Boys narrow girls' lead for first time since GCSE began

After years of despair over their academic development, boys will finally narrow the gap with boys in top-grade GCSE success for the first time in the exam's 13-year history, according to results to be published today.

While girls will maintain overall superiority over boys in this summer's results, boys will catch up in the A* to C grade range, in which girls led by 9.2 percentage points last summer. There has been an overall rise with these grades, but boys have showed greater improvement – thought to be mainly due to their strong performance in subjects such as physics, chemistry and French.

Girls are expected to have maintained their superiority in the A* and A grades, in which they were ahead by 5.3 percentage points last summer.

However, the results will be welcomed by ministers, who had introduced a range of initiatives to try to improve boys' performance.

Professor Alan Smithers, the head of Liverpool University's centre for education and employment research, said: "The gender gap received so much publicity last summer that people have been making all sorts of efforts to boost boys' performance, which could account for the narrowing of the gap.

"Both genders are improving – it's just than one has improved slightly faster than the other."

His analysis showed that the gap for A* to C grades has risen from 4.3 percentage points in 1989 to 9.2 percentage points last year. The shift towards modular qualifications and a greater emphasis on coursework have been blamed because boys are thought to do better at traditional, end-of-course exams.

Last week's A and AS-level results showed girls maintaining their lead in the sixth form. Girls increased their lead in A-grades from 0.6 per cent to 0.8 per cent. Overall, their pass rate is 90.7 per cent – 1.9 percentage points ahead of boys.

But the biggest gap appeared with the first AS-level results. Girls are 3.2 points ahead of boys in grade A results and 4.2 points ahead overall.

The results for Northern Ireland's exam board, the Council for the Curriculum Examinations and Assessment, published yesterday, showed a similar pattern. Boys narrowed the gap for A* to C grades from 12.4 percentage points last summer to 10.4 points. There was improvement in the A* to C-grade range, from 71.6 per cent in 2000 to 72.2 per cent this year, but boys' grades rose faster. However, the failure rate also rose; 2.3 per cent of entries failed to achieve any grade, up from 2.1 per cent last year.

Only at the top A* grade did girls widen the gap in Northern Ireland. About 7 per cent of entries achieved the top A* grade – a rise of 0.4 per cent from last year. A total of 5.3 per cent of boys and 9 per cent of girls scored top marks.