St Michael’s Grammar wins right to favour girls to balance intake
Elite coeducational schools across Melbourne are relying on exemptions under the Equal Opportunity Act to allow them to favour girls over boys. So why is this extreme measure necessary?
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Prestigious coeducational school St Michael’s Grammar has won permission to keep favouring girls over boys so it can balance its school intake.
The exemption under the Equal Opportunity Act permits the St Kilda school to, where appropriate, advertise specifically to prospective females to enrol, structure its waiting list to favour girls, allocate student placements so female students are favoured and offer bursaries, scholarships and enrolments targeted at prospective and existing female students.
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The school first sought the exemption in 2007 to ensure it could achieve as close as possible a 50/50 split of girls and boys.
A Victorian Civil Administrative Tribunal hearing to continue the exemption was held in February and the exemption came into effect from April 21.
Head of St Michael’s Grammar School Mrs Terrie Jones said the exemption allowed the “school to continue to deliver a coeducation experience where girls and boys and young men and women work together, side-by-side and collaboratively towards meaningful and purposeful endeavours”.
“The exemption upholds our current practices for achieving and maintaining gender balance, underpinned by a commitment to providing a coeducational learning environment for our students,” Mrs Jones said.
The exemption is sought by a number of schools to overcome a shortage of female enrolments and achieve and maintain gender balance. Many of the co-ed schools compete against girls only schools which are marketed heavily around the message that girls do better socially and academically in a single sex setting. The number of girls’ only schools also outweighs boys’ only schools.
Geelong Grammar, which first sought an exemption in 2013, returned to VCAT to have permission extended so it also can favour girls over boys. While the initial request was sought for the Toorak campus, which sits among a high number of girls only schools, it does apply to all the elite school’s campuses.
Its five year extension was gazetted in March.
Geelong Grammar, which became co-ed in 1976, argued that to be successful, a co-ed school must, as far as practicable, have equal numbers of females and males at any year level.
In its submission to VCAT, Geelong Grammar said its current enrolment was 58.27 per cent male and 41.73 per cent female.
“There are particular gender imbalances in some year levels at present, for example in year 6 at the Toorak campus 74 per cent of students are male and 26 per cent are female,” the submission said.
Girls only Loreto Mandeville and St Catherine’s are located nearby.
Caulfield Grammar has had its exemption extended until 2023.
Last year Carey Grammar won an extension to its exemption, first granted in 1997.
At the time, Carey principal Philip Grutzner stated on the school’s website that the exemption allowed the school to run separate waiting lists for girls and boys so it could maintain a balance of genders in each year level at the Kew school.
“On this occasion, and for the first time, we had three competitor schools put in a joint objection to our application via a legal representative. These parties were also represented at the VCAT hearing for Carey’s application,” he said.
“We and many schools are in this position because in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne there are far fewer places for boys and far more places available for girls. There are lots of girls’ schools, many coeducational schools, and very few boys’ schools. This means the demand for boy places in schools is so much higher.”
This is the fourth time St Michael’s has had the exemption extended. This will apply until 2024.
Founded in 1895 as a girls’ school, St Michael’s started taking boys in at prep from 1962.
Today it has a coeducational kinder to Year 12 with an enrolment of around 1300.
In 2017 the school had 54 per cent boys and 46 per cent girls of a total enrolment of 1292, according to its annual report.
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