It’s almost as if someone somewhere wants boys’ comparatively poor performance in education to be swept under the carpet.

Following the announcement of this year’s A Level results, the headline in many news outlets was “Boys score more top A-level grades than girls”, for example in The Independent and many other places.

That statement is false.

This is a perennial phenomenon, see for example 2017’s post Boys Beating Girls in A-Levels? – Err, No | The Illustrated Empathy Gap. It wasn’t true then either.

Here are the facts.

It is true that, as a percentage of those who took A Levels, a larger percentage of boys were awarded the top A* grade (9.9% compared with 9.1% of girls). But that is because a substantially larger number of girls take A Levels. Actually, 40,203 A* grades were awarded to boys and 43,354 were awarded to girls. So the correct statement is “Girls score more top A* grades than boys”: 8% more in fact.

Combining the top A* and A grades, 28.4% of boys taking A Levels were awarded these grades compared to 28.2% of girls. But the absolute numbers were 115,330 to boys and 134,350 to girls (i.e., 16% more to girls).

• 17% more A Levels were awarded to girls than to boys.
• 8% more A* Grades were awarded to girls than to boys.
• 21% more A Grades were awarded to girls than to boys.
• 33% more B grades were awarded to girls than to boys.
• 20% more C grades were awarded to girls than to boys.

Statistics can be used to mislead as well as to inform. In this respect they do not differ from words. Whether any presentation of statistics informs or misleads depends upon the honesty and/or competence of the author (and the occasional honest blunder).