Single-sex schools will face pressure to open doors to the opposite sex

During the next two decades Australia’s remaining single-sex secondary schools are likely to come under significant pressure to open their doors to the opposite sex or to at least begin discussion of the issue.

Just as Australia has successfully transformed into a richly multicultural country, single-sex independent schools must reflect more actively the country we have become. That such schools are receiving significant public funding makes the issue — for discussion at least — all the more pertinent.

With some exceptions, high schools across the country, along with universities, are embracing students from multiple ethnic, social and religious backgrounds, thus ensuring students are more prepared for the world in which they will operate.

Ironically, many single-sex independent schools make precisely the same claim, overlooking the absence of half the population in the classrooms.

But social, cultural and academic factors are only part of the shifting landscape facing principals and school councils. Political demands for coeducation are likely to intensify, particularly with Labor on the ascendancy nationally, aided by the power of online advocacy, mostly by younger people, and demands for greater institutional transparency.

Conservative independent schools that remain steadfastly committed to their original constitutions — or “deeds of purpose” — not only are refusing to contemplate coeducation but appear reluctant even to engage in discussion about it. Encouragingly, several more enlightened single-sex schools are working in positive and
co-operative ways with schools of the opposite sex.

One leading school not silent on the subject is one of the oldest schools in the country, Melbourne Grammar School.

It offers coeducational learning from prep to Year 6 and single-sex education for boys from years 7 to 12. MGS believes this approach offers a “supportive environment appropriate to individual development needs”. It has reached this view through painful experience.

The school flirted with coeducation to Year 12 in the early 1990s but was hammered by parents and former students who believed it was wrong, and that the council at the time had been high-handed and arrogant in not openly communicating the intended policy change.

The plan went nowhere and, although it has not been revisited since, it is good to see refreshingly open web-based discussion on the subject.

Speaking with principals of coeducational schools in several states is enlightening. They are so positive and so committed to their chosen model, some say they would refuse to lead a single-sex institution.

Practised though a number of single-sex independent schools are at silence, it’s instructive to note the kind of responses from principals and council chairs when the issue is raised.

Almost exclusively, economic and/or academic arguments are highlighted as reasons for not contemplating coeducation. You will hear that “our enrolments are full 10-plus years out” or “our finances are sound and we see no compelling reason to move to coeducation” or “our academic results are ‘first rate’ and no change is warranted”. Rarely do they discuss the social or cultural aspects of coeducation. Perhaps this is because those committed to coeducation are likely to easily win an argument on the social and cultural fronts when it comes to girls and boys learning together.

By far the majority of Australian parents want their children educated in a mixed environment, and data from The Good Schools Guideshows that coeducation dominates the education landscape.

In NSW 84 per cent of secondary schools are coeducational. This is even higher in Victoria, at 87 per cent, and Queensland, at 90 per cent. A significant majority of all students across the country are learning in coeducational environments they find socially coherent and culturally normal.

Voting with their feet on co-education have been Guildford Grammar in Perth, Canberra Grammar and Barker College at Hornsby in northern Sydney. Also worthy of note is that no school — government, Catholic or independent — in the past 20 years has opened as a non-coeducational school.

The Australian Council for Educational Research found recently that students in coeducational schools learn at the same speed, or even faster, than their segregated counterparts.

ACER research fellow Katherine Dix says: “In terms of the compounding influence of being in a single-sex school … 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.”

While it’s acknowledged non-coeducation may offer scope for more tailored styles of teaching according to gender, final results are not thought to be influenced positively in any significant way. Of course, other research, based on NAPLAN, does make the case for more focused learning in single-sex environments.

As school students complete their higher years of education and enter colleges, university, TAFE or employment, they will do so in a mixed environment where girls and boys learn, and compete, with each other.

Just as the workplace — although slow in moving towards equality — is responsive to community expectations that jobs, at all levels, be equally available to women and men and that pay rates are parallel.

John Simpson is a former member of Scotch College council and is a member of Monash University council.