Don’t be surprised if your daughter seems to be doing better at school than your son!
It has been a fairly well known fact that girls do better than boys at all levels of education from the age of the first SAT tests at 7 up to higher education.
A new report has just come out which suggests that this is true at an even younger age. A study from the Institute of Education in London (part of the Millennium Cohort study) says that girls are two months ahead of boys in verbal, non-verbal and visual skills at the age of 5. They even suggest that girls are doing better than boys at the age of 3!
As research director, Dr Hansen states,
“Our age three assessments of the children showed the same general trend, so the gender gap in learning is established early in life.”
However, this does not mean that all girls do better than all boys. The top 10% of the ability range are pretty equal, but far more boys are in the lower scoring groups.
The study also comes out with some other facts about how family life seems to affect performance, again reinforcing the idea that if there are two parents who live together, have educational qualifications themselves and read to their children, then the children have a better chance of being successful in educational development.
It must be pointed out that these are only trends and single parents or parents with no qualifications themselves can still have children who break through into the highest levels of achievement. If you are reading this then you are probably concerned enough to be doing all the right things with your children to ensure that success.