LOITERING IN A SCHOOL corridor, waiting for one son or another, I browsed a display of Year 5 children’s stories. Vibrant drawings, tidy handwriting, commendable punctuation . . . and every last one written by a girl. In this co-ed primary, not a single boy’s efforts had made the cut. In an admittedly rushed perusal of other walls, I found one boy’s name appeared for roughly every five girls. Friends at other schools have the same story.

I don’t doubt these were worthy winners of best in class. If I was a teacher, I too would select neat, sustained work, realised in a rainbow of gel pens, to represent my best endeavours. But it must be so dispiriting to be a boy, to see your typical smudgy, dashed-off efforts always exceded by those Stakhanovite girls.

It is, of course, partly about development. Ten-year-old girls are simply biologically ahead of their male peers. Chatting with other mothers of boys, we are always agog at the sophisticated, slightly scary creatures in their scaled-down high-street fashions who share our sons’ classrooms. And the girls just seem to try so much harder. A friend’s daughter wakes him, standing beside his bed in full school uniform, impatiently drumming her foot. “Daddy,” she says as the clock reaches 7am. “I’m getting that late feeling again.” Another girl insists on finishing her weekly homework the very afternoon it is set, rather than — as in our house — retrieving the screwed up ball of questions from a coat pocket, amid much huffing and puffing, the night before it’s due in.

Girls’ results now exceed boys’ at all ages, with 61 per cent achieving five good GCSEs, compared with 51 per cent of boys. And my inner child shouts hurrah! All the shackles placed on girls’ achievement during my childhood are broken: the worry that boys didn’t fancy swots, that to excel was unfeminine, that since the repertoire of attainable careers ran from nurse to teacher, why bother striving for university?

Yet since motherhood turned me into a cheerleader for Team Boy, I am keenly aware how society treats its future men. From birth, male babies are dressed in “Big Trouble” or “Little Monster” T-shirts — girls in “Little Angel” or “Princess” — rapidly graduating to sweat-tops logoed with graffiti, as if every boy aspires to grow up a gangsta rapper or skateboard punk. To be male is to be a problem: the raw energy of boys is pathologised as aggression, a force that must be contained. Why do they have to roar around, dominating the playground, kicking balls, knocking little ones over? Why can’t they stand and chat like their sisters? In a danger-phobic society boys represent a health hazard.

Feminism has to take part of the rap. We believed gender was all down to “socialisation”, not biology, that masculinity was constructed with every toy truck and football boot. Treat the sexes the same and they will behave the same. Until science blew that baloney away, revealed the old cliché to be true after all: boys — regardless of how many dolls you buy them — will be boys. Their brains and body chemistry are designed for action, competition, constant challenges to their growing muscles and minds. As a product of hunting ancestry, a man’s brain falls into a complete resting state if he sits still too long (which explains men’s ability to zone out of awkward conversations).

No wonder boys fail when education is ever more about quietly listening and less about cutting up frogs. And while boys — particularly those who have no father at home — thrive under good male teachers, men have all but left primary education, a terrible by-product of a society that obscenely questions their motives for working with small children.

The tyranny of league tables means boys’ schools are turning co-ed — using those high-achieving girls to boost their ranking, while girls’ schools stay single sex, not wanting those pesky lads dragging them down. In some parts of London there is a shortage of school places for boys. Certainly, as I’m finding during our year of secondary transfer hell, there is far less choice.

I had never considered sending my son to an all-boys school. Won’t he turn into one of those gormless, repressed blokes who blushes when he speaks to women? Girls, we are always told, are a civilising presence: how grateful we should be to parents who send their daughters as co-ed missionaries when they could be thumping out the A*s, undistracted, at an all-girls academy.

But this week, for the first time, I visited a boys’ school. And now I really don’t know. Because what joy to find a library crammed with Hornblower, Just William and Bond. Or a woodwork department where a master cajoled his class with that gruff- twinkly mix of authority and humour that boys adore. And corridor walls covered floor to ceiling in boys’ stories.

• HOW SATISFYING that Constance Briscoe, a black judge, chased and pressed charges against the drunken racist who insulted and threatened her. Not least for the Martin Amis-esque detail that her abuser’s surname was Death and the pub he tried to hide out in was The Alibi. But also because his community sentence chalked up a rare victory for citizen power.

  After a father of two was killed recently in a Hackney stairwell for asking partying junkies to keep the noise down, police insist that we should never intervene. Not even tell a yob to pick up his crisp packet or stop kids from wrecking a sapling. And so we cede all power over our lives. Yet if Ms Briscoe had simply reported the incident, forms would have been filled in, sympathy expressed, and meanwhile Lee Death would have melted into the city.

• THE SURFEIT of ghastly grey clothes in the high street has been blamed for a 4 per cent decline in sales. And a range of shades from flu palor to dead rat are hardly desirable in this sunny autumn. But when I skipped off to the shops, happy to splurge on new duds, all I found were ugly and unwearable frocks. Appalling droopy smocks and nasty Seventies shirt-waisters in some ironic take on Crimplene. All of which look retro and boho when you’re tall, thin and 22. But the rest of us don’t want to look like a superannuated milkmaid or Dame Edna Everage.

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