Election 2025: Boys’ education in crisis say school bosses
A new report says Australia is facing a growing crisis in boys’ education and calls for Government action to improve boys’ educational outcomes.
Boys’ education is one of five key issues the Australian Men’s Health Forum (AMHF) highlights as part of our Federal Election Platform for 2025.
Better education equals better health, and Australia’s education system delivers poorer outcomes for boys and young men (compared to girls and young women) at every stage.
One of the starkest demonstrations of the link between poor education and poor health can be found in Government statistics on male and female suicide.
Men aged 25-54 with no post-school qualifications have a rate of suicide that is:
- 2.6x higher than men with a university education
- 3.5x higher than women with no post-school qualifications
- Nearly 6x higher than women with a university education
Source: Australian Institute of Health and Welfare
The gender gap in education
Catholic Schools NSW’s research unit, the Kathleen Burrow Research Institute, has published a new research report in the run-up to the Federal election titled Echoes of Disparity: Boys’ Education in Australia.
The report says boys are struggling in literacy and are over-represented among the most academically vulnerable school students. The authors say this trend drives negative outcomes for young men in higher educational attainment, employment participation and other stages of life.
According to NAPLAN data, boys are twice as likely as girls to score in the lowest performance bands in the literacy domains. Even in numeracy, where boys traditionally outperform girls on average, the lowest performers are equally likely to be boys.
More broadly, disparities in the presence of disabilities are likely to exacerbate the gender gaps, with boys more likely than girls to be classified with a disability.
Boys overlooked by policymakers
Despite the scale of the problem, the report states that the educational underperformance of boys has not received appropriate policy attention. It finds that Government monitoring and reporting often focuses on areas where girls lag while overlooking even wider disparities to the detriment of boys.
The authors acknowledge it is important to address gender gaps that disadvantage girls, such as in mathematics and certain STEM subjects, but say this should not prevent action to close other gender gaps that negatively affect boys.
The report says that the causes of the underlying gender gap in education remain debated, with proposed factors including biological differences, behavioural issues, and cultural stereotypes.
However, many proposed causes are addressable by policy; in particular, analysts suggest that Australia’s highly disruptive classrooms by world standards are more likely to disadvantage boys’ learning, says the report.
Getting it right 20 years later
In 2002, a bipartisan committee in Federal Parliament – whose members included the current Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese – published their report, Boys: Getting It Right.
The report unanimously recommended that governments begin programs to assist boys, especially in literacy. Despite its bipartisan backing, many of its recommendations never made it to implementation, and today, there exist few, if any, such programs targeting boys’ literacy.
Since 2002, there have been no follow-up parliamentary inquiries into boys’ education, either at the federal or state levels. The four trends that formed the catalyst for the original inquiry – namely, gender gaps in primary-level literacy benchmarks, secondary-level tertiary entrance scores, retention rates, and higher education participation – are all as salient now as they were twenty years ago.
As such, the new report’s authors say, “greater focus on analytical discourse, policy interventions, and even parliamentary attention would be timely in addressing the critical situation for boys in school”.
DOWNLOAD: Echoes of Disparity: Boys' Education in Australia (Catholic Schools NSW, April 2025)