Is school working for teenage boys? : outdoor learning and real-life skills could be the keys to re-engagement

Whilst boys have been the chief beneficiaries of education through history, there was a shift of international educational focus at the end of the twentieth century to boys who appeared to be struggling in school (Weaver-Hightower 2003). The Australian Parliament commissioned an enquiry into boys' educational performance in 2002, which revealed that boys had lower average academic achievement (especially in literacy) and school retention, and higher rates of suspension and exclusion from school (House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education and Training 2002). This trend of boys' poor educational performance has continued since the turn of the century in Australia, and is mirrored in most other developed countries (Thomson et al. 2017). Australian boys' retention to the end of high school has consistently lagged behind girls (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2012), and boys rate themselves as being more disruptive in class (Griffiths and Webber 2017). Given this mounting evidence across a number of educational metrics, we can conclude that school is not working well for at least some boys.