Single sex schools vs. Co-educational…. Mixed blessings?

This is an interesting piece from the Financial Times (UK) and makes for a reflective read. One cannot imagine a “changing of the guard” of this nature at GMS! Our old schools in India seem to be chugging along just fine.
Cheers!
VPT

For over the past 30 years, the number of single-sex state schools in the UK has dwindled from nearly 2,500 to just over 400; in 60 local authorities there are no single-sex secondary schools at all. In the past decade, 130 single-sex private schools, too, have gone co-educational or closed entirely.
The prestige of the schools that remain gender-segregated and the extraordinary level of attainment by their pupils ensures impassioned debate. Winchester and Eton, Cheltenham Ladies’ College and St Paul’s Girls’, Harrow and North London Collegiate – all schools with worldwide reputations – are unwaveringly single-sex. The parents who choose to pay the hefty fees (from £9,000 to £28,000 a year) for these schools undoubtedly believe they are doing their best by their children. But is the education that virtually guarantees these students an entrée to the world’s leading universities and high-flying jobs also likely to bring them more than their fair share of emotional trauma?
Debate about the pros and cons of co-education has been going on for several hundred years. The 18th-century Swiss educational reformer Johann Pestalozzi believed that education should be based on the model of the family. The Quakers, with their similar perspective, pioneered co-ed boarding schools such as Sidcot School in Somerset.
In the mainstream English independent sector, however, girls remained very much second-class citizens until the end of the 19th century. It wasn’t until 1898, when JH Badley introduced girls to Bedales in Hampshire as an antidote to bullying, that progressive apologists began to contend that an education in which boys and girls were taught together would overcome antagonism between the sexes, improve the quality of marriage and discourage homosexuality.
Today, arguments about education tend to focus on performance rather than concern about relationships or emotional wellbeing. However, recent research carried out by Alice Sullivan, Heather Joshi and Diana Leonard at the Institute of Education’s Centre for Longitudinal Studies suggests that our priorities may be confused. In one of the few studies to have examined the longer-term outcomes of single-sex and co-educational schooling, the Institute’s researchers followed 13,000 children born in a single week in 1958 and assessed the academic, social and economic consequences of their education over a 30-year period.
The study found evidence that both sexes benefited from single-sex education in their decisions about careers. “Single-sex schools seemed more likely to encourage students to pursue academic paths according to their talents rather than their gender,” says Sullivan. “The boys from all-boys’ schools had 2.3 times the odds of boys at co-educational schools of getting an English or modern languages A-level, while girls at single-sex schools were significantly more likely than co-educated girls to get at an A-level in maths, physics or chemistry.”
However, says Leonard, professor of sociology of education and gender in the IoE’s School of Culture, Language and Communication, “We found that men who attended single-sex schools suffered more malaise by age 33 and were more likely to be divorced by age 42.”
Although the study indicated that it was men who suffered the greatest long-term psychological distress in a single-sex environment, there’s increasing evidence that as girls-only schools have focused more on exams too, the psychological wellbeing of their pupils has declined.
“Between 1987 and 1999, when girls began to outperform boys in almost every academic subject, the incidence of mental illness among high-achieving middle-class girls rose dramatically, with a 14 per cent rise in those experiencing some form of distress,” says clinical child psychologist and author Oliver James, who himself attended a single-sex school. “The main reasons for the unhappiness were concerns about weight, daily school performance and exam achievement. These girls set themselves impossibly high standards, with a fanatical intolerance of mistakes, and are prone to depression and obsessive thoughts. Though the schools all strenuously deny it, I’m afraid I believe that some high-achieving girls-only schools significantly contribute to the problem.”
Relationship counsellor Denise Knowles, who has worked with Relate for the past 18 years, attended both single-sex and co-ed schools and often encounters the long-term consequences of schooldays stress. “Even in adult life, I see people who are only able to relate through achievement and results. I think one of the reasons this type of thinking may be more prevalent in girls-only schools is that the presence of boys can help dissipate the intensity. The boys send the girls up – and everyone ends up laughing.”
Great Britain and Northern Ireland have a long tradition of single-sex schooling and the famous all-male British public schools, in particular, saw it as their chief function to be the “nurseries of our statesman” (in the words of 1861’s Clarendon Commission). This very specific elite education prepared upper-class boys for power by hardening them through team games, the prefect system and corporal punishment. The self-confident, plucky public schoolboy, accustomed to command, remains one of the most enduring models of success and it’s not difficult to understand why many of our leading schools have fought to defend this tradition while adapting their pastoral care and curriculum to the requirements of modern life.
David Thomas, author of Not Guilty: In Defence of the Modern Man, attended Eton in the 1970s, during a period in which the school briefly flirted with the introduction of girls. Says Thomas: “I think single-sex boarding schools exaggerate both sexes’ worst characteristics ... so boys can become more boorish, more hierarchical and more bullying. You’re away from your family, so the only way you survive is to construct a carapace and become detached from your emotions. The psychological price outweighs the education benefits. I wouldn’t send my son to Eton. I wouldn’t want him ending up like his dad!”
In the UK, the most radical shift to co-education occurred during the 1960s and 1970s when it was argued that girls and boys – and teachers – were happier together, and the expansion of comprehensives put theory into practice. “A family has a father and a mother,” wrote psychologist RR Dale in 1969, in his influential three-volume work Mixed or Single-Sex School?. “Lacking one of these, each feels incomplete and unsatisfied ... So it is with other institutions when they are one sex – as we know from the homosexual activities in Public School...” Dale made his case for co-education at a time when many parents feared that the presence of the opposite gender during lessons would lead to an excessive interest in sex, a concern that has clearly not entirely disappeared.
Still, at a time when pay disparity and the glass ceiling remain common workplace issues, girls’ schools are adamant that single-sex schooling provides the best working future for their pupils – a belief supported by the Institute’s research. “At an all-girls school every subject is a girls’ subject,” says Vicky Tuck, principal of the Cheltenham Ladies’ College, a pioneer of women’s education in the 19th century and still a leader in its field. “Last year we had 31 girls taking economics at A-level and 51 doing maths.”
Dr Brenda Despontin, until recently headmistress of Haberdashers’ Monmouth School for Girls, adds: “In a co-ed school, there will be fewer opportunities for girls to fill leadership roles.”
When it comes to boys, a key concern among educationalists worldwide has been underperformance. Some have started to argue that co-educational schools, particularly at primary level, can actually work against both boys’ achievement and happiness.
In the US, a society where single-sex education had become extinct as a result of the 1972 anti-discrimination education amendment Title IX, the psychologist and medical doctor Leonard Sax created more than a ripple when he founded the National Association for Single-Sex Public Education and, in 2005, published Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know about the Emerging Science of Sex Differences.
Some schools have coped with the single-sex versus co-ed dilemma by introducing a system known as the “diamond model”, in which the sexes are taught together in the early years, separated between 11 and 16 and brought back together at A-level. Berkhamsted Collegiate School in Hertfordshire has offered this approach since 1996. “In the pastoral sphere, the benefits are significant,” says retiring head Dr Priscilla Chadwick. “Students can take responsibility as prefects or organise societies within their section of the school and learn to motivate others without undue gender pressures. Boys and girls aged 11 to 16 can enjoy music-making, drama, field trips and theatre outings together, so that, by the time they come together in the sixth form, they know each other as friends.”
In state schools, single-sex classes within co-ed secondary schools were advocated in the 1980s as a means of addressing equal opportunities for girls but, since the 1990s, they have been used primarily to help under-achieving boys.
In “We Decided to Give it a Twirl: single-sex teaching in English comprehensive schools”, an article published in Gender and Education in 2003, Cambridge academics Molly Warrington and Michael Younger studied the impact of single-sex classes in 25 English comprehensive schools and found that, while “single-sex classes on their own are no panacea for the problems of poor behaviour, disaffection and lack of achievement, they can provide a positive and successful experience for girls and boys”. They also stated that “periods of mixed settings and single-sex setting raises [the] consciousness of girls and boys about their own gendered behaviour”.
The “diamond model” offers one solution to both emotional wellbeing and gender stereotyping. But it is unlikely to end an enduring debate.

Lisa Freedman is an educational adviser and a contributing editor to ‘The Good Schools Guide’.