By Lucy Carroll
One of Sydney’s oldest private all-boys’ schools, Newington College in Stanmore, will become a fully co-educational campus for kindergarten to 12 students within a decade.
In a letter to parents on Monday, Newington’s chairman Tony McDonald said the board’s decision to shift the 160-year-old college to co-education was unanimous, and that the transition to admit female students would be gradual, starting with primary years.
Newington College, in Sydney’s inner west, will become fully co-educational within a decade.Credit: Steven Siewert
The school first floated the idea to parents almost two years ago, along with a proposal to make the school more culturally and socio-economically diverse.
McDonald told parents the school conducted a third-party consultation on co-ed and single-sex schooling research, consulted the Uniting Church and other GPS schools, ran workshops with current students and asked the old boys union to consult former students about their views on moving to co-education.
McDonald said Newington would admit girls at its primary school campuses at the inner west suburb of Stanmore and the Lindfield in kindergarten and year 5 from 2026. The first girls will join the senior campus in 2028 in year 7 and year 11, with the college becoming fully co-educational by 2033.
The move follows the decision by another prestigious private boys’ school, Cranbrook – which has also admitted only boys for more than a century – announcing it will become fully co-ed by 2026.
At Cranbrook, division about the speed of the co-ed move sparked a bitter dispute and mass exodus of council members at the end of last year. The decision at that school was heavily backed by a group of former students who said private boys’ schools foster attitudes and behaviours that are no longer acceptable in broader society.
In the letter to parents, McDonald said the decision was the best for the long-term future of the college, and “especially the futures of each of the young people we educate now, as well as those students who will join us in the years to come”.
“The decision was made with a high degree of confidence in the ability to make Newington an even better school. It’s carefully staged so that we underwrite both our current and future direction,” he said.
“There was range of views and opinions during the consultation process – we’re a school that’s more than 160 years old, and we’re fortunate to have a vital, engaged community – and we believe we have the insights and the analysis that shows this is the right way forward.”
The school said the size of the cohorts at kindergarten to year 6 campuses will stay the same, but each secondary school group will eventually grow from 250 to 300 students, which the board said was subject to council planning laws.
Michael Parker, headmaster of Newington College, started in the role in 2019. He was deputy head at Cranbrook from 2008 to 2014.
A decision to increase numbers by one-fifth was made after considering “demand for a Newington education within the key catchment areas”, and the changes in government funding for independent schools, McDonald said.
Newington, opened by the Methodist church in 1863, is a member of the Athletics Association of Great Public Schools, a historic sporting association of boys’ schools, which also includes Shore and Scots College.
The college will be the second GPS school to make the co-ed move after The Armidale School began to admit girls in 2016. Four Sydney Catholic schools in the inner west, Maroubra and north shore, have recently become mixed-gender, while Barker College in Hornsby became fully co-ed last year.
St Mary’s Cathedral College, a 200-year-old all-boys’ institution in the inner city, is planning to convert a $100 million inner-city building into a new campus ahead of plans to go co-ed.
Professor Andrew Martin from UNSW’s School of Education said that while more boys’ schools are moving to a co-educational model, there “needs to be clear focus on the opportunities and benefits it will bring to the girls”.
“It’s not a matter of just bringing girls in to a school, but it’s about responding pedagogically in high-quality ways. The rationale has to be much more than ‘this will be good for the boys’,” Martin said.
“Certainly for older school that have long-standing values it’s a way to see how they mesh with where society is, and where it’s going, to the betterment of all its students, be they boys or girls.”
Martin said large-scale quantitative studies indicate that single-sex schools are a “nudge ahead of co-ed schools on academic performance”, but added the effect sizes are small, and there are many other factors in schools that predict academic achievement.
Parent Kirsty Robertson, who has enrolled her son to attend in year 4, said she was “ecstatic” about the decision: “I enrolled him in the school in the hope they would go co-ed. It will better set him up for the world he’s going to work and live in.”
One former Newington student, who has two sons at the college, said: “Co-ed might be a good thing in some schools. But it’s the change I am concerned about and how that will be managed in a school with such a long history of boys’ education.
“It’s rocking a very stable boat,” he said.
“There aren’t that many private, historic, well-established co-educational high schools in Sydney, so maybe the demand is there.”
A prospective Newington parent, who spoke anonymously in order to speak freely, welcomed the move, saying there was a dearth of co-ed schools in the inner west.
“I want my son to go to a co-ed school and Newington is the sort of school I’d want both my kids attend, my daughter and my son. Given that though, I obviously never put my daughter’s name down because it wasn’t co-ed option so I’d hope there would be some kind of sibling priority so that my daughter could also attend,” they said.
The school has recently bought 200-hectare rural property at Eungai Creek on the Mid North Coast as “social service-based campus”. Newington’s fees range from about $22,000 in kindergarten to almost $39,000 in years 11 and 12.
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