‘Minister for men’ mooted as 500,000 boys miss out on university

The UK government should consider creating a “minister for men” position to address the growing educational attainment gap between young men and women, a new report recommends.

Boys and young men are still falling “far behind” their female peers throughout the education system, the report by the Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi) outlines, with Ucas data showing that 44,000 fewer men than women accepted a place at a higher education institution in 2024-25.

Between 2015-16 and 2024-25, 682,420 fewer men than women entered higher education, with the gap standing at 409,485 when considering those aged 19 and under.

In order for young women and young men to go into higher education at the same rate, it highlights, the higher male birth rate would mean 55,000 more men needed to go to university a year – with about half a million “missing men” over the past decade as a whole.

The paper says that a “minister for men” could go some way to addressing this gap, highlighting that there is currently a cabinet-level minister for women and equality, which is held by education secretary Bridget Phillipson.

“Given the relative educational underachievement of boys and men and Phillipson’s recent letter imploring higher education leaders to make more progress on widening higher education admissions, alternatives to having a new cabinet-level minister for men would be to appoint a cross-cutting junior minister for men and boys or a named minister within the Department for Education specifically tasked with addressing the relative educational underachievement of male pupils and students,” it says.

Nick Hillman, director of Hepi and co-author of the report, said the focus given to educational differences caused by class and ethnicity is “missing when it comes” to gender, arguing that “this must change if we are to tackle one of the most egregious issues affecting education as well as society”.

“We need a cross-government strategy to address the problem…for any new strategy to be truly effective, it will need clear ministerial oversight, including – if necessary – a new minister for men and boys to oversee it. Without change of this scale, another half a million young men – those who are currently schoolboys – will lose out just like their older brothers and fathers already have,” he said.

By age 19, the higher education progression rate for white male students who were entitled to free school meals (FSM) in England is 14.9 per cent, which is three times lower than for Asian FSM males (47.3 per cent), the report highlights. Comparatively, an Asian FSM female is over four times (63.6 per cent) more likely to progress to higher education than a white FSM male.

It speculated that perceptions of “troublesome boys and compliant girls” could form teacher bias in schools, and this, along with a lack of male teachers and role models, as well as developmental differences between the sexes, could help reinforce attainment gaps in teenagers which progress into higher education.

The report cites research by King’s College London’s Policy Institute, which found 88 per cent of the public do not know that fewer men than women go to university, while 77 per cent believe the numbers are the same.

Consequently, the majority of universities do not formally recognise men as a disadvantaged group with respect to university entry, the report says, which “limits specific action” taking place. Such action could include targeting promotion of higher education to boys and their parents within schools and communities, as well as addressing the gender gap in access to higher tariff universities.

Mary Curnock Cook, former chief executive of Ucas, writes in the report’s foreword that ignoring men’s educational outlook is “no longer an option”.

“It matters because a significant minority of men and boys are unnecessarily underachieving in education as this report so graphically describes. They are going on to crowd our justice system and prisons, our hospitals, our negative narratives about masculinity and the continuing fight for gender equality in the workplace and in homes.”

The report adds that the government should take action in specific areas where existing rules “disproportionately” affect men’s access to education. It said that given 96 per cent of prisoners are men, restrictions on prisoners that prohibit them from accessing undergraduate student finance within six years of their release “mainly affects men”.

Mark Brooks, male inclusion policy adviser and co-author of the new report, said it was important to better support men into higher education “not only because it helps them, our society and the economy but also because – importantly – it helps young women too. We need both to rise together”.

juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com