposed by the research on hunter-gatherer bands where boys have learned in collaboration with each other and with adults -and in harmonious relationships.
• Given the peer group role, creating learning groups that work in a positive way is crucial. Individualistic approaches are limited if no attention is paid to peer group influences.
• Rules have to be created jointly - and all agree to them.
• Boys do actually come up with sensible ideas given the right context – and they can all come up with realistic goals – given support.
• Martha Lucas’s analysis is correct. Supporting agency, autonomy and goal setting is essential.
• Tackling poor views of identity is central – helping boy create positive identities matters
• First find out about each person before assisting them to learn.
• Support being and challenge doing (if needed). Show that you care about and value every single boy – who they are is fine. What they do may not be fine – and it needs challenging in the best way possible. Everything adults do should be oriented to supporting learning.
• Whatever the person does – no matter what adults think – is, to them, doing what seems the best option at the time.

One question that is raised is about cost i.e. that this approach is costly. Actually it isn’t. The question ought, anyway, to be about cost effectiveness. However in the school in the first case we had come up with plans for all year 7 students to join learning groups in order for them to think through and plan how they were going to use their time in secondary education. (Unfortunately the Deputy Principal who had sponsored the programme left to take up a Head post elsewhere in the UK, so the plan was not implemented.)

It is cost-effective because for one thing you move away from the one to 30 classroom and the one-to-one work that schools do using counselling, mentoring and other processes. By transferring resource to the 1 to 6 group mode learning works better and young people are in a supportive and caring group.

Our learning community worked at a lower cost per student than secondary schools because we did not waste resources on poor learning environments, particularly the classroom.

References

Blakemore, S. (2018) Inventing ourselves; the secret life of the teenage brain. London: Doubleday

Cunningham, I (2021) Self Managed Learning and the New Educational Paradigm. London: Routledge.