It's not only the boys that can fail at school

Since success is still seen as natural for boys, the ambitions of girls are being left to founder

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'Sexist' teachers are holding back brightest girls

In a lecture that is to be delivered today in Belfast, Professor Jannette Elwood does useful work in exploding some of the myths that lie around that shiny image of modern success, the teenage girl. Every summer, for the past few years, we have been treated to smiling, laughing, whooping pictures of the glorious girls who get an armful of starred A grades at GCSE and a handful of the same at A-level.

At the same time a raft of commentators always drifts into view, complaining about or rejoicing in the fact that this proves that the future is female. The assumption is that this new generation of wonderfully confident young girls is going to be ruling the world in a few years' time, and will soon be pulling the rug from under all those uncertain and underachieving males.

But funnily enough, as we all know, the high achievement of girls at school is not being carried through to later life. It doesn't take more than a few years in the outside world before this bubble of female success floats away. And then the old inequalities of pay and power become entrenched.

Elwood suggests that this might partly be because even now, school performance is judged rather differently for boys than it is for girls. Although girls now get more top grades than boys, even at A-level, there is still a tendency among teachers to attribute girls' success to mere hard work and boys' success to innate brilliance.

Elwood found by talking to teachers that the characteristics of a good A-level student tended to be described through words such as "flair", "unique" and "sparkle", attributes that, whatever their exam results, were much more often ascribed to boys than to girls. Girls, on the other hand, tended to be described as diligent and organised and competent.

More than a century after feminists won the right for girls to be educated alongside boys, it still seems as though we believe that boys take more naturally to things that girls can only achieve by dint of a lot of hard work. As one female maths teacher she interviewed said: "Girls will listen to every single word and do it exactly along those lines and they won't take risks. They will produce a very competent, good piece of work but it hasn't got that sparkle."

Does this matter, if the girls are getting the grades? It does, because if girls are constantly told that their success is down only to their obedience and to their industriousness, when they go into a world where exams are no longer important – when, in other words, they enter real life – they are less likely to believe that they really have the talents that they need in order to shape the world in accordance with their own dreams. If boys, on the other hand, are constantly told that, despite their lesser achievements, they are in fact more naturally talented, then they are much more likely to believe that they should push for success, even if they don't have the paper qualifications.

I can recognise this picture of the way in which girls and boys tend to be treated differently at school, and no doubt it is one of the reasons why girls still tend to become more confident if they attend single-sex schools, where they are less likely to be pigeonholed as attentive listeners rather than independent thinkers.

From what Professor Elwood says, it sounds as if even the smartest girls in mixed schools are being encouraged to believe that they are all Hermiones, the civilising, hardworking influence on the naturally brilliant Harry Potters at the next desk.

For all the school targets and the pressures that come from parents and from teachers to get good grades, children know that real success does not just mean success at examinations. Many young girls may be doing extremely well in examinations and yet, by being encouraged to see their achievements as being only down to the strain of their enormous hard work, they are unlikely to feel confident that they will be able to wing off freely into the wider world. And that means that even those middle-class, well-qualified girls whose faces light up the pages of our newspapers every summer when exam results are announced are unlikely to be able to make as much difference as one might hope in reforging to their advantage the ugly, unequal world that exists outside the classroom.

There is another worrying aspect to this stereotyped school culture. Since success is still seen as natural for boys in a way that it is not for girls, that means that the ambitions of young girls beyond the middle classes are often being left to founder. Boys who don't do well at school are constantly discussed as the big problem, and that has led to a raft of government strategies, policies and local education initiatives in attacking the problem of boys' underachievement.

On the other hand, since girls are assumed to be those busy little bees who are doing just fine, there is much less interest from politicians and from commentators in saying that failing girls should themselves be helped to achieve their full potential.

What failing girls? I hear you ask. Indeed, in this world where the teenage girl is seen as the most successful animal in Britain, it seems odd to suggest that the underachievement of girls is still a real problem. However, although it is true that more girls than boys achieve good GCSE passes, there are still far too many girls, as well as boys, who end up leaving school with no qualifications at all. These girls are very rarely spoken about, since our stereotype of the overachieving teenage girl has become so tenacious recently. But she does exist.

And for girls like those, the gap between the simple image of the stunningly successful teenage girl and the harsher reality is far more striking. Yesterday, new statistics were published on teenage pregnancy rates. The UK still has one of the highest teenage birth rates in the developed world. In fact, if you subtracted the US from the graph, nobody would be able to beat Britain for girls of school age who have babies.

This is down to much more than one single factor. No doubt we could do with more sex education, and more easy availability of contraception for young girls. But high on the agenda is the need to raise the expectations, not just of middle-class, high-achieving girls, but of girls from all backgrounds.

After all, middle-class girls are the least likely to get pregnant in their teens, partly because they feel that they would have too much to lose by starting a family early. If girls from other backgrounds don't see any choices on the horizon beyond low-paid work or a dull dependence on benefits, then no wonder that the challenge of having a child of one's own looks like the best option around. This grim reality kicks against our glossy image of the teenage girl who has the world in her hands.

It is easy for older women to look at media images of young girls, and to believe that they have everything that their mothers and grandmothers lacked, from contraception to confidence. But sometimes the reality looks rather different, and a lot more challenging.

n.walter@btinternet.com