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International Opinion

The Key is Character, Not Test Scores

By Richard Whitmire — August 15, 2010 1 min read
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That’s the bottom line of this treatise on why British boys lag behind. Some interesting stats from the piece:

One of the headlines that will no doubt accompany this year's results, as it has for results of the past decade or more, is the fact that boys have performed in these exams less well than girls (or conversely that girls' grades have tended to rise, while boys' have marked time). That trend has lately seen 64% of girls achieve five A*-C grade GCSEs while only 54% of boys reach that benchmark. It has also seen half of young women participating in some form of higher education, but only 37% of young men. These trends are being felt in the (ever shrinking) jobs market, where even among recent graduates men are 50% more likely to be unemployed than women; that, in turn, is reshaping domestic arrangements across the county. More than a quarter of British men aged between 25 and 29 currently live with their parents (the figure for women is 12%), and a tenth are still in the family home at 35.

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