Schools Guide

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Men think differently from women, and boys differently from girls. The cause of this difference is the subject of debate, but the difference itself is rarely denied. Therefore, it is perhaps unsurprising that the most academically successful schools in the UK are single-sex.

The gap in performance between girls in co-educational independent schools and girls in girls-only independent schools is striking at both GCSE and A level. For example, in summer 2008 the percentage of passes at A/A* at GCSE in schools that belong to the Girls’ Schools Association (GSA) was 68.5% while for girls in co-educational schools it was 54%. At A level, 56.9% of results achieved by girls at GSA schools were at A grade, compared with 48.9% at co-educational schools.

No one can explain this success for certain, although it has long been considered that girls perform better in mathematics and science subjects when taught alone and boys perform better in languages and English. It must be hoped that the belief that girls are capable of learning everything that boys can learn is universally held well beyond the confines of girls’ schools. But it is more to do with how boys and girls learn than what they learn. As our understanding of the brain evolves in the coming decades, many believe that neurological distinctiveness, as opposed to social conditioning, will explain why it is that girls and boys approach learn differently.

Teachers who have taught in both single-sex and coeducational schools explain that they teach differently in a singlesex environment, and that they can foster a love of learning harder to maintain in a co-educational school. In mixed classes, boys will demand more attention. Your daughter will be left to work quietly, co-operating with her friends, while the boys' questions are answered. Even in classes taught by people determined to avoid such patterns of behaviour, they still occur. A girl in such a class may be short-changed in every lesson. In an all-girl classroom or laboratory, the girls are very vocal and lively, prepared to take risks without worrying too much if they have come up with the right answer.

More importantly, a great deal of learning takes place outside the classroom. Men and women, girls and boys have different conceptions of hierarchy, of competition, of communication, of leadership and of teamwork. It is essential, particularly for girls, that their models of thinking are allowed to flourish. In a good girls’ school there is a confidence-giving climate of co-operation – not just with peers but with teachers too. The most important roles are taken by girls, and exercising leadership or taking real responsibility is normal. This touches all aspects of school but is most obvious in a subject like drama, where all the roles are played by girls, including running the lighting and the computerised sound system. This matters to your daughter and her perception of herself.

Good co-educational schools cater well for the different needs of boys and girls, but some are really boys’ schools with girls attached. The senior staff are male, the routines are determined by rugby, cricket and the CCF, and these are not good places for girls to grow up.

Parents educated in a single-sex school, remembering the anxieties they felt as a teenager, sometimes hope that a co-ed school will spare their children the same anxiety. This is a myth. All adolescents, even the most self-possessed, will suffer some of the same uncertainties we all felt at 15, and it is unwise for heads to exaggerate their influence over the way adolescence is experienced. Whatever they claim, having the opposite sex around does not make the life of any 15-year-old easier. Attending a mixed school is also no guarantee of later happiness, as a glance at France, Germany and the USA shows. These countries are overwhelmingly mixed in their schooling, but the relationships between the sexes are no simpler there, or anywhere else, than they are here.

Nowadays, young people, even at single-sex boarding schools, socialise at weekends, throughout the holidays and via on-line community sites during term time and they have friends of both sexes. Still, most find the return to the solidarity of the single-sex school liberating. The bonds of friendship forged in the single-sex school, especially among boarders, often prove to be enduring and deeply sustaining.

As a result of the evolving liberation of women we are rethinking our definitions of success, of academic disciplines, of leadership, of organisational structures and of the nature of work. We have moved on from the 1960s and 1970s to a more mature and less strident view of the sexes as equal, but different. By giving girls confidence to think for themselves society as a whole is enriched, and we might ask why successive governments have by stealth largely abolished single-sex state schools.

Finally, perhaps I should qualify all this. The goal of all good schools must be the same – to educate each pupil well. The parents I meet rightly seek an excellent school, a school which enables human beings to become decent, independent adults, where the particular needs of their son or daughter will be identified and looked after.

There are certainly places to be wary of – the co-ed school without a truly co-educational ethos is one, especially for the teenage years – but excellent schools come in all shapes and sizes. What matters, above all, is that the school provides a supportive ethos where each boy's or each girl's self-awareness and inner confidence can truly grow.