Australian Year 4 students have achieved their best ever result in a major international assessment of maths and science. Year 8 students, who also did the test, held steady.

With pupils resitting Maths and English GCSEs at an all-time high, and fewer than a fifth of those passing, is the system broken?

However, after 4 months, boys are scoring higher on maths exams than are girls, on average, and this gap widens by 12 months (Fig. 1). Figure 1 | Emergence of a gender gap in mathematics.