educational underachievement can have personal costs to individuals and to society, especially when underachievement turns into delinquency and crime.

Anyone who knows about the educational underachievement of boys compared to girls will have been surprised by the headlines about the 2017 A-level results. But despite all these celebratory headlines, having looked in detail at gender differences in the available data, it seems this isn’t actually the turning point for boys that was so widely reported at all.