So girls do better than boys at single-sex schools, a new report claims. Gosh, fancy that. It doesn't half make you feel your age. I expect someone will be telling us that school uniforms are good for discipline and social cohesion next.
To be precise, today's report, conducted on behalf of the Good Schools Guide, suggests that girls in non-selective girls' schools do better in their GCSEs than similar girls in co-ed comprehensives. Weaker students' grades improved most without the distraction of boys, it added.
"Girls are less self-conscious in single-sex schools, they are certainly more confident and more likely to speak up for themselves ... because they are less worried about what others, particularly boys, think of them," Jill Berry, president of the Girls' Schools Association, told the Times. There are benefits in co-ed schooling, but we should not ignore this evidence, the Guide's editor, Janet Wallis, told the Guardian.
Well, no. But we probably will unless a substantial cohort of movers and shakers – the women's branch of the great and good – decide that they may have been wrong to press for this particular form of equality as a manifestation of progress. There were always schools and the odd Oxbridge college which resisted the perils of uniformity, and now it turns out that their experience is a source of useful data.
Not that girls haven't done very well on both routes. Middle-class girls soaked up most of the expanded university places. And didn't we read the other day that 45% of women now graduate as against 35% of men – which creates fresh problems in the already-troubled matrimonial market.
But the idea that adolescent boys might disrupt adolescent girls' education simply by being in the same classroom should hardly have come as a surprise, any more than the news a few years back that their older sisters were ironing their boyfriends' trousers at integrated university halls of residence.
It may not be fair, but it's not all patriarchal oppression or social conditioning either. Some of its in the genes (ironing jeans in genes?) and we'd be foolish not to accept it. Watch small children: girls play with dolls, boys kick things and step in nasty puddles girls shy away from (most of them).
So surely girls' schools should be encouraged, not persecuted in the name of progress and uniformity. I know mixed education is meant to encourage greater understanding and familiarity between the sexes. Even if that's only half true (it is), there's a price, particularly, today's report suggests, for less able students for whom the lure of boys may be greater for being more obvious than physics.
It's not as if British teenagers are not sufficiently aware of their sexuality these days. They are overwhelmed with sexual imagery and advice, much of it commercial in nature. They could do with a bit less. As for social networking sites on the internet, this morning's Daily Mail warns us against unhealthy exhibitionism again today – in lurid detail. I managed two paragraphs.
Myself I attended a mixed grammar school in a small country town and was almost as shy when I left as when I arrived, though I'm slowly getting better. Our sons all insisted on going to schools where there were girls.
My daughter-in-law went to a girls' grammar in a big town and tells me the experience made her more confident and assertive. The trouble with boys came only when she went off to study engineering at laddish Imperial College.
Better to get good GCSE results than a boyfriend, I'd say, though both is nice. Plenty of time for lurve later on.
