Gareth Southgate Says Boys and Girls Need to Be Taught Differently — And His New Documentary Is Sparking a Huge Conversation

Gareth Southgate, the man who led England’s football team to back-to-back major tournament finals, is now tackling something far bigger than a penalty shootout. The former England manager has stepped away from the pitch and into a very different kind of arena — one focused on the mental health, education, and emotional wellbeing of boys and young men.

In a bold and thought-provoking new documentary, Southgate is making the case that society needs to fundamentally rethink how it raises, educates, and communicates with boys. And his central argument? Boys and girls simply learn differently, and pretending otherwise is doing a generation of young men a serious disservice.

From the Touchline to the Classroom

Most people know Gareth Southgate as the waistcoat-wearing, calm-under-pressure manager who transformed England’s footballing culture. But since stepping down from the England job, Southgate has clearly been doing a lot of thinking — not just about football tactics, but about something much more personal and societal.

The documentary sees Southgate dive deep into the world of boys’ education, mental health, and the unique challenges facing young males today. He speaks to educators, psychologists, parents, and the young men themselves to paint a picture of a generation that many feel is being left behind or misunderstood.

His core message is simple but controversial: boys and girls are different, they develop differently, they process emotions differently, and they often respond to learning environments in completely different ways. Treating them identically, Southgate argues, isn’t equality — it’s actually holding boys back.

What Exactly Is Southgate Saying?

To be clear, Southgate isn’t making some outdated or regressive argument. This isn’t about saying boys are better or worse than girls. It’s about recognising genuine differences in how boys engage with education and emotional development — and designing systems that actually work for them.

Research has long shown that boys, on average, tend to develop certain cognitive and emotional skills at different rates than girls. They often respond better to active, physical learning environments. They may struggle more with sitting still for long periods. They frequently find it harder to articulate emotions verbally, especially in early childhood and teenage years.

Yet many school systems, particularly in the UK, USA, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, are largely designed around a one-size-fits-all approach. Southgate’s documentary asks: what if that approach is quietly failing millions of boys every single year?

The Crisis Facing Young Men Today

The timing of this documentary couldn’t be more relevant. Across the English-speaking world, there is growing alarm about the state of young men’s mental health and prospects. Boys are falling behind girls academically at almost every level of education. Men account for the vast majority of suicides in countries like the UK, Australia, and the US.

Young men are increasingly disengaged — from education, from community, and sometimes from healthy social connections altogether. Into this vacuum, figures like Andrew Tate have rushed in, offering a toxic but seductive vision of masculinity that many young men find appealing precisely because mainstream society seems to offer them so little in the way of positive male identity.

Southgate’s documentary takes this crisis seriously without being alarmist or preachy. It’s a genuine attempt to understand what’s going wrong and what can be done about it — coming from someone who has spent decades working with young men in high-pressure environments.

Southgate’s Unique Perspective

What makes Gareth Southgate such a compelling voice on this issue is his lived experience. As a footballer and manager, he spent his entire career navigating the complex emotional landscape of male team sports — an environment where vulnerability is often seen as weakness, where mental health is rarely discussed openly, and where the pressure to perform can be crushing.

Southgate himself has spoken previously about the emotional challenges of his career, including the famous penalty miss at Euro 96 that haunted him for years. Rather than letting that define him negatively, he used it as fuel — and later created a team culture with England that was notably more open, emotionally intelligent, and psychologically aware than previous squads.

That experience gives him real credibility here. He’s not an academic theorising from an ivory tower. He’s someone who has seen firsthand what happens when young men are given the tools to understand and express their emotions — and what happens when they aren’t.

The Education System Under the Microscope

One of the documentary’s key focuses is the education system and whether it is genuinely set up to help boys thrive. The evidence, frankly, doesn’t look great. In the UK, boys are significantly less likely than girls to achieve top grades at GCSE and A-Level. The gap in university attendance between young men and women has been growing for years.

Some educators and researchers featured in the documentary argue that traditional classroom settings — long periods of seated, quiet, written work — naturally suit the learning styles more commonly found in girls. Boys, who often benefit from more movement, more competition, more hands-on activity, and shorter bursts of focused attention, can find these environments deeply frustrating.

The solution isn’t to make education worse for girls, obviously. But there is a serious question about whether schools can and should adapt their approaches to better serve boys — through different teaching styles, more physical activity integrated into learning, and a curriculum that speaks more directly to the interests and experiences of young men.

Mental Health and the “Man Up” Culture

Perhaps the most emotionally powerful parts of the documentary deal with mental health. Southgate is unflinching in confronting the culture that tells boys to suppress their feelings, to “man up,” to never show weakness. He argues — convincingly — that this cultural messaging is literally killing people.

The statistics are stark. In the UK, suicide is the single biggest killer of men under 45. In Australia, men die by suicide at three times the rate of women. In the US, men account for nearly 80% of all suicides. These aren’t abstract numbers — they represent sons, brothers, fathers, and friends.

Southgate believes that if boys were taught from an early age to identify, name, and express their emotions in healthy ways, many of these tragedies could be prevented. He’s not suggesting boys should be turned into something they’re not — he’s suggesting they should be given the emotional vocabulary and safe spaces to be fully human.

Reaction and Controversy

Predictably, the documentary has already generated significant debate online. Some commentators have praised Southgate for using his platform to address a genuine and often overlooked crisis. Parents, teachers, and mental health professionals have largely welcomed the conversation he’s trying to start.

Others, however, have pushed back. Some critics argue that focusing on boys risks distracting attention from the very real challenges still facing girls and women. Others question whether emphasising differences between boys and girls risks reinforcing harmful stereotypes.

Southgate, to his credit, seems to have anticipated this debate and addresses it head-on in the documentary. His argument isn’t that boys are more important than girls — it’s that both deserve an education and upbringing tailored to their actual needs, not a theoretical ideal of perfect equality that ignores real-world differences.

Why This Matters Beyond Football

It would be easy to dismiss this as a famous footballer dabbling in social commentary. But Gareth Southgate has earned the right to be taken seriously on this topic. His decade-plus managing young men at the highest levels of sport, combined with his own personal journey, makes him genuinely qualified to speak on these issues.

More importantly, the conversation he’s trying to start is one that desperately needs to happen. The quiet crisis facing young men — in education, mental health, social connection, and sense of purpose — is real, it’s serious, and it’s not going away on its own.

Whether you agree with every aspect of Southgate’s argument or not, the fact that someone with his profile and reach is willing to stand up and say “we need to do better for our boys” is something worth celebrating. Because the alternative — continuing to ignore the problem — clearly isn’t working.

Final Thoughts

Gareth Southgate has always been something of an unlikely hero. The man who missed a penalty became the man who changed English football’s culture. Now he’s taking on an even bigger challenge — trying to change how an entire society thinks about raising and educating its boys.

It won’t be easy. The issues are complex, the debates are heated, and the solutions won’t come quickly. But the fact that we’re talking about it — really talking about it — is a start. And sometimes, a start is exactly what’s needed.

What do you think? Do you believe boys and girls should be taught differently in schools, or do you think a single approach works best for everyone? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below — this is a conversation that affects all of us.

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