An industry has grown up around boys’ “under-achievement”. As media stories about the apparently growing gender gap lament the performance of boys as girls “overtake” them in the achievement tables, courses, guides and manuals have appeared which aim to explain to teachers what they should be doing to address the problem. Is this a satisfactory response?

Christine Skelton thinks not. She argues that “implementing boys’ underachievement, or indeed pro-feminist, programmes without a firm grasp of the theoretical underpinnings upon which they are based, can be limiting, if not dangerous, for schools”. To explain, she draws on a wide body of scholarly research and on her own studies in primary schools. She succeeds admirably in making complex theories accessible and relevant to teachers, although this is far from being a “how-to” book.

In a comprehensive introduction, she looks behind the media panic to examine how and why this issue has become so prominent. She is particularly concerned with the dominant images of schoolboys produced by primary schooling, and the ways in which boys deal with them as individuals and in groups. This is an explicitly feminist exploration of the field, and Skelton’s understanding of the politics of gender and sexuality in primary schools permeates her accounts and analysis.

Teachers who want to understand the theory and politics, and build up practice based on an understanding of their own classrooms in the context of research evidence, will find this book (part of the Educating Boys, Learning Gender series) invaluable.

What About the Boys? is a collection of papers which raises many pertinent and interesting questions, with contributions from leading researchers from Australia, the United States and the UK. The overtly academic style may be off-putting, although several papers repay perseverance.

In “Maths Talk is Boys’ Talk”, Australian researcher Anne Chapman considers the specific ways in which language is gendered in school mathematics, drawing on examples of classroom talk to examine how boys take up (or not) a “masculine” style, characterised by a relative absence of metaphoric content. She raises interesting questions about what she calls the strongly male domain of the subject. What, she asks, does the masculine image and structure of mathematics mean to boys, and what kind of boy is likely to succeed? For those boys who cannot or will not “talk the talk”, what are the (interlinked) implications for their learning and social positions in the gendered classroom hierarchy? Like Skelton, she is concerned with the images of schoolboys available in schools and boys’ responses to them.

Another paper in the collection - “Learning to Laugh” by UK-based researchers Anoop Nayak and Mary Jane Kehily - looks at the role of humour in constructing images of masculinity. The emphasis is on the ways in which boys produce those images and negotiate responses. The authors argue that boys use humour to construct specifically masculine social hierarchies: through the kinds of ritualised jokes, games and playfights (often homophobic) that will be familiar to teachers, they are able (or not) to display what the authors call “an English heterosexual masculinity”.

Concluding that “young men who did not subscribe to an exaggerated practice of masculinity were ridiculed through humorous rituals”, they draw attention to teachers’ role in helping boys to reflect on and understand these masculine practices. This collection of papers takes up several of the issues raised by Christine Skelton’s book, and challenges us to think beyond the rhetoric about boys’ experience in schools.

Shereen Benjamin is a research fellow at the Open University