Pros and Cons of all-girls schools

[ANightingaleSang]

Just that really. I went to a bog-standard mixed state school and so have no experience to draw on. What are people's thoughts and experiences with all-girls schools? Thank you!

I went to a girls school, and while it's not something I would choose for my own children, the one really has huge advantage was that I grew up thinking of girls and women as the default person. If the teacher asked a pupil to carry some furniture, or stand on as desk to open a window, they asked a girl. If I needed someone stronger it taller to help me, The people who were good at maths or science or sport, who did the tech for school plays? All girls. We never modified our conversation or appearance because there were boys nearby.

When I left school and went to university I found myself pretending to be wracking and less capable than I was because that was what was expected of me, and discovered all sorts of topics that women didn't really talk about in front of men, but I never forgot those years where being a girl was just normal.

I also went to an all girls school and would say it was good for building confidence and a can do attitude. I work at a mixed school now and I think sometime boys do dominate.

However downside was definitely having fewer boys as friends.

I work in a girls school. The corridors are never rowdy. Sometimes excitable at lunchtime, but happy bubbly excitement, never rough or unpleasant (compared to the mixed state school I worked in before).

The girls get extraordinary results in Stem subjects. Talking about science is normal. Being as good as you can be is normal. The girls don't modify their dress in 6th form for boys.

I went to a girls' school and it was a very fantastic experience. I received a very good education and pastoral care. Because everyone was female there were no gender roles and we did everything ourselves which also meant that I never knew there was something called 'gender inequality' until I was much older. Basically we all thought that girls and boys were equal and we could achieve anything we set out to do. Some people may find that naive but personally I thought it was very empowering and so many of my peers went into finance and STEM careers after that.

This describes my experience too. I never learnt to defer to males, and am still a bit shocked when I come across mediocre males who expect to hold the stage.

We had the best part of 20 girls doing A level physics in a 6th form of just over 100.

@Imalongtimepostingmum That's really interesting. I've heard some absolute horror stories before now so it's good to hear something positive to balance the negative.

Here, they separate girls and boys from age 7, so quite young really.

Same as posters above, it just doesn’t occur to you that girls shouldn’t do anything or aren’t good at particular subjects or sports. I also had no idea about sexism really, that was perhaps also a sheltered life contributing to that. People say that girls schools are bitchy and cliquey and while they can be, I found going to a mixed school after single sex far more brutal. Girls can often be very supportive to each other, whereas the boys tore down the girls with misogynistic comments and the focus on appearance was endless. I appreciate the appearance aspect may be different in girls schools now with the ubiquity of smartphones and social media.

Less likely to be sexually assaulted by fellow students. The sad reality of it all.

Also there is more chance of feeling capable in STEM subjects

Interesting point about ‘girls as the default’, and weirdly it’s something I hadn’t considered in quite those terms. My all-girls’ school was excellent in that respect but the drawback for me was that I had no boys in my life (no brothers or boy cousins my own age, and overprotective parents who wouldn’t let me go to mixed parties or activities) so I grew up with some really weird ideas about boys. So I think as with all things in life there needs to be balance…

Ironically I am now the only female in my household!

I went to a girls school and then a mixed school.

Obviously it will hugely depend on the schools themselves - but I found the girls school better both socially and from a learning perspective. Long term the girls I went to school with at the girls school have what I suppose you could say were “better” careers than those at the mixed as well.

Overall it’s been positive for my two dds. A good learning environment and a message that girls can ( do anything.) A safe space and in younger years nurturing teachers. The only sticky area that crops up now and again are friendship groups, especially as they get older. Too many queen bee types and their followers, has caused upset in the past. Not everyone is kind to each other just because they all happen to be female. Just something to consider.

I went from a mixed state primary to a very academic girls school and loved it - socially, academically. No pressure to wear make up or roll up our skirts. No bullying for being clever. No sexual harassment .

Taught that we could so anything - a female astronaut visited one speech day. Engineering, physics were encouraged.

I loved the freedom of the single sex environment so much that it's what I have chosen for my own DD - and she's thriving socially, academically and most of all emotionally. She was state til 8 and prefers the single sex environment.

My dd went to a girl's school and I think it was a good choice. But I worked very hard at making sure she had extra curriculars that had lots of boys-and I encouraged her to go to a mixed 6th form. I think being in an environment where female is default is an excellent thing.

My mum is a secondary school teacher and she says if we (my sisters and I) were children now, no way would she send us to a mixed sex school for that reason. She says the stuff girls have to put up with is enough to make you cry (and my mother is quite brutal and not easily moved. She'd also have no hesitation coming down hard on perpetrators, but I guess feels there's little she can do overall).

Possibly she just teaches in a particularly bad school but I don't know. It's a good school in a "naice" area, wouldn't be described as rough.

She wasn't a teacher when I started secondary school, she did her PGCE when I was in year 8, so I'm not sure whether it's changed, or if, had she been a teacher before, I'd have ended up at an all-girls school. Before becoming a teacher she'd have been dismissive of the benefits of all-girls schools.

I went to an all-girls state comprehensive secondary. I agree with the default being girls and a higher number doing STEM subjects. There was no rubbish about girls dubjects/boys subjects. (There was some idea around academic and non-academic subjects. University-bound girls were not encouraged to do secretarial subjects.)

I did half my A-levels at the boys school (though in practice for Latin, we were all girls.) That was subject dependent. There were some shared activities like language exchanges and drama productions. And 6th form socials, but they were arranged by us, not school. I also saw boys out of school at swimming club and other activities.

I'm sure there were some girls who hated school, (which could be said of any school,) but I enjoyed it and am still good friends with a some of them.

Had I had a daughter, I would have liked her to go to single sex for secondary.

I agree with some of the positives that others are posting re the female being the default, but have a few cons to add.

I went to a mixed primary school and girls only secondary (in the 00s). My girls' school was very bitchy and cliquey, but maybe a mixed school would have been the same, or maybe it was that I had a particularly bad year group. I have to say that I don't remember any kind of "girls supporting girls" energy. It was very competitive. Could have just been the school, though.

The biggest thing I remember was that access to boys was the most valuable currency you could have. Past Year 8, the biggest thing that made you cool was knowing boys.

I didn't have brothers, male cousins, or male friends from extracurriculars, so for years, I didn't speak to a male peer. I was shy but averagely so, not ND or anything - I just didn't know any boys. My equally-uncool friends were in the same boat. The more popular girls would go off with groups of boys from nearby boys' schools after school, to sit in parks and drink, but if you weren't in with them, that was kind of it - you just didn't speak to boys. I remember being 15 and desperate to have a first kiss and a boyfriend, but with no idea of how to make it happen. I sometimes felt that I was living a 1950s teenage experience.

When I started university, I was very nervous around boys. I was hugely naive about what actual men are actually like, mostly because I had spent more time reading romance novels than interacting with actual males. I developed huge, debilitating crushes and, I think, behaved in a very immature way for an 18 year old. I think university would have been a bit easier (and also more fun!) if I had got some of that out of the way at 14 rather than 18. I didn't have a boyfriend until I was 20.

So that's my view - for some of the girls I was at school with, it was fine, and it might have been fine for me if I'd been friends with the right people, but for some of us, we were effectively cloistered, and it seemed to come down to where you were in the coolness pecking order. It's easy in middle age to dismiss it, but romance it's a big deal to teenagers and a big part of your development.

Anyway, this is all quite personal and may have been specific to circumstances, but wanted to add it as I think there's sometimes a starry-eyed view of female single-sex schooling on here. If I HAD to send my kids to single sex schools, I would try and make sure that they had some extracurriculars with the opposite sex.

I had a great education at my all girls school but being so sheltered I think really did affect my social development, in ways I can still see now. Having to relate to boys in any way in my uni years was so weird for me, to this day I don't have male friends. If I had a daughter I'm not sure I would choose it for her, since I don't think it prepares you for the real world.

We live in an area with both mixed and single sex options. When DD was in year 6 we went to see both, expecting to put the mixed one as first preference, but actually we both loved the single sex one more. Perhaps it was just that school, perhaps it was the single sex angle, but she has been really happy and stayed on for 6th form. She has a brother so I don't know if I would have felt differently if she didn't but it has worked for us. I think that default person = female point made by PP above is true. DS goes to the mixed school not the boys one because we preferred it but anecdotally I was shocked on an open day to be shown a GCSE computing class with one girl in a room of boys.

We will almost certainly be choosing a girls' school for DD. As @UnimaginableWindBird said, girls' schools are an environment where 'female' is the default, in a world where the default is still very much male. The Head of a lovely girls' school I recently visited opened her talk with: 'This is a place where girls take centre stage', which is exactly what I want for our daughter.

I attended a coeducational grammar myself, and would be fine with a mixed grammar environment, where the common factor among all the students is that they love learning and want to be there. But in a comprehensive setting I think other factors kick in that are potential detrimental to girls and their learning.

I currently volunteer in an upper KS2 class at DD's primary, and to be frank the class I'm in is an excellent advertisement for girls' schools - frequently at least half the lesson time is wasted due to low level disruption from disengaged boys, many of whom have unmet needs and cannot function properly within a mainstream setting. Obviously this is symptomatic of the SEND crisis and in many (though not all) cases isn't the boys' fault as such, but neither is it the girls' fault to sort out, and pragmatically speaking an all girls' school screens out a lot of that disruption and wasted time.

I'm also a primary governor, and in this capacity am very often party to discussions around how to better engage underachieving and disruptive boys in learning - lessons themed around football; focus on wars and conflict in History; class readers written by male authors, with male protagonists. Seldom is this ever reversed; the girls are just expected to get on with it. Even our local mixed comp has got wise to all this, and now teaches girls and boys separately for the core subjects.

The negative, I guess, js the old trope that 'girls' schools are bitchy', frequently trotted out by a fair few people I know. But in a lot of cases this strikes me as internalised misogyny, and I've seen very limited evidence for it myself.

Both of mine are coming to an end of their time in a girls state school and have both concluded that although not perfect it has been really good for them. Dd1 has excellent results dd2 only year 11.

Dd2s maths teacher moved from a mixed private school and said the girls there were meek and silent in class as the boys dominated she prefers their school as the girls speak up in class and are confident about their maths. Zero regrets here.

I moved from a mixed grammar to a girls grammar at 16 (so opposite to what most people choose!) Because of my subject combination.

One of the first things I noticed, which I hadn't before, was that boys had dominated the classroom before. More likely to speak up, or have a guess, and just fill the space. Whereas in the girls school... everyone had the same space. Equal respect all way round.

I never even considered Engineering as a career before that. But I did a competition in Yr12 and was hooked.

Cons: girls can be bitchy

Pros: absolutely no sexual assault or sexual bullying from boys. I literally had no idea about this until sharing experience with a friend who went to mixed.
Also your default person is female. It's perfectly normal to you for women to like STEM, sports, be in leadership roles.
Lessons are tailored to girls- picking the history option that isn't just war, the English book written by a woman. These on their own are very small changes but they add up.

My daughter went to a single sex school for her whole education. She ended up with top grades but more than that a determination that she could achieve her dreams.
She's very confident, has bags of integrity and calls out poor behaviour.
She's currently year 2 of studying veterinary medicine which was her dream since she was 10.
She certainly hasn't had issues with boys, not sure if it's because I also have a son or because she was a competitive swimmer so was used to being in a mixed environment.
We're delighted with the effect the school had on her.

Completely agree with this - this was my experience too. When I finally interacted with boys at uni I had very little experience of how to do this in a 'normal' way and was far too willing to compromise my own self respect to win a boy's affections.

Like many people have said, the big advantage was simply that you never felt that girls were 'other' in any way as everyone was female. Large numbers of maths and STEM; a friend of mine in a nearby coed school with a great academic reputation was the only girl in her physics A level class. At my school, most of the brightest girls did maths, further maths and physics. I have no idea if it was bitchier than girls in a mixed school would be through teenage years as I've got nothing to compare it to but I don't look back and feel like behaviour in any way traumatised me. Friendships issues much as my children have in their mixed schools. There was very little preoccupation with what we were wearing, or distraction in lessons from anyone but girls who wanted to mess around (plenty of those!).

Cons, again like others, although I had a brother, I grew up with limited contact with boys. There was quite a bit of mixing in sixth form, and I had a couple of boyfriends, but they were both quite geeky types, and I found the more typically masculine boys hugely intimidating, both during school and through university. Even now in middle age I am vastly more comfortable in all-female company.

On the whole, if there were a state girls school available, I'd happily send mine there.

I can't really imagine spending my education alongside boys. I didn't notice the lack of them!