Sue Gyford: Can left handed be all right?

Being a lefty has been a burden in the past. Victorian schoolchildren were beaten for using their left hand, and in several languages the word for left-handedness has negative connotations – the French say "gaucher", related to gauche, or clumsy, and the Italians call the left hand "la sinistra", related to sinister.

Nowadays it has ceased to be a major issue for most left-handers. But this week a headteacher has suggested that the oral element of school exams should be increased to make life easier for lefties.

Antony Clark, of Malvern College in Worcestershire, is to host a conference on left-handedness on 18 May.

And he speculates that schoolchildren who are left-handed struggle more than their counterparts when learning to write: they have to find ways to avoid smudging their work with their writing hand, and have to push the pen across the page rather than pull it.

As a result he suggests they may also struggle more during school exams.

If writing is more difficult, he theorises, you are likely to write less and be less proficient at expressing yourself in writing.

He suggested that offering more oral exams would benefit left-handers still catching up after their early years.

"It strikes me that exams are still done for right-handers really, because you're pulling the pen, you're not pushing it. It's not done by keyboard and it's not done by oral exam. You may have somebody who on paper is not so good but orally is excellent," he said.

His observation that left-handers tend to lag behind might outrage southpaws, but there is research to back it up. A 2008 study carried out for the Economic and Social Research Council by the University of Bristol, looked at national curriculum test results of 10,000 pupils.

The study concluded: "Left-handed children perform worse than right-handed ones in terms of cognitive outcomes at ages eight, 11 and 14. The gap between left-handed girls and right-handed girls is larger than the gap between left-handed boys and right-handed boys."

And that trend for there to be a difference between male and female left-handers could continue into adulthood, according to the results of another study from the department of economics at University College Dublin.

Researchers there found that left-handed men typically earned 4 per cent more than right-handed men – but women earn 4 per cent less than their right-handed counterparts.

Professor Timothy Bates, of the psychology department at the University of Edinburgh, agrees that "handedness" – whichever hand you use most – does tend to correlate to cognitive abilities.

"There are thousands of studies relating handedness to cognition and if there's a difference it favours right-handed people," he said.

However, he contradicts Mr Clark's theory that this difference develops as a result of lefties struggling to overcome the physical challenges of a right-handed world.

He says: "There are some people who are left-handed because their left hand works better, just like a right-handed person's right hand works better – and some people where it's a sign that something has gone wrong."

There are as many different experiences of left-handedness as there are southpaws. One left-hander who thinks he has probably become more academic as a result is Jonathan Salmon, 43, a biotech programme manager from Shandon.

He says: "I think at school, because I was left-handed, I was less good at sports like cricket, so I'd tend to spend more time inside on computers and the like – so I think I was far more studious than I would have been."

So it might be a challenge growing up a lefty, but with the Stormtroopers and Obama on our side (not to mention Ned), it can't be all bad.