The age-old debate of whether single-sex schools perform better than co-educational settings is back in the headlines after a protest outside a legacy private boys school in Sydney’s inner west.
But is the moral panic justified? And in the 21st century, is there still a place for education segregated by sex?
Why the high emotions?
The protests were prompted by Newington College’s announcement late last year that it would become fully co-educational, with the transition not to be complete until 2033.
It comes after a string of high profile private schools, including Cranbook in Sydney’s east, Marist College North Shore and Barker College in Sydney’s north, Armidale School in NSW, St Aloysius College in Melbourne and Canberra Grammar in the nation’s capital similarly opted to expand enrolments to the opposite sex.
On Monday, the centuries-old Sydney boys school St Mary’s College was the latest to announce it would open its doors to female students.
But while the tides might be turning in favour of co-educational education, to a couple of dozen parents and former students at Newington, the decision was a “woke, toxic-masculinity type palaver” break with 160 years of tradition.
“I suspect it’s for virtue-signalling, woke-type principles, which I’m dead against,” one protester told AAP.
What is the history of single-sex education?
Professor of education and history at the University of Sydney Helen Proctor says legacy schools like Newington were established at a time when upper-class boys and girls were believed to require different curriculums and lived different social lives.
In the government sector, though, debate has been rife for centuries.
“The history of co-education is as old as history of schooling,” she says. “Since government schools were rolled out in the mid-1800s, there were discussions about whether they’d enrol boys or girls together.”
The colony of Victoria was the first to introduce a policy of co-education for all public schools in the 1860s, despite panic about “moral wellbeing” and the “corrupting influence” of boys on girls. The reasoning was mostly financial – it’s cheaper to build one school instead of two.
Other colonies followed, except New South Wales, which set up a number of single-sex government high schools in the 1880s.
Still, boys and girls rarely mixed at school, while girls would have governesses to teach young women how to behave appropriately.
By the late 1800s, girls were allowed to sit the same exams, and debates turned to ideological grounds.
In following decades, arguments ebbed and flowed – from fears girls were being sidelined in co-ed classes to concerns boys were being outstripped academically or “distracted” by their counterparts.
What does the evidence say?
It is difficult to determine how attending a co-ed or single-sex school affects academic outcomes, mainly due to the fact there are so many variables.
A recent study published in the British Educational Journal, that examined Pisa (Programme for International Student Assessment) results, noted it was a “typically problematic” area to examine, as in most countries single-sex schools are selective and the numbers attending them are relatively small.
By using Ireland – which has a high proportion of state-funded and non-selective single-sex schools – as a case study, researchers found “no significant difference” in the academic performance of single-sex school students compared with their mixed-school peers.
In Australia, 14 out of the 20 top-performing schools in the latest HSC round were single sex (eight all-girls, six all-boys), as were 12 out of the top performing schools in the VCE (10 all-girls, two all-boys).
But all were specialist, independent or Catholic, which cater to a higher proportion of single-sex schools, and tend to perform well academically.
Writing in the Conversation, professor of education at Deakin University Amanda Keddie said that, rather than gender, a better predicator of student success was their socioeconomic status – as well as whether students lived in a rural or remote area.
Proctor agrees. She says research doesn’t come down on one side of the system or another. “It’s much more complex than that,” she says. “The critical factor is social class – there’s too high a correlation with class and outcomes at a structural level.”
Are single-sex schools in decline?
Single-sex schools have always been in the minority, but there has been a slight trend towards co-educational schooling in the past decade.
According to the Good Schools Guide, the percentage of students attending single-sex schools has declined slightly from 7.2% in 2018 to 7% in 2022.
Sydney is the “hotbed”, with around half of all single-sex schools, followed by Victoria (25%) and Queensland (50%).
Proctor says Sydney is different from the rest of Australia because it used to be more vocationally oriented, establishing single-sex tech schools for boys and domestic science schools for girls, which continued in their traditions.
But while to some, a boys school going co-ed may feel like the end of the world, in reality, it’s likely single-sex educational options will be here to stay.
Proctor says arguments that single-sex schools are going down the drain are largely overblown. She points to a large reorganisation of schools in the 1950s, which led to a wave of private schools going co-educational.
“In the 1970s you might’ve said single-sex schools would disappear,” she says. “But I wouldn’t be predicting the death of single-sex schools anytime soon.
“In a sense, [our current schooling structure] is a historical accident. Once a school is established as single sex, it takes big reform to change them.”
So what’s the future of single-sex schools?
In the 1800s, girls and boys were kept separate because it was believed their lives were destined for separate destinations. Now, single-sex schools emphasise their expertise in specialising, Proctor says, which fits the “prevailing idea enshrined in our educations systems of school choice”.
At the end of the day, though, she says debate about whether single-sex or co-education provides a more rounded person is the wrong question to ask.
“We should be looking at what’s happening in classrooms, how kids are allowed to express themselves, how gender is managed within the school,” she says.
“Some single-sex schools do that well, some co-ed schools do that well.”
Still, for schools like Newington, with more than a century of history, tradition can be a “double-edged sword”.
“Older boys schools are wealthy enough to provide a lot of resources, develop fabulous extracurricular activities, but a weight of history comes out of ways of doing masculinity that can be a problem for those schools,” she says.
“It’s hard enough being a teen without rigid and prescriptive gender norms to live up to.”
