This more punitive effect on single sex schools for girls demonstrates, just as many of us have already feared, that the effects of this policy are both sexist and ableist.
Sexist; since many girls need a female-only school environment for various reasons, including just that they would like to be at school through the day without routinised sexual harassment from male peers, which in this world of smartphones and accessible porn is a significant problem in many mixed schools. And abeist, in that this goes even more so for many girls with SEND and mental health needs!who might be able to manage in mainstream only because it’s less socially stressful (because it’s single sex) education, especially during their teenage years. That single sex environment allows for those girls to be in school and to reach their academic potential whatever it may be.
A single sex school might also be preferred by any girl of any level of need or regardless of her background, who would like to study for her exams in a girls-only school, given that it’s been evidenced that girls do better academically if they are learning in a single sex school environment. (The opposite is true I believe for boys, who do better in mixed schools).
Yet the gov gives no shits about putting both these private and state girls schools out of reach for thousands of girls. One factor not accounted for in the analysis here is that among state girls mainstream secondary schools, extremely few of them are NOT already academically selective.
So if you have a girl who would benefit from that environment but she is not an academic high flyer (and is without the higher academic ability which would have given her some level of advantage in life), then that lower performing or higher-needs girl does not have as good odds to be able to find herself a state girls’ school place, now.
Another factor is that many girls’ schools in the UK both private and state sectors, will have a strong religious ethos due to their founding history. And while that ethos may be perfect for many girls and their families, again the presence or absence of that religiously influenced curriculum in a girls-only state school, can be a barrier to a girl finding a single-sex state education.
That lack of opportunity for a female single- sex education goes especially in the scenario that a girls’ private school has closed down or become unaffordable for her family thanks to this government policy which is obviously aimed at shutting down as many fee paying schools as possible.
I’m so disgusted at this gleeful shutting down by a government, of options for improved academic outcomes for girls, and for improved economic outcomes for girls.
In these times where the government worries endlessly about the welfare bill, to not allow girls to advance themselves as much as possible at school according to their needs, is madness. Girls are more likely to be in lower paid jobs and are more likely to end up taking on the burden of their childcare affecting their future earning power, and are then more likely to be reliant on state pension support. Girls schools were invented partly to help women have economic freedom and more choices about their lives.
The lifelong struggle to set up girls’ schools by pioneering women in Victorian and Edwardian times, pioneering against systemic sexism that women today can only shudder at, is just being chucked away because thos government doesn’t want to engage in the reality that the UK is still a very sexist place compared to lots of other countries. Where is the sense that government policies should never be actively compounding that?
As a descendant of several working class women who were first in their family to go to university, who were enabled to do so because they themselves went to girls’ schools run by some of the first generations of women who were able to go to university at all, who inspired their female pupils to go on to have choices in life beyond the limits of what their contemporary society was telling them they were born to do, and to become teachers for girls in their turn, I can really feel how horribly backward this step is.