Choose the School – not the Sex

The perennial debate over the relative merits of single-sex and co-education will not be stilled by yesterday’s report from a group of independent co-educational schools.

As it somewhat reluctantly admits, there is simply no hard evidence for or against the many prejudices surrounding the issue. What is needed is a comparative study over time of the fortunes of large numbers of pupils of similar ability in both types of school. No such study has been done. Instead the report offers earnest assurance that girls do not suffer academically from being taught in a co-educational environment. The approach – largely ignoring the position of boys in single-sex schools – is instructive. Girls, it makes clear, are the battleground.

One reason is the common, if statistically awkward, belief that girls do better in single-sex schools while boys are better off in co-educational ones.

Another is the fact that most independent co-educational schools are former boys’ schools that began admitting girls to keep up their numbers – and urgently need to keep on doing so for their survival.

That pressure, combined with the oft-repeated refrain that girls have a “civilizing” influence on boys (never the other way round), is enough to make many parents more than a little suspicious about co-educational schools’ interest in their daughters.

Add to that periodic reports suggesting that boys in mixed schools demand and receive disproportionate attention in class and that girls, particularly in maths and science lessons, are liable to be sidelined by the more aggressive sex, and parental worries multiply.

So seriously do some co-educational schools take such concerns that they even teach the sexes separately.

Against that, the report argues: “In single-sex and co-education a number of academic and social factors come into play, but there is no evidence that one type of schooling is more effective than the other in exam terms.”

In the absence, in truth, of any evidence one way or the other, one is forced to fall back on the admittedly bland formula of “horses for courses”.

A good school is a good school, whether single-sex or co-educational. The best school is that one that best suits a particular child’s academic ability, personality and inclinations.

Text C

The secondary school I went to was a direct grant grammar school. It was single sex, boys only, and it was a religious school: Roman Catholic.

The whole aim of the school seemed to be to prepare people for university entrance. So there were three streams in each year, but you got a very clear impression that the pupils who mattered for the staff were those in the top stream who were going to go on to university.

It’s interesting that there was actually no careers specialist on the staff. If you were going to leave at sixteen after your “O” levels then you left at sixteen, and people just – the staff just said goodbye and that was it. They were mainly interested as I say in those who were going on to university. In that sense they were successful, and had a very high rate of successful university applications, but I can’t say that I look back on my time there with any sense of love at all. It was a very strict school, very rigid timetable, very rigid teaching methods.

The fact that it was single sex I now see was a big disadvantage and the fact that it was a religious school in a sense was a disadvantage as well. I think it was actually a socially divisive institution in many ways.

It helped me get into university. I suppose I’m grateful to it for that, but when it came to thinking about schools for my own children there were two basic criteria that my wife and I applied. One was that we would not send our children to single-sex schools and secondly we would not send them to religious schools. They both in fact attended state comprehensive schools, the nearest secondary school to where we live, and I think they had much more enjoyable times at school than I did. And my wife feels the same. She went to a similar school to mine, a Catholic religious school for girls.

As I say, it helped me get into university, but that is what it set out to do. It gave us no training for life, shall we say, no advice at all on careers, so we were left entirely to think of that for ourselves.

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