Co-ed or single-sex? Canberra Grammar, The Armidale School, LaSalle Catholic College and All Saints make the leap

More single-sex schools are going co-ed. But is it better for everyone?

TWAM 23 Jan 2016

Fisher Day’s friends “freaked out” the first time they saw girls playing in their schoolyard.

The gangly Barker College boys stuck together, surveying the teenage girls who had just joined their all-boys’ school at the start of Year 10. “Everybody enjoys watching the Year 10s,” laughs Fisher, now 16 and school captain. “It’s so funny; after maybe a week they’ll pluck up enough courage to talk to the girls. Often a whole group of guys will go over just so one of them can talk to a girl. It can be intimidating. It’s always awkward.”

Vice-captain Molly Glendenning, who transferred to Barker from a girls’ school, recalls how “the boys were on one side and the girls on the other for the first few weeks”. Two years on, “the novelty’s worn off”. Julia Cormio, a pinstriped prefect who plans to work as a paediatrician or biomedical engineer, rolls her eyes: “No offence guys, but you’re not that exciting.”

Barker College, a 125-year-old independent school at Hornsby on Sydney’s north shore, is in the vanguard of education’s battle of the sexes. In this generation, which takes gender equality for granted, is there still a good reason to segregate boys and girls? The prevailing theory is that ­single-sex schooling suits girls, while boys benefit from a mixed education. Just seven per cent of Australian students attend a single-sex school and that number appears set to drop further.

In NSW alone, the number of private and Catholic single-sex schools has dwindled by 18 per cent over the past 20 years. Controversially, two of the nation’s most prestigious boys’ schools – Canberra Grammar and The Armidale School, NSW – are transforming into co-ed colleges, along with LaSalle Catholic College in Sydney’s Bankstown and the All Saints Catholic boys’ and girls’ colleges at Liverpool, which will merge this year while providing same-sex classes for core subjects such as maths and English.

Barker has long had a co-ed compromise: only boys attend the school until the end of Year 9. Girls arrive in Year 10, although boys outnumber them 2:1 in the senior years. Headmaster ­Phillip Heath says girls tend to mature faster than boys, so the college will stay boys-only in the junior years. Its hybrid model also offers a point of ­difference to rival schools. “For four ­decades we have demonstrated this model serves Sydney and serves the nation, and offers a choice that is different and unique,” he says.

Heath sees no problem in throwing teenage boys and girls together at the peak of adolescent angst. “Haven’t you heard of the six-inch rule?” he grins. Heath is referring to the school’s policy from the 1970s, requiring girls and boys to stay six inches, or 15cm, apart. These days, the ban is on “inappropriate touching”.

To Heath, co-ed “accelerates the maturation process for both boys and girls. It’s the normality of talking to a person of the opposite gender as a human being, not on a romantic or predatory level, but as a person with an intellect and a world view that might be different,” he says. “That is an incredible gift which I didn’t get until I went to university – where I spent the first year in shock.”

Girls in co-ed schools, Heath says, learn to speak up and stand up “without being coquettish”. “They can enjoy femininity without deploying that to some advantage in an unhealthy way,” he says. “That takes a bit to learn. Equally, to stand up and not be overwhelmed is a big challenge.” The boys, in turn, “get that it’s cool to care, that life is not just about success but about belonging”.

Seventeen-year-old Natasha Salisbury, Barker’s female school captain, admits the boys stoke her competitive streak. “I beat the boys,” says the aspiring scientist. “Especially in maths.” At her old girls’ school, “things were a lot more intense”. “You’re close and you share your feelings but that gets really full-on sometimes,” she says of the girl-group dynamic. “Boys kind of calm everything down a lot and put things in perspective. There’s more joking around.”

Fisher quips that the boys view the girls as “mates, not dates”. “Mateship between guys is very different,” he says. “You’d find it very strange if your mate opened up about his feelings. Sometimes I really need a girl’s opinion.” When the girls show up in senior school, he reckons, “the level of testosterone definitely dips”. “The girls calm the boys down a bit. Guys are too hyped up at middle school and are constantly just mucking around.”

Heath admits the females bring “a lot of vigour” to the classroom in an academic sense. “But I would be aghast to think that this was a venture to just benefit the boys’ education,” he says. “That would be scandalous, that girls would be used in that way – completely unconscionable. That girls would be admitted in order to enrich the education of boys would be completely indefensible.”

The break-up bell at Canberra Grammar sends boys scuttling from ivy-covered exits, lugging cellos and overstuffed backpacks down the red-brick stairs. They lumber into the carpark, grunt-greeting the parents waiting in a queue of SUVs to collect their sons on the last day of school. Canberra Grammar is about to shut the door on 87 years of tradition. Until now, it’s been co-educational only from pre-school to Year 2. Next year it will become fully co-ed.

Nearly 500 girls have applied to enrol at Gough Whitlam’s alma mater. “Will you be offering classes in quilting?” one mother enquired, to the bemusement of the enrolment officer. News of the switch to fully co-ed has upset some of the parents paying up to $21,000 a year in fees. University academic Mina Sakai, who put her 12-year-old son on a waiting list at birth, says the boys feel they are being “invaded”. “We wanted a boys’ network and a role model for him,” she says of her schooling choice. “He’s an only child so we thought it could be good for him to get to know more boys.” Sakai scoffs at the “political correctness” of single-sex critics. “If you use single-sex education, it’s as if you’re old-fashioned and conservative,” she says. “But I benefited from a single-sex education and my husband went to a boys’ school. It helped shape my identity, who I am, what I like to do.”

When news of the school’s co-ed conversion was posted on Facebook, the Old Boys bickered bitterly. “Gutted!” groaned one. “Outrageous,” wrote another. But Andrew Bromwich, a recent graduate, wrote that the “boys’ club” attitude at Grammar “was at best immature, at worst it was extremely damaging”. “Eighteen-year-old men were being put into the world with no experience interacting with or respecting women as peers,” he wrote. Bromwich’s comments infuriated Max Moore, an 18-year-old alumnus now studying information technology at university. He insisted that Canberra Grammar “was a place where boys not only got an education in arts and science but also in how to be a man. If you think that educating boys in a single-sex environment makes for sexist and misogynistic people, put your money where your mouth is and show me how many old boys disrespect, beat and mistreat women with comparison to a co-ed school.”

Moore, who left Grammar in 2014, tells me that girls would distract boys from their studies. “There’s less pressure to do your hair up in the morning to look good,” he says of the boys-only environment. “It takes that pressure off, especially in the last two years when you’re concentrating on your higher school certificate.”

For principal Dr Justin Garrick, the decision to turn fully co-ed was as philosophical as it was pragmatic. He says there was strong parental ­support for the move that would prepare students for a world where women play an equal role. “I do think that single-sex education evolved at a time when boys and girls were destined for ­different kinds of lives, so it might have made sense to educate them differently,” he says. “I don’t think they’re destined for such different lives anymore.” But there’s also “an underlying economic financial issue” for his school, he adds. “Enrolments aren’t reliable from year to year. We need to be sure we have a strong and large potential population base so we can plan and be secure in our finances, to invest in the long-term future of the place.”

Many parents with boys at the school wanted their daughters to attend too, he says, even though Canberra Girls Grammar is just a kilometre down the road. “We hear it time and time again – ‘We want our kids at the same school’,” he says. “Families are incredibly busy; by and large both parents are working long hours. They don’t need life to be any more complex than it needs to be, and having to negotiate two schools with two timetables is hard.” Garrick admits the announcement “has made things a bit tense” with Girls Grammar, which has pulled its students out of the combined orchestra. “If they’re going to change what they’re doing, we have to reassess what we’re doing,” says girls’ school ­principal Anne Coutts.

Competition is something that girls’ schools nationally will need to get used to. “Ultimately all of the boys’ schools in regional Australia will become co-educational,” predicts Murray Guest, principal of The Armidale School, which will end 122 years of tradition this year when it admits girls to its high school. “The way our school is going, the growth will be through co-education,” says Guest. “I know some parents prefer single-sex education but we did a lot of research and the evidence is very clear that being single-sex or co-ed does not by and of itself lead to better educational outcomes.”

The Ancient Greek philosopher Plato advocated co-education for “creating comradeship” between boys and girls. Research in the UK has concluded that girls are more competitive in ­single-sex schools, while boys behave the same regardless of whether they’re in mixed or segregated classes. Milorad Cerovac, a science teacher at The King David School in Melbourne, observed similar conduct when he coached teens from a cross-section of schools in a national robotics contest last year. After noticing that some girls were standing back to let boys lead, he created an all-girls’ team. “Once the girls got together they really did step up,” he says. “The girls tend to be a little more apprehensive and the boys tend to jump in head-first sometimes, without thinking the repercussions through.”

Cerovac describes the girls as “very collaborative”. “They were less likely than the boys to push their own ideas, and more likely to encourage their team-mates’ ideas even if their own idea was better,” he says. A couple of girls who hailed from co-ed schools were more assertive in the mixed teams. In the end, Cerovac says, the all-girls’ team built a simpler but functional robot. The boys “tended to over-engineer their robots and then struggle as they ran out of time”.

Professor John Hattie, chairman of the ­Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership and director of the Melbourne ­Education Research Institute at the University of Melbourne, believes same-sex or co-ed schooling makes little difference to student performance. “It’s a very trivial difference,” he says. “Many parents rationally will choose schools on the basis of the friends they want their kids to have, and networking opportunities down the track. Just don’t pretend you’re making an educational decision about kids’ learning.”

Dr Simon Longstaff, executive director at The Ethics Centre, sits on the school council of elite Sydney boys’ school Knox Grammar. He says parental aspirations, family tradition and religion are the reasons most families choose a single-sex private school. “Whether or not the so-called ‘old school tie’ still works as it once did is questionable,” he says. “I think, in a highly competitive society such as we live in at the moment, the cost of turning our back on meritocracy is too great to bear. You can imagine an old world where some law firms and government departments would recruit from the same narrow pool, but now the cost of poor performance, group-think and a narrow world view would be considerable.”

Most single-sex schools are private, drawing students from aspirational and relatively wealthy families that demand high academic results. The Australian’s analysis of the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) reveals that co-ed high schools outgun girls’ schools, which in turn achieve better results than the boys’ schools in Years 7 and 9. James Ruse Agricultural High School, a selective co-ed state school at Carlingford in Sydney, achieved the highest cumulative score of 4421 in the 2014 NAPLAN results. The top boys’ school, North Sydney Boys High, scored 4224 – slightly less than the 4247 at North Sydney Girls’ High. Of Australia’s top 20 high schools in last year’s NAPLAN testing, more than half were co-ed. An analysis of student performance in the ­Victorian Certificate of Education subjects by The Age last month found that students from independent girls’ schools were more likely to score high results than those from boys’ schools.

A hybrid model operates at Australia’s biggest school – the independent Haileybury school with 3700 students across various campuses in Melbourne. Girls and boys are segregated in class, but mingle in the playground. Principal Derek Scott says the segregated classes help teachers compensate for girls’ tendency to excel in literacy, and boys’ merit in maths and science. “We want to encourage the girls to take risks in maths and science,” he says. “In English, there’s a tendency for boys not to be as articulate as the girls, so they’ll often sit back in class and not be prepared to speak out. Our English department will target the textbooks and literature to be gender-specific, to target the students.” Academic results have been extraordinary: more than a quarter of Haileybury students ranked in the top five per cent of Australian students last year.

“We want girls to find their voice,” pronounces Judith Poole, tenth headmistress of the elite upper north shore Sydney girls’ school Abbotsleigh, in her New Jersey drawl. “The last thing I want as a headmistress is to have girls who are compliant; the good girl at the back of the room. Girls in general want to please, and one way to please is not to argue. But I want them to have the courage to challenge ideas. Being able to hold your head up and voice opinions, having the courage to contribute to a group, you have to believe in yourself.” So she wants her girls to be bolshie? “Ab-so-lute-ly! I want them to know that an individual can make a difference. It might be in a boardroom, working with a ­charity or building better robots.”

Leadership is a strong selling point for the school: it is here that girls learn to be leaders, be it as school captain, soccer team captain or first violin in the orchestra. No competition from those pushy, boisterous boys. The Anglican school’s Latin motto translates as “Time flies faster than a weaver’s shuttle”. A brick wall bears signs extolling the school’s values. Passion. Grace. Humility. Courage. Gratitude. Integrity. Joy. Compassion. Hope. Creativity. Purpose. Poole had a crèche built onsite for staff, in part so her girls become accustomed to seeing teachers dropping babies and toddlers to childcare: working women as role models.

Strolling through the sprawling school grounds – past tennis courts with surfaces of the same quality as those used in the Australian Open – Poole greets a group of ponytailed girls filing out of a science lesson about mine rehabilitation. Poole studied physics and maths at ­university, then worked for the Peace Corps for six years in Botswana before teaching maths in Australia. She’s passionate about getting more girls to study the STEM subjects of science, technology, engineering and maths. In the 2015 Higher School Certificate (HSC), the school was the top-ranked independent school in NSW – and ninth overall – for the third year in a row.

At Abbotsleigh, the girls’ lessons last twice as long as the standard 40 minutes. “What a girls’ school allows us to do is to create a learning environment which capitalises on the strength of how girls learn,” Poole says. “We have 80-minute lessons because girls like to go deep into topics and work in groups. They like to talk about their learning. We have longer lessons because girls’ attention spans can take that. In co-ed classrooms, boys demand more attention of the teachers. And boys often like to do things independently.” Poole encourages her students to “work collaboratively, not competitively”. Is that realistic, though, in the real world where workers have to compete to get ahead? “It builds team skills for getting projects done,” Poole retorts. “That’s what employers want.”

Leatherbound legal journals cram bookcases in the wood-panelled chambers of Queen’s Counsel Kathryn McMillan. “You only got it because you’re a woman,” a male colleague told her when she took silk in 2006. McMillan is Queensland’s most senior female barrister. With 29 years at the bar, she represented the Medical Board during Queensland’s 2005 public ­hospitals inquiry and was senior counsel assisting the state’s Child Protection Commission of Inquiry in 2012. She advises the state government on family violence reform and lectures as an adjunct professor at the ­University of ­Queensland’s TC Beirne School of Law. When McMillan came back to work after having ­children, colleagues gave her grief. “I had some men say, ‘You shouldn’t be ­working, what sort of mother are you?”’ she recalls. “It was really awful. But I just thought, ‘Bugger you! No, I’m just going to stick it out’. I thought, ‘I’m ­entitled to do this’.”

McMillan credits her grit partly to her ­“Scottish Presbyterian blood”, and partly to her schooling at St Aidan’s Anglican Girls’ School in Brisbane. Sister Julian, the nun in charge of St Aidan’s at the time, instilled in the girls a sense of compassion, community, duty and – crucially for McMillan – perseverance. “Men tend to be by nature much more confident and I think that is something some women do struggle with,” McMillan says. “At the school there’s a really strong emphasis that as a woman you can really do anything you want to. You certainly had the attitude you could try anything. Perseverance was one thing I definitely learnt.”

McMillan confesses she found university a culture shock, sharing lectures and tutorials with young men. “They were noisier,” she recalls. “It’s a very different dynamic in a mixed room. I work predominantly with men these days and it’s very different to working with a mainly female group. Men tend to be straightforward and tell you what they think. Women can have a series of agendas that men don’t always share.”

Karen Spiller, the principal of St Aidan’s, chairs the Association of Heads of Independent Schools of Australia. At girls’ schools, she quips, it’s “cool to be smart, cool to ask questions”. “One of the things I love about being in a girls’ school is that the girls can get involved in music and sport and the academic subjects without necessarily worrying about what boys might be saying, or what they look like,” she says. “An all-girls’ environment gives girls a lot of confidence to speak up and be heard, so that when they go out into the business world they’re used to being leaders themselves.”

McMillan’s 16-year-old daughter, Eleanor, is in her final year at St Aidan’s. Mum has visited her alma mater to talk to the senior girls about those awkward yet imperative topics of drugs, domestic violence and underage sex. “I think they felt freer to talk about those sorts of issues where it was all women,” McMillan says. “Some of the questions were really interesting, about what constituted rape, what constituted consent. My sense was they would be very reticent to say that in front of boys. I think girls are very good at expressing their emotions and if boys were there that would probably inhibit that to some extent. Likewise I think boys are more ­reticent in front of girls – they don’t want to appear anything other than cool.”

McMillan’s 21-year-old son Nick, who is studying arts/law at university, attended a boys’ school. “In adolescence you’re trying to define your identity and your sexuality and I think that can be a pretty heady mix, so I think there is an argument for segregation,” his mum says. “Because you’re not dealing at school with relationship issues with the opposite sex, it’s probably a bit more straightforward. But I have to say the opposite argument’s also true. Adolescent girls can be highly unpleasant and you don’t have the dilution of boys. Women aren’t always your friends. You expect support from women but you don’t always get it.”

“MEAN GIRLS – shameful bullying at elite girls’ school,” shouted The Daily Telegraph’s front page on December 11. The Sydney tabloid reported a story about alleged bullying at Ravenswood, where ­parents will pay $29,590 in Year 12 tuition fees this year. Ravenswood had disciplined four of its students for allegedly shoving a Year 8 girl in a cupboard. The story emerged after school captain Sarah Haynes veered spectacularly off-script during her end-of-year speech last month. “I wrote two speeches today just so I would be able to say that Ravo isn’t perfect,’’ she told the startled students and parents assembled in the hall. “If a school can’t admit it isn’t perfect, how can they expect adolescent girls to realise perfection is unattainable? … It seems to me that today’s schools are being run more and more like businesses where everything becomes financially motivated, where more value is placed on those who provide good publicity or financial benefits.’’ The chairman of the school council, Mark Webb, said the speech related to “a disagreement about disciplinary action taken against a number of students following an incident of alleged bullying” which was “before the courts”.

“Ravenswood has an overriding obligation to provide a safe and respectful learning environment for every student – and all our girls have the right to feel valued,” he said in a statement after the memorable speech night. “This applies not only to the way girls behave towards one another but also to allowing their freedom to express individual opinions in speeches or otherwise.”

The ruthless emotional manipulation that can afflict groups of adolescent girls was parodied in the hit ABC comedy series Ja’mie: Private School Girl. Canberra cardiologist Dr Libby Anderson still smarts at the “bitchiness” of her all-girls’ school in the 1980s. “Girls can be very cliquey, and have the potential to be particularly mean to each other,” she says. “It was each girl for herself to find a boy. I remember when we saw a boy at a school dance, you wouldn’t even think, ‘Do I like this boy?’ All you could think was, ‘Does he like me?’ To get a boy to pash you was the highlight of the night. It wasn’t about whether he was nice or kind. The boys and girls didn’t have a clue about how to talk to anyone – it was so dysfunctional and uncomfortable.”

When Anderson’s parents moved to Rome in the ’90s she found solace at The British School, which is co-ed. “The boys were a moderating factor in how the girls acted between themselves,” she recalls. “And we kept an eye out for each other.” Anderson has chosen co-ed for her daughter Olivia, who starts high school this year. “I think she’s vastly less likely to be distracted by the boys when they’re with her all the time,” Anderson says. “Boys and girls are much more likely to be in a friendship group. Girls who have no confidence in how to deal with boys are, I think, potentially more vulnerable to behave in a way with boys that could put them at risk. A girl who is engaging with boys every day is more likely to stand up for herself and say, ‘Get lost!’ because she’s not so desperate.”

Anderson credits her later co-ed schooling for her success in what she describes as “a blokes’ profession” – women account for fewer than one in 10 cardiologists. “The girls, as soon as they leave school, are going to be competing against boys in every arena,” she says. “We need to equip our girls with the skills to do that. People who say girls aren’t listened to as much in class and don’t want to look smart in front of the boys are just not bringing up their girls the right way.”