Girls - co-ed or single sex secondary?

[Cornygirl]

Just that really!?!

But am worried about moving them at A Level - isn't that really distracting? Especially going from SS to co-ed?

I would personally say that it is better to integrate her at this point than throw her in at the deep end when she goes to Uni.

DD is in her last few weeks at school and has been co-ed throughout. It is a case of the right school for the child, and it has suited her. She had an older brother and was always a bit of a tomboy. She is also a maths/science girl, and struggles with essay subjects, but reasonably sure of herself so it seemed sensible for her to go to a school where more students would have a similar profile. Top sets were very boy dominated, but she and her friends stuck together and held their own. She switched to a very selective sixth form, and observational evidence is that she had covered as much ground if not more than girls coming from supposedly more academic single sex schools, plus was much more at ease with having boys in the class room. (She arrived late to her first lesson so simply sat down on the first available seat, only to realise that the other girls were clustered together and she was alone amongst the boys and getting strange looks.)

DS was co-ed bar three years (13-16). Co-ed really helped at the "hormonal" stages. Boys can be quite tough on each other around the age of eight, and girls are pretty beastly from 10-13. The presence of the opposite sex calms things down. Again 15 year old girls in single sex schools seem far more boy obsessed than those in co-eds, where girls know that 15 year old boys are rather silly and slightly smelly, and peers clamp down pretty quickly on those who seem too keen.

DD's sixth form has been wonderful. Again it is about the right school for the right child. Moving is a challenge and will stretch, but many are ready for this. DS at the same stage really benefitted from girls joining, even though he and his friends were pretty quiet. Boys and girls each bring something to the equation and both groups benefit from the broader experience.

I will let you know as dd is moving from her very small independent girls school to a large coed state 6th form in September!

Surely the results are skewed as most single sex schools are independent? (although being in a class of 8 girls for maths gcse didn't seem to help dd much - she still may have failed )

If girls have to be isolated from normal society to achieve, it doesn't say much for girls, let alone their prospects in the modern world.

I think it's the modern world itself that it doesn't say much for!

The fact is that girls in single sex schools are more than twice as likely to choose STEM subjects than girls in mixed schools. As a society, we need to address this by changing the attitudes of teachers / pupils / parents.

Goodbye, it's not a convent, it's a girls school. Girls who attend ss schools are not isolated!

My daughters go to a single-sex comp purely because that was what we have round here and the school I liked most of our local comp options.

I would not have chosen single-sex on its own. However, I really, really like the outspoken, explicitly feminist ethos. And I like the fact that it's not just maths and science, but girls playing the bass guitar and the drums, and girls doing the lighting for the school plays. They have Feminist Assemblies and all.

The school joins with the boys' comp at sixth form, which I very much like, and in all honesty they seem to see a lot of the boys from the boys' comp anyway .

So my limited experience is that all-girls' schools are great if you want your daughter to turn into a stroppy feminist type. Fortunately I did.

goodbye what a stupid and very unpleasant thing to say. Your statement doesn't say much positive about you, tbh.

Erm, well my dd IS definitely isolated in her girls school. Its miles from anywhere. I guess if you live in London (i'm guessing motherinferior??) or a city when girls have easy access to boys then its a different story.

My experience of rural girls schools is that you are more likely to get carbon copies of conservative, rather sloany mothers than stroppy feminists. More's the pity.

I'm pondering this at the moment.

Re single sex always being independent, that's not my experience. When we lived in Berkshire then Hertfordshire, especially St Albans, there was quite a choice of single sex state schools.

We will opt for the independent sector and I'm not sure if the Stem criticisms hold true there as the co-ed school we're looking at holds a national 'girls into engineering' conference regularly. The head is a woman as is the head of maths. Ds1 is there and when I brought up maths and science as being considered a boys subjects he gave me this face.

But...the single sex school has phenomenally high results (top 5 in country) but I worry that's very much the wrong place for a very bright, perhaps too intense and too uptight, young girl.

he single sex school has phenomenally high results (top 5 in country) but I worry that's very much the wrong place for a very bright, perhaps too intense and too uptight, young girl.

run for the hills!!

I went to a single sex comp. It was utterly shite.

Thinking about Goodbye's post: what matters is what prepares girls best for the society that they are going to enter, and the world of work that they are best suited for.

So if the school equips girls with the STEM qualifications that they need for engineering, but none of the other skills that they might need in that world (including the ability to work effectively in mixed or otherwise all-male teams), then that is not preparing them fully.

But equally, a school that prepares its girls very well for working in mixed or all-male teams but which explicitly or implicitly makes it less likely that they would study STEM subjects is also not preparing them fully.

I do also agree with PP who suggest that digging deeper into the data to compare like with like would be informative, as girls' schools are more common in some sectors rather than others.

So e.g. STEM subject takeup in:

• Girls' grammars vs fully mixed grammars
• Girls genuine comps vs fully mixed genuine comps
• Girls' private selective vs fully mixed private selective
• Girls' private non-selective vs fully mixed private non-selective (I realise that all private schools are selective by parental income, but i mean those where the entry exams are a formality or where there are few applicants per place)
• Girls' secondary moderns (the 'other' school in partial or full grammar counties) vs fully mixed secondary moderns.
• Girls' faith schools vs fully mixed faith schools

i suspect the fact that many girls' schools are private, grammar or the other' school in grammar counties [confusingly sometimes called comprehensives, but without a comprehensive intake], or may be faith schools, can skew the data, because the vast majority of true comprehensives are mixed.

Hewl, take your point. Smack bang in London, very wide ethnic and socioeconomic intake.

throw her in at the deep end when she goes to Uni this is just not true. I went to single sex secondary and 6th form however I spent plenty of time with boys from local schools and other extra curricular activities. I had no problem at university...there was no deep end!

I think girls generally do better in single sex (no concerns ever about doing maths, physics, ict etc was always just as normal as any other subject) and boys do better in mixed.

Berkshire has grammar schools - so some at least of the state girls' schools there will either be or be descended from grammar schools or their corresponding secondary moderns?

Single sex schools give girls confidence and ambition in a way co-ed can't in my general experience.

Motherinferior, I think the vibrancy you get at most London comps these days would counter much of the single sex issues faced around the country. There would be a good racial mix and little feeling of isolation or being 'removed' from their peers. In many parts of the country, girls schools are quite gentle cosseting places, seeing their job as shielding girls until they reach 18 and are apparently better placed to cope with a co-ed world. Albeit many achieving very high results in the process.

Teacherwith2kids. Berkshire does have a couple if grammars but isn't a grammar authority. I was thinking of The Holt school in Wokingham actually.

In St Albans in Herts I seem to remember at least 2 state single sex girls schools and a further 2 state boys'. Maybe more.

Ah, OK. Apologies.

I do think across the country, very few non selective single sex state schools still exist. Probably my experience of living in St Albans then Wokingham probably skews that. In St Albans, if you want co-ed you really struggle with choice even looking at both state and independent. The few high achieving co-ed schools are stupidly over subscribed and you need to live very close to ensure a place.

My DD attended an all girls school from 11-16.

It was brilliant. She was so well supported and nurtured at every turn. And in a world where women too often have to fight for resources/a voice, she spent her formative years where the very fabric of her days were geared to her sex.

She moved at sixth form to co-ed. This was entirely her choice and I was nervous. But it has worked out well (so far). The transition was not difficult, no doubt aided by the fact that she is uber confident in her own worth.

She has made lots of nice friends, both boys and girls. She has quickly worked out how to handle sexual interest from young men (inevitable in a school where boys outnumber girls). There haven't been any serious downsides to the move, although naturally working out new situations takes time and energy, when all you might want to do is veg.

Homemama, that's interesting. A quick Google - may be wrong - suggests that the girls' schools have history as Grammar and Catholic schools. I know it is derailing the thread, but I wonder whether there are any non-faith girls' comprehensives that were founded as such?

Yes, I think St Albans girls was grammar until the 70s as was Veralum boys. And yes, the other two are Catholic. But it's interesting that across the country, where historically most grammars were single sex, this pattern was not repeated. They evolved into co-ed comps or became part of the independent sector. St Albans certainly opened new comprehensives in the 70s but retained the single sex status of the old grammars.
I'm not sure about The Holt in Wokingham. I think it's post war but I'm unsure whether it was a grammar school as its not actually too far from Kendrick.