Declining rates of achievement and retention:

the perceptions of adolescent males

The challenges and issues

Executive Summary

The research summarises the views of 1800 adolescent males, one-third of whom were identified as ‘at risk of not completing year 12’, in Years 9 to 11, drawn from 60 secondary schools in South Australia. The schools were drawn from State, Catholic and Independent sectors and were located in rural and urban sites. The views expressed are clear and largely uniform across the schools, year levels and levels of achievement.

It is evident from the literature review undertaken as part of this study, and from media reports, that the issues and problems are being reported as single factors and more in terms of ‘problem boys’ who are not coping, than problems that boys more generally face while trying to fulfil their learning needs. Some of the strategies employed currently reflect these approaches.

Several popularly held views are that the problems start in the primary years, and that the issues are reducible to matters of gender difference, gender equity or literacy and numeracy. These were discussed in the literature but were not perceived by the boys as being significant factors in the choice to remain at school. Issues about masculinity did not feature at all, with occasionally some irritation being expressed by the boys about others defining ‘what they [the boys] ought to be’.

The views of the boys to emerge included:

The adult world is not listening, or not ‘genuinely listening’.
Most boys don’t value school; it’s more about getting credentials than learning, and these don’t operate usefully as short term motives to do the work.
Most girls get treated better, but so do boys who find it easy or necessary to comply and conform, and who quietly get the work done.
School work is boring, repetitive and irrelevant.
School doesn’t offer the courses that most boys want to do, namely courses and coursework that prepare them for employment.
Most boys neglect or reject homework because it is too intrusive, destructive and ultimately unachievable without sacrificing more valued aspects of their lives.
Years 8, 9 and 10 waste too much time. The Year 11 workload is excessive.
School pushes most boys into a downward spiral of disaffection, resistance, resentment, anger and retaliation that, for many, is just too hard to stop.
School poses too many contradictions and debilitating paradoxes:

School expects adult behaviour but doesn’t deliver an adult environment.

School pushes the rhetoric of education (e.g. fairness, respect, flexibility, a celebration of difference, etc.) but produces the opposite in practice.

School is about getting most boys out of education.

School is about preparing youth for adult life, but adult life gets in the way of school; culturally celebrated achievements and rites of passage into adult life (e.g. sport, driver’s licence, owning a car, part time work, providing for their own needs, helping to run a household, establishing an adult identity, social life and sexual relationships) are negative influences on school achievement and on the preparedness of boys to stay at school.

The primary factor, and the most troublesome paradox for boys, is that there are too many unsuitable teachers who either create or exacerbate their problems. Good teachers change everything but there are not enough good teachers.
For most boys, school is focused on preserving the status-quo, which makes it culturally out of date and unable to respond to change. It remains detached from the real world, distant from the rest of their lives, and neither convincingly forward looking, nor plausibly concerned with the need to prepare them for a place within the emerging society.

The experience of good teachers creates a paradoxical dilemma: good teaching is less present than desired, but is demonstrably better for everyone. ‘Teaching’ appeared to be synonymous with all that happens—the boys did not separate out school climate, organisation, curriculum matters and classroom interactions. The compounding impact of this, and the other paradoxes they face, seem to produce stress (both acute and chronic) and a rational commitment to objective despair, which may help to explain the growing incidence of a broad range of self-destructive and often anti-social practices.

Although most Year 9 boys say they would like to finish Year 12, many have given up on secondary schooling before they reach Year 11. Apart from ‘hanging on’ at school, they see themselves pursuing one of three options; employment (preferably an apprenticeship), TAFE, or a senior college. These appear to offer the chance to pursue more relevant, interesting work, with realisable goals and rewards, in a more up to date adult environment and away from unsuitable teachers.

In order to see whether trends continued post school, the retention and achievement rates of 1st year students at Flinders University were examined. These results show that adolescent males leave university in higher numbers than females, and that the rate of retention is declining for both over the last four years.

There appears to be a need for teachers, teacher training, curriculum, school organisation and all other aspects of schooling, genuinely to recognize students as young adults, preparing to live in the world of the twenty first century. To the boys it appears that the gap between schooling and their other lives is huge and growing and many opt for other lives, despite recognising the cost.

Further research is needed to establish what optimal learning environments which lead to boys achievement and retention are and how ‘good teaching’ might be measured.

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The challenges and issues

In summary, some of the issues which emerged which need further consideration are:

A need for understanding ‘good teaching’, and how it relates to the perceptions of the boys.
A need for systemic change in schooling which brings schooling closer to the ‘outside world’ as perceived by adolescent males.
Research into the nature of learning environments, which would address the issues raised by the boys, and provide opportunities for them to succeed.
A focus in pre-service teacher education on understanding the perceptions, lifestyles, views and aspirations of adolescent males and how these impact on schooling, retention and achievement.
The design and delivery of in-service education for teachers which focuses on understanding the impact of lifestyles, views, aspirations and perceptions of the current generation of adolescent males and the impact on schooling, retention and achievement.
Examination of and action on the relationship between years 8, 9, 10 and years 11 and 12, noting the perceptions of the boys.

Most crucially, there is a need to develop and foster environments in which adolescent males are not seen as a problem and are recognised as young adults who have views which need to inform the educative process.

Full Report

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