While fully supporting the effort to get boys into school classes with male teachers, parents of boys need to know that they can 'school-proof' their boys most effectively by making sure that their sons go off to school with all the basic skills in place.

The theory that boys do not take as readily as girls to book-learning has its origin in the way parents as well as everyone else so often ignore boys' intellectual needs in early childhood.

Boys as well as girls love learning how to decode, love learning how to make great letters and words on paper, love learning to draw, love listening to stories, enjoy music - when all these things are provided for in the context of learning from parent-modelled values, skills and behaviours, and when their need for rough and tumble is also met on a daily basis in everyday life.

Boys, especially, need to 'hit the ground running' when they start school because, since the nineteen seventies, there has been a highly successful attempt to redress the disadvantages experienced by girls until that time in public education - the net result of which has meant affirmation for girls - at the expense of boys! We don't want the pendulum to swing back against girls, but certainly we want all children to be able to maximize their potential.

So by all means help the initiatives being taken to get boys into classes with male teachers - but also teach your three year old sons all the basics, a project in which enrolling in the Early Reading Play School is particularly helpful.