My LA planning to close state boys' school but keeping a single-sex girls' school - is this legal?

[LineRunnerSaturnaliaCometh]

Or the boys' school may become a co-ed. Or a mixed academy. Who knows.

My point is, is it legal for a LA to offer single-sex school to girls and not to boys? (Or vice versa.)

Can't see why not...? They allow schools that only let in muslims, jew, catholics etc so why not only girls? It does however skew the LA, my LA has a muslim girls school which means the academy in the same area of town has a large proportion of muslim boys.

Hi, kritur.

I'm wondering what the actual law is about an LA having a non-religious state offer for one sex and not the other?

Is there even such a ruling?

Not illegal I wouldn't have thought especially if undersubscribed. Hertfordshire has 7 girls' state secondaries and 5 boys' so presumeably more girls prefer single sex schools to boys.

Where I am, though, there would be one girls' and NO boys' at all.

Southampton, by any chance?!

No, doglover, but please tell me all about it! Sounds comparable. (I'm up north of England.)

We have 2 Catholic comps in So'ton - one girls, one boys. They are currently single sex but are proposing to make the boys school mixed and retain the girls' status. As I have girls, I'm breathing a sigh of relief!!

Seeing that the LA is under no obligation to offer any single sex schools at all I don't think it can be illegal to offer one single sex school and not another.

A few years back Southampton had a non-faith girls school but, iirc, no corresponding boys school; they turned the girls school mixed after consultations with parents etc, but not because of questions of legality.
(I breathed a sigh of relief as we needed this school for dd for other reasons but wanted her to attend a co-ed).

In your cae, if there is single-sex education for one gender but not the other then I would have thought that was a clear case of sex discrimination.

Birmingham has a consortium of five Grammar schools. There used to be three boys-only and two girls-only. Someone cried foul and they ended up making one of the boys into a co-ed. So there seems to be a precedent there, but this was years ago and the legislation may have changed a bit since then.

ain't the interweb a wonderful thing?

Wolverhampton has a girls' schooll, and has for years. No boys' school though.

It is legal. There is no legal requirement to provide single sex schools and many LA's have none. It is a sensible and pragmatic decision. If the girls' school is thriving and oversubscribed, it makes sense for it to continue. If the equivilent boys' school is parents' last choice, with loads of spare capacity, it may not be viable for much longer and making it co-ed may be the only option to keeping it open.

Many years ago, this happened with Teddington Boys School in Richmond which was small, undersubscribed and threatened with closure. In a final attempt to keep it open, the council decided to make it co-ed, after which it went from strength to strength and is now one of the largest schools in the borough.

Surely it means that boys have less choice of schools than girls.

Legalities aside, it is certainly not fair.

Lambeth used to have loads of "co-ed" schools which were 70%+ male - it's not ideal.

Yes it is unfair as far as choices are concerned. But for years us non-religious folk have been saying the same thing about Catholic secondary schools.

Any religious school.

It might not seem fair to the families who would choose the boys school. However, if the majority of parents of boys are choosing co-ed schools anyway, it may mean it is not viable to keep the boys school open for the minority. Also, if it is an unpopular school, there may be boys allocated to it, for whom it was not one of their choices.

Cecily, that AELR I linked to said:
"HELD: For the purposes of establishing that there had been less favourable treatment of girls ... on grounds of sex it was not necessary for the commission to show that selective education was 'better' than non-selective education since it was enough ... to show that the council has deprived the girls of a choice which was valued by them or their parents " (my bolding)

If LineRunner
(a) substitutes 'boys' for 'girls'
(b) substitutes 'single-sex education' for 'selective education' and
(c) values single-sex education
then this ruling must apply. It could backfire and end up with the girls-only school also going co-ed but the treatment must be the same for both sexes.

I think they key is that someone must feel that it is unfair and complain about it. If no-one complains then nothing happens?

Re the situation in Wolvo: wiki says it is a Foundation school. Does that mean it organises its own admissions instead of it being the responsibility of the LEA. Is that the get-out clause?

senua, I understand what you are saying, but I took the court decision to mean that there was unfavourable treatment of girls because there were significantly fewer selective places for girls even though the commission was not taking any view on the merits of selective education.

This happened near us. The boys school was threatened with closure, however the girls school announced they were going to apply to become an academy (and remain single sex). This meant the LA couldn't close the boys school.

It gets more complicated than that as the girls school then decided to become co-ed. The decision wrt the boys school hasn't been finalised - it will either go co-ed (which they've wanted to decades but weren't able to because of the girls school) or it'll close.

It's as clear as mud right now.

Thank you everyone who has contributed to this thread. I'm re-reading all the posts and the link, and it's not easy for a parent (i.e. not a specialist lawyer) to work out whether the LA would have a case to answer if it only supported a girls' school, especially as academy-status enters the mix.