Co-ed pioneers

[Campanarate]

Does anyone have any experiences of their son/daughter joining a previously single-sex school of the opposite gender?

Moving house soon - and one of the potential schools in the new area is like this. DD would be one of 2 or 3 girls in most of her classes.

She is a tomboy - mainly friends with boys in any case - so it might be great for her. A lot to love about the school in terms of pastoral care etc.

But older DS pulled a bit of a face and said that Y9/Y10 boys are ‘savages’ - and that he’d worry for her being the target of ‘banter’ / unwanted male attention / just generally the atmosphere not being at all like hanging out with male friends Y5/ Y6/ Y7 etc.

Does anyone have any experiences of being a gender extreme minority in either direction?

bump for the evening crowd

My DD joined a boys school in the 1st year of it going co-ed. She was unhappy at her girls school and her brother was always very positive about his school so she was keen to go. They only put girls in 3 of the houses initially (they introduced one new house, so there were 7 in total). Some boys also moved to the new house. The first year was great as all the girls were a small gang and got to know each other really well. There were some funny incidents with the staff not quite sure how to manage the girls emotions and my daughter was told “Ah, you’re numbers brother aren’t you?” By a PE teacher.

It worked really well for her. She came from a private girls school to a fairly traditional private boys school and moved at the beginning of Y9.

That’s reassuring to hear. Thanks for sharing.

Bump

My DD only has 2 other girls in her class, primary though. Basically it means the girls are friends even if they might not have been if there had been a wider pool, think 2 popular girls but different style and 2 awkward ones, one with SN. They still spend all breaks together and do playdates etc.
So not an issue for us, maybe even the opposite at she is one of the awkward ones!

Only my own experience in the 90s! I moved schools in Y10, one of four girls in a year of about 30. It was fine, girls were few enough in number to be looked after a bit more by the school.
Whether it's the same now in the age of smart phones etc I'm not sure.
I'd watch for access to sports if that's important and the curriculum choices which may also be balanced towards boys (set texts, history modules, DT facilities)

Secondary school I went to had been all boys a few years previously. It was still geared for the boys in things like we did woodwork and CDT and Design technology and not sewing/cooking.
Only things really I can remember as being an issue was our year was the first year that there were more girls than expected and the girls changing room for PE was half the size of the boys so we were a bit squashed.

Some of the male teachers were not used to the girls so tended to treat us like delicate flowers. Fine when it meant they went "boy, have 1000 lines to do tonight; girl, can you manage 5 by next week?" but I remember our group objecting when one teacher used to send the boys to do chair shifting and missing half the lesson while we continued working. He did concede that maybe he was wrong though.
The uniform was basically same as the boys with a skirt, which was fine except the athletics tops weren't designed for a female figure and were rather revealing, but the PE teachers told us to wear a T-shirt underneath.
Although I was quite a girlie-girl, I never found it a problem.

I met a girl who had been in the first intake. There were I think less than 10 girls out of a year of 75 in year 7 and very few in the years above. She was one of three girls boarding (about 25% of the school boarded) and her comment was she "had such a wonderful time that her parents decided that she better not board in the sixth form in order to concentrate on her work".

On a slightly different scale, my dd1's infant school forms were 10:20 girl: boy ratio and was a lovely form with very few issues. My dd2's form was almost the other way round (17:13) and really difficult.

I was the first coed year into a boys school. We were evenly split in our year but the other years were 100% boys.

I loved it, but there was definitely some stuff that wasn't great. The older boys disliked us and thought we were ruining their school but we didn't really get worse than dirty looks.
Competitive girls sport wasn't really a thing until about 4 years in (it took them a while to really figure out what they were doing with everything other than netball!).
Some teachers were very used to teaching smelly teenage boys and I think struggled a bit to relate to the slightly more fragrant creatures now gracing the classrooms!

In general we were hugely proud to be breaking new ground, but this was 30 years ago!