By Gavin Mackintosh-
Gender neutral A levels classifications will affect research that enable studies comparing performances between boys and girls. The country’s leading exam boards recently announced plans to allow students opt out of boys and girls classifications.
Teenagers who do not wish to identify with either gender will be able to request for male and female flags to be removed from EdExcel’s system for the first time.
EdExcel, owned by the education company Pearson, has also completely removed gender categories from the documents that students receive on results day with their grades. Research that gathers information about boys and girls performances help researchers understand what makes either gender do better, and can highlight the issues of attitude that propels either gender academically, and encourage the underperforming gender.
There has never been any suggestion that either boys or girls are genetically more intelligent on the basis of gender, so differences in performances can only be put down to differences in focus, attitude and hard work.
IMPACT
The Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ), which represents the UK’s major exam boards have said that the introduction of a gender neutral option would not affect national trends since numbers would be too low to have an impact. This is at best an assumption because there is no way they can tell what proportion of boys or girls would not wish to be identified by their gender. Researchers may just have to accept that they will be very restricted in any future research they do comparing boys and girls in the se exams.
Researchers will be able to make their comparisons by comparing the number of boys and girls who identified their gender, but it won’t be accurate once we know there are a number who opted out, unless that number is factually shown to be very small and insignificant.
EdExcel is the first major exam board to have made changes to accommodate non-binary pupils, but others intend to follow suit. Pearson, a multi-national and educational company headquartered in the Uk, is the only privately owned examination board in the Uk is a multi-national company
A .spokesperson for Pearson said: “We are continuing to look at how non-binary students can have the option of signalling that they do not wish to be classed as either male or female when they register for a qualification and receive results with Pearson Edexcel.
Pearson said it is working on a number of initiatives with the charity Stonewall aimed at boosting “diversity and inclusion”.