Practical and easy-to-follow guidance on how to apply research that is proven to work in the classroom. Get your copy here: bit.ly/3iSYlJ2 Find out more here: ebtn.org.uk/book-fundamental…

FROM CAMPAIGNING TO REAL CHANGE: HOW ADVOCATES FOR MEN AND BOYS CAN BECOME MORE EFFECTIVE Are we actually changing laws, policies and institutions? Or are we mostly talking to each other? This is the challenging question emerging from three valuable sessions hosted by Mike Bell for the International Council for Men and Boys (ICMB), drawing on the experiences of nine campaigners who have successfully engaged governments and official bodies. Mike's resulting report, Strategies for More Effective Campaigning, contains lessons that every advocate for men and boys should consider. The central insight? We need to move from CAMPAIGNING to ENGAGING. Awareness matters. Conferences, articles, podcasts and social media have their place. But genuine progress requires influencing the people and processes capable of delivering change. Here are ten lessons worth applying: 1. Focus on outcomes, not activity. Measure success through changes in legislation, government policy, institutional practices and services (not likes, followers, conferences or media appearances). 2. Make one clear, achievable request. A specific legislative amendment, correction to official guidance or proposal for a men's health strategy is more actionable than a sweeping demand to fix everything. 3. Identify the actual decision-maker. Understand which minister, parliamentarian, committee, regulator or public servant has the authority to deliver your proposed change. 4. Present solutions, not just problems. Prepare a concise, evidence-based proposal explaining what should change, why, how it would work, what it would cost and who would benefit. 5. Be professional, respectful and constructive.Anger, exaggeration, personal attacks and culture-war rhetoric can alienate precisely the people we need to influence. Strong evidence and calm persuasion are far more effective. 6. Build relationships across political divides.Men's and boys' wellbeing should transcend party politics. Find allies wherever they exist. 7. Make it easy for politicians to help. Offer draft amendments, briefing papers, statistics, speech notes and practical assistance. Don't expect busy representatives to design your solution themselves. 8. Start small and build momentum. Some of the most impressive breakthroughs came from individuals or small teams pursuing tightly focused reforms; not from enormous organisations or expensive campaigns. 9. Collaborate rather than compete. Share knowledge, support other advocates, avoid personality conflicts and give credit generously. Our mission matters more than individual recognition… 10. Persist until something actually changes. A friendly meeting, encouraging email or sympathetic politician is progress; but it’s not victory. We need to follow-up, maintain relationships and keep working. The experiences of Mark Brooks, Robert Garza, Emma Johnson, Ed Bartlett, Warren Farrell, Christina Hoff Sommers, Ronald Henry, Michael Gurian, John Barry, Glen Poole, Richard Reeves and other successful advocates demonstrate that meaningful change is possible. Our movement doesn't lack passion, evidence or worthwhile causes. We need to become more disciplined, strategic, collaborative and effective. Let's spend a lot less time preaching to the converted, and a lot more time converting good ideas into real-world improvements… The ultimate measure of our advocacy isn't how loudly we speak. It's how much better life becomes for men, boys and their families. #MenAndBoys #MensAdvocacy #PolicyReform #MensHealth #GenderEquality #EffectiveAdvocacy @menandboysnet @evidence_1st

Or…hear me out….why don’t we admit that what we’re doing in K-12 is not working and try something else like….oh I don’t know…explicit instruction and math drills. 😀

Watch this interview about my new book, 'Yes He Can'. youtu.be/O00q_C9X6MU Hear how six British secondary schools closed the attainment gap for their boys.

ARE YOU PASSIONATE ABOUT IMPROVING EDUCATION FOR BOYS AND YOUNG MEN? JOIN US. Across the world, too many boys and young men are struggling educationally: from literacy and school engagement to attainment, completion and the transition into further education and work. The International Council for Men and Boys (ICMB) has examined disadvantages, inequalities and institutional unfairness affecting boys and men across more than 50 countries, including vulnerable males whose needs too often go unmet. That work has helped identify 12 major disparities facing men and boys globally. Education is #1. Now we want to move from identifying problems to finding, sharing and advancing solutions... ICMB’s Education Community of Interest (also known as the Education Disparity Team) brings together researchers, educators, advocates, practitioners and others who want boys and young men to receive equitable educational support. The group is exploring practical projects including: 📖 Finding schools that have successfully closed boys’ literacy and attainment gaps 🎓 Identifying colleges and universities who are increasing male completion 🔎 Building the international evidence base on what works 🧑‍🏫 Improving boys’ engagement, support and access to positive role models 🌍 Developing constructive policy recommendations for governments and international institutions Importantly, supporting boys doesn't mean taking anything away from girls. Every child deserves the opportunity to flourish. The Education team is co-convened by Mike Bell and Sebastian Bittar. If you care about boys’ education and have knowledge, experience, ideas or simply the determination to help, we would love you to get involved. Reach out to Mike Bell, Sebastian Bittar, David Maywald or ICMB: info@menandboys.net You can also join one of ICMB’s other disparity teams (have a look at the attached image)... Let’s turn evidence into action, and help every boy fulfil his potential. #BoysEducation #MenAndBoys #Education #BoysAndYoungMen #Literacy #EducationalEquity #GenderEqualityForMen #ICMB #EveryBoyMatters @menandboysnet @evidence_1st

TURNING GLOBAL DISPARITIES INTO GLOBAL ACTION The International Council for Men and Boys (ICMB) is launching Communities of Interest for the 12 major global disparities affecting men and boys. This is an important next step: bringing together researchers, practitioners, advocates, educators and policy experts from around the world to move beyond identifying problems and towards evidence, collaboration and practical solutions... I’m particularly excited about the new Education group, co-convened by educational researcher and author Mike Bell and passionate advocate Sebastian Bitar. Its mission is simple but ambitious: to ensure boys and young men receive equitable educational support worldwide, while promoting inclusive, gender-balanced approaches that improve learning, wellbeing and life outcomes for all students. The need is substantial. Boys are much more likely to repeat grades, fail to progress and drop out, while educational disengagement can have lifelong consequences for employment, income, health and social stability. Among the Education group’s proposed work is identifying schools that have successfully closed boys’ literacy and attainment gaps; developing interventions around literacy, engagement, teacher bias, male role models and mental-health support; and producing credible policy recommendations for governments and international institutions. Importantly, this isn't boys versus girls. Addressing educational disadvantage among boys strengthens genuine gender equality rather than diminishing it. The Education Community of Interest will draw upon researchers, school leaders, mental-health specialists, fatherhood and mentoring organisations, policymakers and others with knowledge and experience to contribute... Across all twelve global disparities, our ambition at ICMB is to build international networks capable of turning concern into knowledge, knowledge into policy, and policy into measurable improvements in the lives of men and boys. ICMB homepage: menandboys.net Email your interest in contributing to one of the 12 disparities: info@menandboys.net If you have expertise, evidence or practical experience that can help, we would love to hear from you... #ICMB #MenAndBoys #BoysEducation #BoysMatter #Education #MalePsychology #GenderEquality #MensHealth #Fathers #Masculinity @menandboysnet @evidence_1st

It should not be controversial that every lesson put in front of students should first be logically analyzed against principles of effective instruction and field tested with small groups before it is disseminated to larger populations.

The Aussies are finally getting it! "The New South Wales Government has ditched the term 'toxic masculinity', warning it risks alienating young men and undermining efforts to address harmful behaviour." dailymail.com/news/article-1…

What makes boys respond differently to school? It's not simply about being "nice." Strong teacher-student relationships come from taking an interest in each pupil, offering support, and creating discipline that feels fair. #education #boys #teachers #school #learning

Get your copy of 'Yes He Can!' here. routledge.com/9781041242154 Get 20% discount: code 26ESA3

Australia Confronts a Widening Divide Affecting Its Men and Boys (Press Release from the International Council for Men and Boys) Across Australia, men and boys face stark gender gaps in education, health, family life, safety, and employment, with national statistics showing significantly poorer outcomes in several key areas. Education: Australian education data show a persistent gap disadvantaging boys. The Year 12 completion rate is 85.3% for girls, compared with 77.6% for boys. Among Australians aged 25–34, 53.3% of women held a bachelor’s degree or above, compared with 40.0% of men. The gap continues in higher education. Women accounted for 62% of commencing domestic higher education students, compared with 38% of men. In 2025, 17.1% of Australian women aged 15–74 were currently enrolled in study, compared with 15.7% of men. Health: Life expectancy at birth is 81.1 years for males, compared with 85.1 years for females. The adult mortality rate is also substantially higher among men, at 72.6 deaths per 1,000 adults, compared with 41.6 among women. Homicide: Between 1 July 2024 and 30 June 2025, Australia recorded 279 homicide victims, of whom 80% were men. Suicide: In 2023, men died by suicide at a rate of 18.0 per 100,000, compared with 5.8 per 100,000 for women—more than three times the female rate—and consequently accounted for approximately 75% of all suicide deaths. Shared Parenting: Court proceedings in Australia show a substantial gender disparity in sole custody outcomes. Mothers receive sole custody in 45% of court proceedings, compared with just 11% in which fathers receive sole custody. Domestic Violence: Among people currently in a relationship, 12.0% of men reported experiencing physical abuse in the previous 12 months, compared with 5.9% of women, showing that men also experienced physical abuse at more than twice the rate reported by women. Homelessness: Males accounted for 55.9% of people experiencing homelessness, compared with 44.1% of females. Workplace: In 2024, men accounted for 96% of workers killed in work-related activities, representing 180 fatalities. Their fatality rate was also significantly higher, at 2.4 fatalities per 100,000 workers, compared with just 0.1 per 100,000 among women. Conclusion: Australia must act now to confront the struggles of men and boys because only by addressing these disparities can the country achieve true gender equality and build a more inclusive future for all. The International Council for Men and Boys (ICMB) is a non-governmental organization working to celebrate the contributions of men to society and to end the 12 sex-based disparities affecting men and boys worldwide. ICMB has conducted analyses of male disadvantage in more than 50 countries, available at: menandboys.net/country/ This link below to the Press Release contains all sources and references, for the material above: menandboys.net/pr/australia-… @menandboysnet @CO_Resilience1 @evidence_1st @DavidMaywald @thelawcenternet

Schools Eliminate Gender Learning Gaps for Boys at No Extra Cost or Funding (Press Release from International Council for Men and Boys) menandboys.net/pr/schools-el… 17 August 2026 — Boys' education is in global crisis: they are more likely than girls to repeat grades, fall behind and leave school for good. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization counts 140 million boys out of school, against 133 million girls. The problem has been described for years without producing a remedy that schools can copy. Australia's House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education is now examining why attainment differs between and among boys and girls. ICMB Board Director David Maywald attended the inquiry's first hearing, where members pressed federal education agencies to name programs with strong evidence of success. "The inability to point towards proven, scalable interventions was striking," Maywald wrote. Six secondary schools in England have done it, using the budgets and staff they already had. Their methods are documented in Yes He Can!, published by Routledge on August 3, and in free guidance online. Author Mike Bell led the research for the United Kingdom's 2023 parliamentary inquiry into boys' reputed "underachievement." Finding no proven solutions, he went to the schools that had already succeeded and recorded what they did. The schools acted independently — they did not know one another or read the same research, yet arrived at nearly the same approach. For example, Balcarras School in Cheltenham had a gap above 20% in English and mathematics at its worst, in 2006, and none by 2022. Heathfield Community College closed a 25% gap in the same subjects and has held it three years. The six schools' interventions include: · Literacy first. Weak reading and vocabulary were treated as an urgent, solvable problem and attacked in the first year of secondary school. · Equal standards. Internal observation exposed staff rewarding weaker work from boys and punishing them more harshly than girls for the same offense. Several schools found the bias endemic, and unconscious. · Visible role models. Older boys were placed in leadership and paired as tutors with younger boys falling behind. · Reliable discipline. No school calls its system strict. What they share is certainty and consistency, applied to both sexes. Australia already has an example of its own. Balgowlah Boys Campus, a non-selective public school in Sydney, moved from seven points below comparable schools in standard senior English to nine points above them, crediting explicit teaching of writing and regular, actionable feedback. Girls were not disadvantaged by these interventions. In no school did girls' results fall as boys' results rose. Maywald makes the same point. Improving boys' attainment "isn't about taking opportunities away from girls," but about "ensuring that every Australian child has the opportunity to reach their full potential." At a minimum, ICMB urges lawmakers to: · Require educational attainment be reported separately for boys and girls, school by school. · Emphasize literacy screening and intervention as students enter secondary school. · Require schools to audit reward and discipline records to eliminate unequal treatment of boys. The International Council for Men and Boys is a non-governmental organization working to end the 12 sex disparities that affect men and boys worldwide. The ICMB is a leader of the emerging global movement to address these disparities. menandboys.net/ @menandboysnet @evidence_1st

Hi all, We have a new "Recognition Scheme". Each time you stay late marking or attend an unpaid twilight, SLT will send you an email saying "Well done for showing resilience". The email will arrive at 11:47pm and will require a reply by 7am confirming you feel valued. Thanks x

The Real Reason Boys Are Falling Behind (And How to Help Them) youtu.be/O00q_C9X6MU?si=smiv… via @YouTube @evidence_1st

I'm delighted to introduce the outstanding new book by my friend and board colleague, Mike Bell: Yes He Can! Closing the Attainment Gap for Boys at Secondary School. Now available in paperback, hardcover and e-book, it's one of the most practical, hopeful and important books ever written on improving educational outcomes for boys... Taylor & Francis listing: taylorfrancis.com/books/mono… Amazon UK: amazon.co.uk/Closing-Attainm… Mike is one of the UK's leading advocates for evidence-informed education. He also served as Secretary of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Issues Affecting Men and Boys for several years, whose ground-breaking inquiries produced four outstanding reports on boys' education, men's health, male suicide, and the experience of being a boy today. That work helped elevate issues affecting boys and men from the margins into serious public policy discussion: APPG Men & Boys: equi-law.uk/appg-menboys/ Podcast with Mike Bell: youtube.com/watch?v=D1h9ZNbh… Yes He Can! builds on that foundation in exactly the right way. Rather than asking why boys struggle, Mike asks a far more useful question: what are successful schools actually doing differently? The result is a refreshing, evidence-informed handbook built around six secondary schools that successfully closed, or dramatically narrowed, the attainment gap for boys through sustained improvements in whole-school culture rather than gimmicks or ideology. The book is packed with practical strategies that schools can implement immediately: building stronger relationships, maintaining high expectations, improving literacy and oracy, providing positive role models, celebrating achievement, engaging parents, ensuring fair and consistent discipline, and investing in staff development. Perhaps most encouragingly, these schools achieved remarkable results without additional funding or compromising girls' outcomes. Raising boys lifted everyone... What makes this book especially compelling is its optimism. It rejects the notion that boys' underachievement is inevitable or that there is a single "silver bullet". Instead, it demonstrates that thoughtful leadership, evidence-based practice and a relentless focus on school culture can transform lives. It also challenges a number of popular myths about boys' education, replacing them with approaches that have been shown to work in real schools. This book could not be more timely. Across the UK, Australia, New Zealand, North America and much of the Western world, boys continue to trail girls across almost every stage of education, with profound implications for employment, mental health, family formation and social mobility. Yes He Can! offers something that has been in desperately short supply: credible, practical and proven solutions. I recommend this book without hesitation to teachers, principals, education departments, policymakers, teacher educators and parents. Mike Bell has made an outstanding contribution to one of the defining educational challenges of our time. If we are serious about helping every child reach their potential, this is a book that deserves to be widely read; and even more importantly, widely implemented. @DavidMaywald @evidence_1st

Hi SLT, Because we have only have 2 minutes to carry out Appraisal Observations, we have had these dice made. As soon as you enter the room, roll the dice and you will have an instant judgement. You can spend the rest of the 2 minutes thinking of a reason why. Thanks x

Knowledge in long-term memory takes up no space in working memory, but knowledge outside the head does. And what's in long-term memory always—and instantly—influences what we can do in short-term memory. Our students don't need practice in thinking; they need more to think with.

To all parents of boys? Did you know that, at most schools, they will underachieve, relative to girls? These schools changed the way the adults acted - and closed the gap for their boys. routledge.com/9781041242154

🇬🇧 THEY TOLD YOU A STORY. 🇬🇧 Colonisers. Slavers. Oppressors. And you were supposed to feel ashamed. Not for what you done... But for WHO YOU ARE. 🇬🇧 So we tested it. Britain wrote everything down, so we opened the books. 📖 Turns out fewer than 1 man in 10 could vote in the year Britain banned the slave trade. No woman could. Your ancestors could hang for stealing a sheep, get shipped across the world for petty theft, or go down a mine at 8 years old. In Manchester, the average age of death in a labouring family was 17. They weren't running the slave trade. They were underneath it too. Which is what makes what happened next worth knowing. In 1772 an enslaved man named James Somerset walked free from an English court, because English law couldn't hold a slave. In 1791, 300,000 families just stopped buying slave sugar. No march, no riot, just a decision made at 300,000 kitchen tables. In 1792, 519 petitions carrying 390,000 names hit Parliament, most signed by people who couldn't vote themselves. In 1807, Britain banned the trade. Then the slave owners sent Britain a bill for the 800,000 people they still held. 💷 £20 million. About 40% of the entire government budget at the time. The Treasury says it wasn't paid off until 2015. So if your family paid British tax before then, they helped buy 800,000 people their freedom. From 1808 the Royal Navy spent 60 years hunting slave ships at sea: 1,600 stopped, 150,000 people freed, and 1,600 British sailors dead, mostly of disease, buried thousands of miles from home. ⚓ In 1816 they ended two centuries of Barbary corsairs enslaving Europeans. In 1896 a war that lasted 38 minutes ended slavery in Zanzibar. 🇹🇿 Almost every country on Earth outlaws slavery today. That fight was paid for largely at British expense, by British hands.🇬🇧 So why haven't you heard any of this? Because within living memory, someone rewrote the story. You got taught the crime. Not the cure. The powerful exploited the world. They exploited their own people first. It was those people who ended slavery. 🇬🇧 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ History got rewritten once, in living memory, by no one who was ever named or held to account. We are ordinary people doing what ordinary people have always done. Opening the books. Refusing to look away. This is how we fight back. Fact by fact. Story by story. Name by name. We are the home of British heroes. There is a place for you in it. If you can afford to support what we do: proudofus.co.uk/support Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧