Dave Hill's son wore mauve and was roundly denounced for it, as he would have been for shedding tears or studying hard. How can we stop the playground gender cops?

He was four at the time but my son Conall was already a garrulous quester after intellectual truths: "Isn't it two add two is four, Daddy? Isn't it letter 'b' goes buh?" He'd also acquired a taste for leaping from high places, and it was when about to plunge from the giddy highest point of the playground climbing frame that he realised he'd transgressed an unwritten social rule.

"That's a girl's shirt," said a voice. It belonged to another boy who neither Conall nor I knew. He too was small, though not as small as Conall. Yet the impact of his comment owed little to their difference in size. There was no heavy hostility. Rather, it was his zeal I found disturbing: the unvarnished, expressionless, almost robotic certainty of his intervention. Conall's response, by contrast, was inflamed.

"It's not a girl's shirt!'

"It is."

"It isn't!"

Actually, it was. My boy had personally picked it from the girls' racks at Adams, the children's clothing chain. It was a pastiche of a rugby shirt, complete with white collar, V-shaped opening at the throat and hoop design. It was, however, a "feminised" version of this enduring sporting style, by which I mean simply that the colours of the hoops were white and mauve. It seemed to be the latter hue on a male person that so troubled the other boy. And now Conall was troubled, too. Time for Dad to intervene.

"It's not a girl's shirt," I said, protectively. "Boys can wear purple if they like."

This was a cop-out. The mauve of the hoops was as mauve as mauve gets, yet a voice in my head told me to name it purple instead. What reflex propelled me? A defensive one, I'm afraid, even though my opponent was barely three feet high. Spinning the colour in question towards the spectrum's darker end made it easier to justify.

Mauve is Unmanly, straight from the Forbidden Palette where it sits, lisping and preening, next to Poofter Pink. Did I read the situation right? It seemed possible, with hindsight, that the colour of the shirt was not the central problem: the other boy may have been familiar with the strict designations of Adams's merchandise, or simply seen the same shirt on a girl. But the basic point remains. At that moment it didn't matter that Conall also wore cool Cica trainers, or that he was being daring and athletic as proper boys are meant to be. Even at his tender age the other boy saw that my son had crossed a frontier it was his business to patrol.

With the nation's pupils' heads lowered over examination papers and the annual inquest into superior distaff outcomes bound to follow, the deeper implications of Conall's T-shirt selection are worth thinking through.

What is the "boy problem" exactly? Perspective is vital here. Girls achieved a C grade or better in 62.4 per cent of GCSE entries last year, compared with 53.4 per cent of boys, dashing hopes raised in 2001 that the disparity was shrinking. At earlier testing stages, too, boys have consistently trailed girls, notably in reading skills at the end of primary school. However, the difference at A-level is less marked, suggesting that the core of the issue is not so much boys in general, as the sorts of boys who could but don't secure the sacred five GCSE A-Cs, and those who don't even get close. Vocational qualifications have been revamped with difficult male youths in mind but, whatever the virtues of these, in the context of the struggle to raise boys' academic standards they smack almost by definition of defeat.

There is no shortage of theories as to why this bored, unmotivated, often disruptive group exists, but few convincing solutions. Rampant laddism has been cited by education leaders since new Labour came to power - Stephen Byers did it back when he was schools minister as did the head teachers' leader David Hart last year - but there is not much public discussion of where laddism might come from or how to combat its effects.

A common conservative view is that modern teaching and assessment methods are at fault. An emphasis on coursework, it is said, suits the intrinsic make-up of girls whereas boys rise best to the challenge of tests. Bolstered by scientific findings about "evolved aptitudes" and "male" as opposed to "female" brains, this line insists that boy and girl intellects are so profoundly unalike that different pedagogies should be applied.

Others simply blame the success of girls - if not girls themselves. The standard men's rights position is that the Evil Feminazis have infiltrated education to demotivate boys by making them feel bad about themselves. This line is consistent with that of David Blunkett when he was education secretary. Responding to the GCSE outcomes of 2000, he warned of a "substantial backlash from males" fuelled by bitterness that thanks to an imbalance in equality campaigning, "the pendulum has swung from gross inequality for women to aggressive assertiveness".

What a silly arse. It is true that secondary school boys especially are strongly aware of being seen as educationally problematic and socially immature when compared with girls, and that they are frequently misogynistic. But to blame this on the success and new self-confidence of girls is ignorant and wrong. Boy culture is the issue and it is boy culture that education policy ought to change.

Interview-based research such as that published last year as Young Masculinities (Palgrave) by Stephen Frosh, Ann Phoenix and Rob Pattman provides insights into how this might be done. It reveals the subtle matrix of rules and mechanisms boys must negotiate in order to be seen as acceptable young males in a changing modern world. It points to the connections between boys' attitudes to "the feminine" in all its perceived forms and the reluctance of too many to learn.

Much of it will strike a chord with anyone of either sex who has ever been to a mixed or a boys' school: the competitive hierarchies, the marginalisation of sissies and swots, the kudos that goes with being "hard". But what is also - and vividly - exposed is the dissatisfaction many boys feel with the limits this imposes.

Some revealed a tension between the need to be well-qualified in a competitive job market where secure employment for men is no longer guaranteed and the countervailing pressure from male - and sometimes female - peers to emphasise their maleness by constantly distancing themselves from the ways of girls. This informal system of "gender policing" involves boys relentlessly regulating one another's behaviour and also regulating themselves in order to fit acceptable masculine norms. Typically, this meant not being "serious" except about football, being loud rather than reflective, and messing about in class. Even studious boys stressed that they weren't good all the time and some implied that it was partly to keep up appearances. After all to be a "boff" was to be girl-like and to be girl-like was to be "gay", the most defective form of maleness of them all.

For conservatives, such behaviour, even when regrettable, is natural and inevitable: it is biology-as-destiny; it is boys being boys. But this neglects the insights boys have into their own situations that even the least scholarly articulated when circumstances made them feel secure enough to do so. For all their anti-girl and homophobic noise, they often expressed dissatisfaction with the limited models of masculinity available to them. And when they looked on girls with envy it was for the freedom girls enjoy to be intimate and expressive and to step into boys' territory without suffering the peer sanctions that boys experience if they do the reverse.

Such a sanction was precisely what my little boy Conall endured thanks to the mauve-hooped rugby shirt, and will encounter constantly in subtler forms as he grows up. Breaking the power of such sanctions should be a priority for schools if they want boys' achievement to improve. It would mean creating more space for the pastoral side of schooling, for encouraging boys and girls to talk and think about what being a boy or girl might mean, and in so doing help boys to escape the straitjackets of boyness that so restrict them.

Charles Clarke seems unlikely to make this a priority. That is a shame, for if he did, he might find the attainment gender gap begins to close itself.

Dave Hill is the father of six children, three of them boys. His novel Dad's Life is published by Headline (£6.99)

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