Single-sex education today?

[exhaustDAD]

As I was standing outside the gate for school pick-up today, a fellow parent initiated a classic idle chit-chat. No harm, business as usual. At one point the topic went from weather, half-term, work and holidays to our children finding out with schools they will continue their education in next week. Fair enough, exciting times. But then he in a really odd manner looked around to see if anyone else would be listening in the conversation and whispered that he is planning to have his son go to an all-boy school, because girls are brutal now. And his reasoning just seemed so hard for me to understand - It is not for me to know what's best for everyone's kid, but he was talking about how the boy is awkward around girls, easily distracted, and he is hoping this would solve it.

I don't know what you - the reader of this thread - think, but to me it seemed like the absolute worst solution. Locking the boy up with only boys, having no interaction with girls his age will surely make him miss out on some evolution of communication skills when it comes to girls...

I don't know if I hurt anyone's feelings with what I am about to say - But I think same-sex schools are very outdated and I think it makes the kids miss out on being prepared for real life... Young men and women will be mixed in every aspect of their lives, further education, work, communal spaces, travels, you name it. I find it very backwards. I knew two people my age personally (one man, one woman, they don't know each other) who came from same-sex schools, and the guy was truly on the level of a teenager when it came to women (our coworkers), for example. The woman was more adjusted, but she openly talked about how much work it was for her to catch up with the world.
Back in the day, when my kids were in nursery, there was a dad who was very adamant that his daughter will only go to an all-girl school, because he doesn't trust boys. That, I feel, is also such a bad motivation.

I don't know, is there something I am not seeing, some invisible positive side?

You lost me at “locking the boy up” and “having no interaction with girls his age”.

I agree with you. (I went to single sex, dc went to co-ed)

Except balance that with higher rates of eating disorders in single sex girls schools.

Little shits apply to girls too.

The biggest issue I found when my children went to a co ed primary school as that when resources are stretched they default to the boys.

for instance sport. The school had one PE teacher. He had to do sport for all the pupils. So what did they play - football and basketball. Why? Because the boys refused to play netball despite all the girls begging to have a team and learn to play. The girls just had to lump it.

at my DD’s single sex secondary they have dedicated netball teachers. At my DD’s friend’s school they play netball until year 10 and then stopped as they found there was greater demand for football from the boys after that point and so employ and extra football teacher and the girls who play netball have to do it outside of school from that point. The girls are told to just go to the gym in PE after that point or play football.

Yeah OP I find it backwards too. Certainly not something you could choose in Canada where I grew up.

I have teacher friends at both single sex (grammar and state) and co-Ed and have friends children who go to single sex. They all have horror stories - mainly around the single sec being horrible eating disorders and mysogyny. Funnily enough thise same teachers who have taught at both think co-Ed is better but it all comes down to one thing - how good is the school?

We have a girls only and indeed the results are very high - but are within a few points of the co-Ed school so it isn’t the environment of single sex only that is causing kids to perform.

Personally I wouldn’t send to single sex. I don’t see the benefits and socialisation with everyone is so important.

But again unfortunately this is the achool. My kids co-Ed has dedicated girls football coaches, netball, rugby, cricket etc. No disadvantage for the girls at all.

I went to an all girls school that I absolutely hated (not cos it was all girls, for lots of reasons) and regularly begged to leave to go to the mixed comp with all my childhood friends, but my mum refused. There was definitely a lot of bitchiness and cliqueiness that I don’t think you’d find so much in mixed sex schools. When I came out as gay at 16 my mum was very disappointed, so I used to tell her it was her fault for sending me to an all girls school 🤣 (obviously not true but it was fun getting my own back on her for being so homophobic!)

That is pretty disheartening @BananaPeels , truly is. I want to believe that it is not a general truth, but an unfortunate and poor way of handling a situation over at your school.

100% and if you go to a large school they can cover this but little schools (most schools my way are 100 pe year ) never have the budget and when the budget is tight my experience is they always default to the boys as boys are more forceful about refusing to do things and the girls bear the brunt.

While I feel for the hardships of your younger years, I can't help but smile at your fun twist on it. Haha, that is great.

I don't know, we had a similar issue about a year ago about girls wanting to do different things, and the school not wanting to employ extra people. So they worked out a rota of doing X this week, doing Y the next week. Or it's every 2 days they switch, I can't remember exactly. Point being, it is about problem solving of the grown-up professionals in charge, not necessarily a fault of boys being together with girls.

I am interested in this subject.
DH went to a boys school and quite honestly it didn't do him or any of his friends any favours.
The evidence also implies boys do better in mixed sex settings.
Our boys have always been in co-ed schools ,happy doing well and girls are just a normal part and equal members of their lives. ( oldest now upper 6th).

The evidence used to imply girls do better in single sex at least academically. Although I'm not so sure this is true?
I was in mixed sex schools and never had any problems from the boys . In fact I would say many positives from having boys present as girls were always less bitchy when boys were around. I was very quiet and shy and had a massive disadvantage of being very ill and at school with a physical reminder of my illness for a while. The boys were always lovely and certainly kinder than the girls.
They were not a distraction and no girl was self conscious around them as we knew them well and could handle them. I often here women who went to girls school claiming these are issues with mixed sex schools. They are not from my experience! I was top set science and boys did not dominate the girls there either. We competed certainly but no bad thing with that.
I now work in a female dominated profession and went to university with many who had been at girls schools and girls boarding schools. Honestly some of these young women had some very strange behaviour around men. So I am not at all convinced it was a positive for them. DH has described a few of my friends as being like a walking warning against girls schools. ( Poor man was truly terrified by one in our early dating days) .
We don't actually have any single sex options near us (unless we could afford the 30k plus private girls school) for my daughter so she will be co ed.
I am happy with this, she will do well I'm sure and hopefully come out still able to communicate well with men!

I fail to see the parallel with endemic sexual violence and abuse if I’m honest.

I've name changed for this to reflect my experience.
My DC go to a girls' school and I can categorically say it has exceeded my expectations in every single way.
I didn't actively elect it for DC1 -just put it down as one of our choices as it was within fairly easy travel distance and it was subsequently allocated for our older DC by our local authority and we decided to accept, and younger sibling followed.

The school is diverse, and the student (and teacher!) demographic reflects all kinds of backgrounds and ethnicities. There is no sense of any curriculum area being 'gendered' and pupils enter (and win) national competitions in STEM subjects and sports.

@AndreaKnowsBest has already made all the points I wanted to make and they are definitely true for my DC. Especially the benefits of removing the layer of stress involved with negotiating the male gaze and male appraisal.

One of my DC has SEND and overall, allocation and provision looks very different to what I see in my own professional role which involves facilitating primary to secondary transition, including for vulnerable pupils and pupils with SEND. There is a very different SEND profile across my DC's school and overlaps with SEND and behaviour is also markedly different; less challenging behaviour linked to need.

My own co-educational experience was mixed. I was highly motivated by the male gaze and excelled at gaining male approval. Much to the detriment of my learning, despite being bright. I didn't really see it at the time, it being 'the water in which we swam', but looking back, so many of my memories of school carry with them a preoccupation with a particular kind of tension around the relationships with the boys I studied alongside. It informed much of what I did, how I behaved and, importantly, how I viewed myself. I'm so pleased that my DC are in a school where they 'present' for nobody but themselves.

i was state co-educated so never considered single sex for my son. But we went to check out a variety of secondaries and I noticed that his favourites were single sex. When I asked him it hadn’t occurred to him that that they weren’t any girls. Instead he said that they just felt like more friendly welcoming places.

And thinking to the different head teachers presentations they did talk far more about the pastoral and the emotional support and growth of the students. Whereas the coed ones were a lot more about results and academics. Not that the boys schools put less emphasis on those.

i was particularly impressed with one of the boys’ school’s use of drama as a core subject to help their students learn to express and communicate rather than stifle emotions - without the worry of the female gaze. With so much talk about the dangers of toxic masculinity approaches like these are timely and important.

So next year he’ll be going to one of these all boys secondaries and I’ll see how it goes.

@Ladyinamask You have assumed these DDs would not have been wierd anyway and you don’t know what influence their parents had. My dd’s boarded and they seem normal enough to me and had numerous male friends. They just didn’t see them at school. There’s odd people everywhere if you look.

From my own experience locally, single-sex schools here are not struggling institutions in need of defending. We have four girls’ schools in the area, two of which are consistently oversubscribed. That suggests a significant number of families actively value that model.

In my line of work I cross between schools regularly and speak to both teachers and parents. What I see on the ground doesn’t reflect some of the more extreme claims being made here. Of course there are negative experiences, in single-sex and co-ed settings alike, but presenting issues like eating disorders, “bitchiness,” or social awkwardness as inherent to girls’ schools feels like an oversimplification, boarding on a slightly biased attack.

Equally, co-ed schools are not automatically paragons of equality and social balance. As one poster mentioned, resource allocation and culture matter enormously.

The proof is out there - and in the not too distance past we have the 'me too' moment that un overed a multitude untold horrors taking place at co-ed institutions.

This is about a balanced review.

A well-run school, single-sex or mixed, will problem-solve around sport, pastoral care, SEND provision, and curriculum access. A poorly run one won’t.

What strikes me most is that people often attribute outcomes to structure (single-sex vs co-ed) when in reality leadership, ethos, teaching quality and family context likely play a much bigger role.

Some children thrive in mixed environments. Some flourish without the social dynamics of the opposite sex in their daily classroom life. Neither model has a monopoly on producing confident, capable adults.

Opinions are opinions, they're too be respected, but there is also evidence in the context of multiple academic studies that support the benefits of girls only education, especially in pre 16 years.

For us, the single-sex option has worked extremely well. For others, co-ed will be the right choice. That doesn’t make either group naieve or backward, it just reflects different priorities and different children.

Both DS and DD went to single-sex secondary schools and did well. We didn't do this for any particular ideological reasons, it was more that we weren't in the catchment areas for any good co-ed schools that didn't also have religious requirements.

If my DCs didn't have each other, and also didn't also have mixed-sex friends outside of school, then I'd have been a lot more wary about choosing single-sex schools for them.

Very much agree - but unless one is kept in a monastery, it's a simple fact of any normal healthy life though that members of one sex will have friends of the other, even at single sex schools! My girls had cousins, friends at the boys school opposite theough joint drama, friends at Scouts and Sailing, family, etc.

Single sex girls (for example) doesnt mean abstaining on all boys until one is 18. It simply means a girls only educational safe space until one is 18 - boys don't evaporate from life.

To be fair, when I went to secondary school in the 80s it was probably for the best because if I'd gone to an all-boys school I'd have been even more hopeless with girls than I was going to a co-ed school. I didn't have any sisters or really associate with girls outside of school until I started dating.

Sad times

I went to an all-girls secondary school and it was a positive experience for me. I went on to study a STEM subject at uni. This subject was around 15% girls at the time, so I think I might have found it off putting if I'd been at a mixed school and felt myself to be studying a "boys' subject". I didn't have any social problems, in either direction (i.e being really shy around boys or being "overly keen" on them).

My DC (both sexes) are at a mixed school and are happy there, but I do think it's a shame that my bright DD who likes sciences thinks of herself as rubbish at physics and not great at maths. I wonder if she'd have felt differently at a single-sex school.

@ArcticSkua I’ve also been aware that teachers think boys are better at maths. In my wider family, a DD was very good at maths but her primary teacher compared her unfavourably with the boy maths “geniuses”. Something was very wrong at that school because the boys turned out to be nothing of the kind. I do think single sex removes bias.

To be fair, there shouldn't be a bias at all, no matter which direction. Capable, professional management of a school would not allow such.

My private convent school went to single sex boy and girl schools but now I think they’re combined.