Downe House and Harrow !

[Tobstar106]

Downe House going into partnership with Harrow !

What exactly does that mean, though?

not too sure !

Have you read the announcement they've put out? At the moment it looks like they will be coming organising more activities together "a rich and meaningful programme of joint academic, co-curricular, and social activities" and aligning their calendars. I suppose the aim is to be a pair of schools that will appeal to families who want single sex education but with formal links to an opposite sex school. And also helpful if you have a boy and girl attending at the same time.

In the longer term, who knows? Single sex schools (particularly boys schools) seem to be on the brink of extinction. The Sherborne group have just announced that they will be restructuring so only year 9-11 will be single sex.

https://www.downehouse.net/community/harrow-partnership/

Yes they are all at it , do you think it has something to do with the 20% vat ? That could be another factor

"Single sex schools (particularly boys schools) seem to be on the brink of extinction." Yes, they do. And it is terribly sad. There are children who are better-suited to co-ed environments, and there are absolutely children who are better-suited to single-sex environments.

The destruction of boys' schools is almost entirely due to financial considerations, and (to a far lesser extent) what is convenient for parents (hedge fund mummy and neurosurgeon daddy don't want to make time to do drop-offs and pick-ups at two schools) rather than what is best for the students. Tragic!

I would argue that it’s actually more to do with changing societal attitude towards masculinity. The days of boys being treated as little kinds who will run the world are thankfully fading. It seems, most parents see that their sons need to grow up with girls to learn to see them as their equals, which in my opinion is pretty difficult to do at a single-sex school.

Agree ! Thankfully atm my boy prep is single sex and his next school has girls in 6th form as from this year ! So not too bad

They do have socials 😆

… and what a healthy way to interact with girls.

To be fair the boys and girls love the socials, it is a lovely opportunity to stay in contact with each other.Life long friends are made from such occasions.

The move towards weekly boarding, however phrased, by most boarding schools also has something to do with that because it has made boarding much more local- if you're picking up every Saturday and dropping back Sunday it just doesn't make sense to pick a school that's 3 hrs away. That gives some schools a much much tougher catchment than others and the rural schools are struggling- by going co-ed they immediately double their pool of potential pupils (simplistically- it's actually a greater leverage if you consider growingpreference to keep siblings together)

I was with a DH parent today- utterly bemused by the announcement. It would seemingly make more sense for DH and Radley to partner as they are at least geographically close. I would have thought the distance between DH and H would make aligned term dates harder rather than easier for families with boys and girls. And now Radley has acquired some co-ed preps that could be an asset in partnership with a girls’ school.

st swithun's and winchester college coordinate socials in the later years.

It’s many years since I looked into it, but then the research in England seemed to show that girls did better academically in single-sex schools and boys did better in mixed-sex ones.

I don’t know much about Downe House, but it’s not very impressive that the only quote from an external publication on their landing page is from 2019.

This is something I constantly hear but when I've looked into it there is basically no research basis for this.

All the research I have seen tends to either come out as "SS girls has a huge effect on academic results, SS boys is also slightly better than coed but not by as much" or having SS boys and coed roughly be the same. (These findings typically are only for academic results, usually not about character or sociability or other aspects which may be important to parents and be affected by SS/coed.)

But it gets spun as "boys actively do better in coed schools" which I just don't think is supported by the data. Usually explained as well by uncomfortable commentary about how boys are awful and can only achieve anything good if girls are around to civilise them. As if boys were just floundering for centuries until girls arrived in their classrooms a few decades ago...

If you don’t know much about the school then why post here? Do you work in IT and this is a comment on the webpage?

Downe House is Tatler’s public school of the year. If you work in IT perhaps you can criticise the webpage manager for not having posted that.

Anyone that knows anything about the top public schools will know that oodles is written every year in gazillions of publications all over the place about this school, Benenden, and Wycombe. So, there is little point in making that comment unless you work in IT and find the website lacking.

Personally I find it comforting that the school is sufficiently confident in its abilities that the landing page does not have bags of third party quotes.