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Victoria’s education apparatchiks are positively giddy about ‘closing the gender gap’ in VCE. Except for one glaring thing: they and their legacy media bootlickers are ignoring the single biggest gender gap of all. The one that yawns wider than the Grand Canyon in the only compulsory subject in the curriculum.
Male and female students are closing the gap in study scores for VCE subjects including business management and physical education, but a sharp gender divide in outcomes remains across STEM and humanities courses […]
In English – a compulsory subject – 1690 girls dominated the top scores last year, while 1176 boys achieved a score over 40. In general mathematics, however, the trend reversed, with boys securing 1188 top marks compared to 879 for girls.
So, in general mathematics, not a compulsory subject, boys lead by 26 per cent. But in English, a compulsory subject all students must pass, girls lead by 30 per cent.
Some of us might think that that was the real story. But, no: ignore boys being systematically left behind in the foundational skill that unlocks everything else. The blob’s response is a collective shrug. No hand-wringing op-eds demanding male role models in humanities. No special programs to boost boys’ participation in reading. STEM gaps get national inquiries; literacy gaps that hammer boys get filed under ‘not our problem’.
Notably, the Age didn’t interview any boys for its story.
The 2025 NAPLAN results make the crisis impossible to ignore. Boys are twice as likely as girls to score in the lowest performance bands across literacy domains. In year-nine writing, the failure rate for boys is catastrophic – over 50 per cent in some states aren’t meeting minimum standards. The gap widens with every year of schooling: year-three boys trail girls by a few months; by year nine they’re 10–24 months behind in equivalent learning. Girls outperform boys in reading, writing, grammar and punctuation right through to the end of secondary school. Numeracy? Boys hold their own or better. Literacy? They’re drowning.
And the female-dominated education industry (another yawning gap the legacy media don’t like to talk about) is resisting furiously any changes that would help boys and girls, but boys most of all.
Boys have always been more active, less verbal at young ages. Boys need structure, phonics, explicit instruction and quick feedback. The very reforms Victoria and Canberra are finally pushing – phonics, explicit teaching – are the ones the blob is furiously resisting. Instead, the teaching industry clings like a security blanket to teaching methods that have failed consistently for decades. Whole-language ‘look-and-guess’ approaches, the ones unions and academics defend to the death, have been a disaster. But their saving grace, in the eyes of the feminist left, is not just that they ‘dethrone hierarchies’, but suit girls’ verbal fluency far better.
A backlash against the state and federal governments’ “evidence-based” teaching reforms is growing among teachers and academics, despite early claims they are raising test scores.
The same people who witter about The Science™ are furiously opposed to literally evidence-based methods.
The two big evidence-based education reforms of recent years – phonics and explicit learning at schools, and uniform standards for teacher training at universities – have been driven enthusiastically by the Victorian and federal governments respectively.
But the AERO chief told The Age that there was growing pushback among academics and teachers.
One of the leading critics of the evidence-based agenda – The University of Sydney’s Nikki Brunker – said opposition to what she called the new “orthodoxy” was gaining momentum.
Never mind that it works. Never mind NAPLAN gains in the early years where it’s been trialled. The blob prefers ideology over evidence.
The hypocrisy is rank. Brunker herself home-schools her own kids.
It’s almost like she knows something.
