By Jordan Baker
The heads of NSW schools that have transitioned to co-education have weighed in on wealthy eastern suburbs boys’ school Cranbrook’s debate about making a similar change, saying objections were short-lived and the students quickly adjusted.
Six years ago, The Armidale School became the only member of the prestigious, all-male Association of Great Public Schools to open its gates to girls.
Students at The Armidale School.
The school, where country boys were sent to be educated for more than a century, now has girls competing with the boys from Kings and Shore School in shooting.
The head of the cadet corps is female and this year it will also become the first GPS school to employ a woman as principal.
“The boys are at the girls’ sporting events cheering them on and vice versa,” says outgoing TAS principal Alan Jones. “We’re seeing a flourishing of the creative arts. Boys having their sisters here has been a good thing.
“The girls we have attracted on the whole have jumped into all of the programs we have run. In the classroom that has enhanced academic performance, it’s introduced a bit of competition - boys don’t want to be seen as second rate.”
TAS decided to become co-ed in 2015, after then headmaster, the late Murray Guest, visited the United Kingdom and saw that the movement from single-sex to co-ed in all but the oldest schools was “almost an unstoppable wave,” said Mr Jones.
Parents, students and alumni were consulted. Some objected, including parents who felt they had not signed up for co-education and old boys who wanted to preserve tradition. “They were, by far, in the minority,” said Mr Jones, who once taught at Cranbrook.
“All this noise was being made by very few people.”
Having a co-ed school has also broken down gender barriers, such as those highlighted in the recent sexual consent debate. “Growing up with someone and realising they’re a person has been really important for our boys.”
The school’s transition to co-education began before former students raised incidents of historic sex abuse at the school.
The Cranbrook school council is expected to consider a formal proposal to make the school co-ed at a meeting late next week, as revealed by the Herald.
Several sources familiar with the proposal, which has not yet been revealed to parents, say female students would be able join International Baccalaureate Diploma classes in 2022 and girls would slowly be enrolled in the rest of the school over several years if it was endorsed.
Barker College, at Hornsby on Sydney’s North Shore, is also making the transition from a boys’ only to a co-ed school. It has accepted girls into its senior high school classes since 1975, and decided to become fully co-ed in 2016.
Principal Philip Heath described it as an “inevitable” decision. There were objections; some parents felt they had signed up for a boys’ only school. The younger alumni did not want the school experience they’d had to change.
Barker College will be fully co-ed next year.Credit: Peter Rae
“The older alumni thought that was fantastic,” said Mr Heath. “Sometimes 18 to 22-year-olds can be extremely conservative about their own school. You would not describe it as hostility. Regret, in some cases, but mostly a quiet acceptance that it made sense.
“The overwhelming majority said ‘what took you so long?’
“No one left the school, although some decided not to proceed with their application.”
The school has made the change gradually and introduced girls at the key entry years such as kindergarten and years 3 and 7. A few years on, only years six and nine are still boys’ only years. The school will be fully co-ed next year.
“In terms of the impact of the number of year 7s, it quickly reached capacity,” Mr Heath said. “There was no hesitation. It went a bit better than we were thinking; the curious thing we’ve observed is the increase in applications from males.”
Mr Heath said the co-education aspect of the school has been helpful during the consent debate.
“We’ve been able to frame it around relationships, not in abstract but in lived experience, our relationships with each other start in the classroom, work their way through the locker areas and into the playing fields,” he said.
Mr Heath also oversaw the transition to co-education at St Andrews Cathedral School. “That was a more dramatic experience,” he said. “It was a bit earlier, it was 1999. The narrative about gender and educational experiences has moved on.”