‘Endangered species’: Do all-boys private schools have a use-by date?

Ask parents who have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in school fees at one of Australia’s top-tier private boys’ schools if they are happy with their choice, and it’s often a strong “yes”.

Good teaching, glossy facilities, strong emphasis on getting top academic results, good pastoral care, they will tell you. The range of sport, music and other extracurriculars is great.

High-profile alumni at some of Australia’s most exclusive boys schools have been pushing for them to go co-ed, to better equip boys for life.Credit: Arsineh Houspian

Broach any concerns over regular headlines about horrendous behaviour or attitudes to women and other outsiders showing up in the culture and there may be a pause.

For one who spoke to this masthead, all the excellence available at the prestigious Melbourne school her boys attended was only slightly tarnished by the fact the French teacher walked out of class a few weeks ago, having been sexually harassed.

For an increasing number of influential boy’s school alumni, misogyny and sexism showing up at their loved alma mater, via the media, can no longer be ignored. They are part of a growing push to modernise Australia’s highest-fee boys institutions by making them go co-ed. They believe this would best serve boys’ chances of emerging from school healthily.

The trend is taking off so fast, especially in the sandstone school belt of NSW, that some education researchers are even declaring that the traditional, English-style all-boys model has a use-by date.

Speaking at his prestigious old school, Sydney Grammar, this month, Finder.com founder Fred Schebesta told alumni that disruption of the all-boys system had become necessary because the world outside “is changing”.

“There is no evidence boys-only school has a bigger educational impact,” he said, and the school he wishes his daughters could attend must “make way for a better set of ideas and even broader set of skills” by going co-ed.

Schebesta says he and the well-placed alumni he has since recruited have received “a mix of support and resistance and that’s expected because change is difficult and scary”. What’s at stake is that, “by limiting the school to only boys ... it reduces diversity of ideas and thoughts, and can lead to a narrow set of perspectives.

“This leaves a weakness, a shortcoming usually seen only in the long term.”

Some consequences of narrowness have made headlines in the form of stories about abhorrent behaviour and backwards attitudes to women in some school cultures.

Some academics suggest the impact of recent reputational damage to high-fee boys schools is becoming a stronger factor in parents’ minds than the perceived, but fading, professional influence of old-boys networks.

In June, nearly two dozen recent head prefects at the high-end Sydney boys’ school Cranbrook wrote to the school council supporting a co-ed proposal, saying private boys’ schools foster attitudes and behaviours that are no longer acceptable in broader society.

Single-sex, independent school structures “create one-dimensional interactions between the genders … some of the attitudes and norms of behaviour that develop in these communities are, rightly, no longer acceptable in broader Australian society,” their letter said.

Adam Karras, the 2013 head prefect at Cranbrook, was one of the signatories of the letter outlining why it should go co-ed.Credit: Janie Barrett

This contributes to adverse outcomes for the young women directly affected by behaviour and for young men who find themselves inadequately equipped for life.

Cranbrook’s decision to go co-ed within a decade forms part of what Murray Guest, late principal of the recently co-ed college The Armidale School described as an “almost unstoppable wave” of independent boys schools responding to shifting values.

As demand for co-ed surges and single-sex enrolments drop, just as Schebesta claimed, data continues to show no conclusive advantage for keeping boys apart.

Melbourne’s high-fee all-boys schools achieve consistently strong academic results. But studies have shown that once influences such as students’ socioeconomic backgrounds are accounted for, “the differences between boys in single-sex schools and boys in coed schools are not nearly as great”, says Professor Andrew Martin from UNSW’s School of Education.

A major US study which analysed results of 1.6 million students in 21 countries and was published in 2014, “showed only trivial differences between students in single-sex versus coed”, for maths and science subjects, and in some cases favoured coed schools.

More notably, Martin says, is the tendency for students in single-sex schools to defy gender stereotypes when it comes to subject selection.

“Boys will be more involved in the arts and humanities in single-sex schools compared to boys in coed schools ... the same for girls; they are more likely to take on STEM subjects in single-sex schools,” he says.

Even so, one researcher, from the Australian Council for Educational Research suggested on current trends, the traditional single-sex model will be gone by 2035.

Melbourne’s four biggest high-fee boy’s schools — Melbourne Grammar, Xavier College, Scotch College and St Kevin’s — show no signs of updating enrolment policies to include girls (a push to do so by Melbourne Grammar in the mid-90s was quashed by objectors), but two of the city’s oldest single-sex Catholic schools, Presentation College Windsor and Christian Brothers College, merged in 2021.

A petition started by former Sydney private schoolgirl Chanel Contos revealed hundreds of allegations of sexual misconduct by private schoolboys.

Next year, one of the state’s oldest girls’ schools, St Aloysius, will begin to accept boys. “Life is co-ed and so are we from 2023”, its website states in bold gold type.

But while dwindling enrolments have driven some inner-city Catholic school mergers, there is no hint yet that demand for a place at any of the city’s leading all-boys schools is on the wane.

Education consultant Paul O’Shannassy says Australia is one of the last bastions of single-sex education, along with the UK, from where we imported the model.

“If you go to Singapore or Hong Kong, you can barely find a single-sex school, and they’re the countries that are leading [international assessment ranking] PISA and excelling academically,” he says.

O’Shannassy advises families searching for an Australian non-government school for their children, and says that for many of his clients, academic results are important, but not the chief motivation.

“There is still huge demand for a place at Scotch and Melbourne Grammar and so on, and I find a lot of it has got to do with prestige, to be honest, and a lot has got to do with family tradition.”

Although in recent years some families have expressed reservations about sending their sons to an all-boys school, and O’Shannassy believes media reports of poor and sexist behaviour have been influential.

“A lot of it is parents worrying about toxic masculinity and the rah-rah jock culture that you get at boys’ schools; they’re trying to avoid that a lot more than they used to,” he says.

So many NSW private boys’ schools have committed to transitioning to co-ed (following the decades-old footsteps of Victorian schools such as Wesley College and Geelong Grammar, Caulfield Grammar and Carey Baptist Grammar) that Deakin University professor Amanda Keddie pondered in August: “As another elite boys’ school goes co-ed, are single-sex schools becoming an endangered species?”

”Does this mean we are seeing the beginning of the end of all-boys schools?” she asked in The Conversation, while noting that research shows socio-economic status, location and race are greater determinants of academic outcome than gender.

“The best schools are the ones which have the greatest diversity and are able to create well-adjusted citizens of the world ... schools that segregate and create exclusions can sometimes be quite harmful,” she says.

A critic of some ongoing aspects of exclusive boys school culture, Keddie credits some of them with having realised they need to be seen to modernise practises for boys, society and their business models.

“Some all-male schools are trying to do things differently, for example doing action research in their context to really understand the boys and do something about hypermasculine behaviours,” she says.

“Some of that can boil down to reputation management, but some really are trying to put active things around teaching and learning.”

One such school is Brighton Grammar, whose culture came under heavy scrutiny following the reported expulsion of two Year 11 students for putting images of young girls on an Instagram page and inviting people to vote on “slut of the year”.

The school has invested heavily in development of a positive masculinity project with the youth mental health organisation Orygen at the University of Melbourne. Like at least two other boys’ schools in Melbourne, it has students who identify as non-binary and are free to be themselves at school.

Brighton Grammar’s deputy headmaster Dr Ray Swann says that in raising healthy kids, “we need to be aware of the impact of messaging around gender, the roles that people play and societal expectations”.

Brighton Grammar has created a Positive Masculinity project based on research and a collaboration with Melbourne University youth mental health experts.Credit: Joe Armao

Boys experience higher rates of suicide, lower rates of seeking help and fall behind girls in literacy, Swann says, arguing all-boys schools can address these needs in an age and stage-appropriate way.

“In an all-boys’ school, there is the capacity to fully address different forms of masculinities,” he says.

“As society moves towards a more inclusive and diverse culture but retains very powerful negative messages of particular types of male expression, Brighton Grammar believes that our Positive Masculinity program creates both the knowledge and practical programs for young men and boys to experience different ways of being male.”

Researchers stress that boys can also be victims of “hypermasculine” school cultures. After St Kevin’s boys in uniform were filmed singing a misogynistic chant on a Melbourne tram in 2019, University of Queensland associate professor Martin Crotty said he felt some sympathy that “they imbibed the offensive culture that legitimates such songs, rather than creating it”.

Changing such cultures is difficult, and modernisation in such schools had been “slow and uneven”, he said.

St Kevin’s installed its first female principal, Deborah Barker, in 2021, but a culture review released that year appeared to back Crotty’s claim that meaningful reform within such traditional structures is hard, and negative attitudes to women endure.

The independent report found nearly two in five female staff disagreed or strongly disagreed the school supports a culture of respect for women and other genders.

“Students and staff said that misogynistic language and sexist behaviour still occurs at the school. Many acknowledged that such behaviour was limited to groups of individuals and that it most often occurred out of ignorance rather than malice,” the report said.

Late last year, former St Kevin’s student James Robinson burned his blazer on the school grounds in protest at the impact on students of hypermasculine culture.

Now a photographer based in New York, he wrote on Instagram that: “Current students and victims of St Kevin’s, and schools like it, who feel their identity is slowly being chipped away by a hypermasculine culture, I see you, I was you.”

Barker continues to oversee the change process. She is on leave but said in an email that an all-boys school such as St Kevin’s is “intentional about how it educates boys according to their developmental needs and consistent with what our society needs from males”.

“An all-boys environment allows us to tailor learning in a focused way. We develop boys that can live in the 21st century and can navigate a world where respect, diversity and inclusion are fundamental pillars of what it means to be a young man in today’s world,” she said.

George Variyan, Monash University education academic, is researching attitudes to women and gender equality among private boys’ school alumni and says the problem for single-sex schools wishing to help instil respect for women is that, “I don’t think you can learn about others unless you live with others”.

Students are caught in systems struggling to balance progressive and conservative forces around gender, in which the heavy focus on all-male sporting success means certain male attributes are “valorised” over others. One former student of Melbourne Grammar attests that while the school offers enormous amounts to students, if you are not a sport kid, “you’re basically forgotten”.

Variyan’s research colleague Dr Claire Charles of Deakin University says while there are obvious efforts to overhaul hyper-male cultures, it’s difficult to see real change happening yet. That private schools are guarded and make it difficult for researchers to get in doesn’t help.

As the push to improve gender equality at all levels of Australian society moves apace, tech wiz Fred Schebesta wants his old school to introduce a prize named after a software program designed to create problems to find and fix system weaknesses.

The “chaos monkey” prize could reward non-traditional thinking by a student who shows themselves to be a creative rule breaker. It remains to be seen if that could ever be won by a girl.