The Pure Hell of St Trinian's

It was with no great sorrow that I read in the Telegraph last week about the demise of two all-girls schools in Bedfordshire, forced to merge as a result of falling student numbers. Although no doubt recession-related, the closures are part of a seemingly inexorable decline in single-sex education in the UK. In the 1960s there were over 2500 single-sex state schools in the UK, but numbers have fallen to around 400 today. In the independent sector, 130 single-sex schools have merged, turned co-educational or closed. Having observed first-hand the anti-socialising effects of single-sex education, I find this trend a welcome one.

My own story is that at the tender age of 9 (the end of year 4), I left my local primary school to join an independent all-boys day school. When I left primary school, interactions with girls were generally of the pigtail-pulling, skipping rope stealing, chasing around the playground nature and although differences were beginning to emerge, we were largely an amorphous lump of tag-playing children. Three years later I rejoined co-education (at the start of year 8). Things had changed; on the cusp of teenage years, it became rapidly apparent that not only was pigtail-pulling no longer on the agenda, but more fundamentally I had no clue as to what the agenda was.

Perhaps in this I was no different from my class-mates – we all seemed to struggle to interact with girls, but for me the situation was more acute – I had been teleported from a world dominated fundamentally by top-trumps, dirt and rude noises to a maelstrom of emotion and hormones with which I was singularly ill-equipped to deal. How those who are wholly single-sex educated ever learn to cope is beyond me; it is perhaps no surprise to learn that boys educated at single-sex schools are a third more likely to divorce in later life than their co-ed counterparts.

But what of the academic benefits? These seem largely to centre around the idea that girls will be academically more successful in single-sex education. Looking at the GCSE and A level league tables, they are dominated by top independent girls schools – surely a strong argument in favour of single sex education? Not according to Alan Smithers, Professor of Education at Buckingham University and Director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research. Smithers' research suggests that whether or not a school was single sex makes no difference to the students’ educational attainment. Differences in performance were accounted for by the ability and social background of pupils, and head teachers made ‘exaggerated claims’ about the benefits of single sex schools because they were under threat.

Nevertheless, in the US, there is a growing movement in favour of gender segregation, arguing that girls and boys learn differently, and will therefore benefit from single-sex education. There is much debate over the validity of this research. Rosalind Chait Barnett, from the Women's Studies Research Centre at Brandeis university, argues that the studies behind this single-sex revival in the US 'do not meet even the most primitive standards of scientific query'.

To some extent, though, this all misses the point. Proponents of single-sex education generally focus on the benefits to girls – but girls already outperform boys at almost every level in the UK. Girls have outperformed boys at GCSE since records began in 1988. Since 2002, girls have scored more A grades at A level than boys, and girls score more 2:1 degrees or better. Boys now only have the lead in the proportion of first class degrees awarded, and this year could see that bastion breached too. Whilst I suppose proponents could argue that girls would do even better if educated separately (although Professor Smithers would demur), this has to be weighed against the fact that girls and boys are prevented from mixing and learning about one another, and the social damage that this must cause.

In the end perhaps we should leave the final word to those educated in single-sex schools. 40 percent of them would want their own children to be educated co-educationally. I am definitely one of them.