Single-sex schools give parents a choice

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

Yesterday John Simpson argued that single-sex schools were failing Australian students. He is wrong — with at least one fact and in principle.

He stated that no school — government, Catholic or independent — in 20 years had opened as a non-coeducational institution.

That is not correct. I was the headmaster of Wollemi College, an independent boys school in the west of Sydney, which started in 2005. Harkaway Hills College, which started in 2016 in Melbourne’s southeast, is modelled on the other Parents for Education schools in Sydney (where the prep years are co-ed but primary and secondary are single sex). Single-sex schools are still being founded. We might ask why.

But it is also wrong to argue that single-sex schooling is sustained by economic considerations. Indeed, single-sex schools are always more expensive. Bigger coeducational schools have economies of scale. It costs more to duplicate campuses, school halls and libraries. There are other more important reasons to set up and fund single-sex schools.

Simpson quoted Australian Council for Educational Research researcher Katherine Dix: “There appears to be no value-add in numeracy achievement and even a decline in reading achievement over time in single-sex schools compared with coeducational schools.” The key words are “value-add”.

Dix’s own tables on the ACER website demonstrate that boys in single-sex schools between years 3 and 7 (the only data presented) retain 3.9 terms of numeracy advantage over coeducational students throughout these four years. Girls in single-sex schools were not far behind, but coeducational students failed to make up any ground on this. Reading shows a similar but less pronounced pattern. She says the data holds even after correction for socio-economic factors.

Simpson suggests that because society is multicultural then schools should be coeducational. But if there is any logic in comparing schools with multicultural society, surely schools should be multicultural, not coeducational. He suggests coeducation is a matter of “equality”. But equality is not uniformity. If both boys and girls have the opportunity to attend single-sex schools, as they do, then where is the lack of equality?

Yet all this still misses the point.

Let’s not be thrown by the patronising notion that because government partly funds non-government schools then parents should be grateful and do it the state’s way. Political theory 1A tells us we are not in a communist state and we do not exist for the state. The state, with our taxes, is there to help us.

Let us ask the parents what they want. There is absolutely no consensus that a child, because he or she is educated in a single-sex school, is disadvantaged, and there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. The five Parents for Education single-sex schools in Australia are providing outstanding academic education (a Wollemi student last year achieved a HSC score of 99.95, with more than a third of the students achieving an ATAR of 90-plus — unprecedented for a non-selective school in the far west of Sydney), but even that is not the key issue. Nobody has a greater right than a child’s parents to determine the moral agenda or the style of education for a child.

Therefore parents have the right, and the duty, to follow their best judgment and place their children in the form of education in which they have most confidence. Some will define education as learning literacy and numeracy, others will place character or dance classes at the top of the list. This is the parents’ prerogative.

Consider the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child: article 18 — governments should help parents by providing services to support them; article 20 — children who cannot be looked after by their own family must be looked after properly by people who respect their religion, culture and language.

Schools and teachers are there to help, not to impose their own nanny principles.

It is parents, not government, who are responsible for education of a child. We have forgotten this. But we are in the age of Safe Schools, where architects of the program cynically mock parents whose rights they are usurping. We are in an era where many politicians and academics just don’t get it.

Andrew Mullins has been headmaster of Redfield and Wollemi Colleges and is on the board of Victoria’s first Parents for Education school , Harkaway Hills College. He is the author of Parenting for Character (Finch).