An emphasis on maths over subjects like English within tutoring centres and admissions tests has set the stage for the clear gender imbalance within the state’s select-entry schools, an expert has said.

Currently, the student cohort is 58 per cent boys and 42 per cent girls, with the gap widening for enrolments at Year 7.

In 2019, 45 per cent of Year 7 places were taken up by girls. This year that figure is 41 per cent.

It’s reported that in some contexts, more than three quarters of student cohorts have been male.

Last week the State Government took action, announcing that from 2027 an equal number of selective places for boys and girls will be offered – a change that will apply to both fully selective and partially selective schools, in addition to opportunity classes in primary schools where boys now make up 60 per cent of students.

Dr Christina Ho from UTS, whose research focuses on selective schooling, has welcomed the move and says the imbalance was initially fuelled by a few key factors, one being a weighted bias within the admissions test towards maths.

The Department has been continually tweaking the test to correct this over the years, Ho adds, but the wheels had already been set in motion.

At the primary level, the focus also seems to be skewed toward maths achievement, too, Ho suggests.

“What I have observed in my most recent research, a lot of the students in particularly opportunity classes, so these are kids in Year 5 and 6, teachers would often tell me that their students were really, really amazing at maths, and not so much in terms of the literacy.

“And I think in our society, there is this cultural association that boys are more maths-oriented than girls, which is obviously just a cultural thing – I don’t know if that’s a reality or it’s just a kind of stereotype or social norm that we have in Australia,” she says.

“But certainly, those kinds of stereotypes can also become self-fulfilling, when girls tend to think that ‘oh I’m not good at maths’.”

Since triggered, the worsening gender imbalance within selective schools has “almost fed on itself”, the expert says.

“There’s more girls that feel hesitant to enrol in a school that they consider to be male-dominated, and then that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” she explains.

The impact of the huge private tutoring industry is also behind the situation, Ho argues.

“We know that there is a huge industry out there preparing kids for the selective test and the opportunity class test.

“And maths is the most common subject that students go to tutoring for. So, it’s not uncommon for some students to be well ahead of the curriculum in their maths.

“Sometimes they can be a whole year ahead or even two years ahead, and so obviously then, when it comes to the test they’re just acing the maths component.”

This is certainly not the case for English, Ho notes.

“You don’t find tutoring centres promising to get you a year ahead in the English curriculum. It doesn’t work in the same way.”

Dr Christina Ho says tutoring centres tend to emphasise ‘getting to the answer’ over developing student’s deeper procedural knowledge in maths, which is causing issues in the classroom.

Ho says the issue of tutored students sitting well ahead of their classmates – and especially in selective schools – is a significant one in need of greater scrutiny.

“They’re so well ahead that [this] can create a lot of other issues in the classroom with student disengagement.

“These students feel like they’ve covered everything already ... and they may think that the way that it’s being taught in school is not as good as the way that they’ve learnt it before in tutoring.”

This observation is backed up by recent research.

Many tutoring centres also tend to emphasise ‘getting to the answer’ over developing student’s deeper procedural knowledge, the expert flags, which also has ramifications for teachers following certain pedagogical approaches.

“The kids are feeling like, ‘my tutor showed me how to do this already, using this shortcut or this formula’.  

“[So they’ve practiced] for the test using these strategic ways of thinking that may be fast, but don’t have the depth that school education is trying to give them.

“I think there are a lot of much bigger issues at play here.”

In August, Ho contended that NSW’s selective schooling system had ‘distorted’ public education in the state, with highly coveted schools only accessible to the advantaged.

Indeed, ABC analysis found that last year, just two per cent of students in most of NSW’s 21 fully selective schools came from the lowest educationally advantaged group.

The state has an additional 27 partially-selective schools, together tallying far more than any other jurisdiction.

“These are public schools, but they’re so inaccessible,” Ho told EducationHQ at the time.

“…they’re very much dominated by students from very advantaged backgrounds, which does not fit with their design as public schools.”

Ho warned the scene had increasingly “gone awry” over the past few decades, with NSW now an outlier on the national stage in terms of the segregation within its public schooling.

She called out a kind of obsession amongst parents to ensure their child gets admitted to a selective school, which is seeing them throw everything at securing a spot. 

“The competition to get into them now is so extreme that people have to invest a lot of resources into preparing their children for the test,” Ho said.

“It’s really locked out a lot of families that can’t afford the sometimes tens of thousands of dollars that people are spending on private tutoring.

“And just the time and the energy and the planning – only certain kinds of families can afford that.”