Single-sex schools provide ‘no academic advantage’, study finds

There is “no academic advantage” for teenagers attending single-sex or mixed-sex schools, according to new research.

The findings are based on an analysis of data from nearly 5,000 15 year olds in Ireland which examined the association between attending a single-sex school and performance in maths, reading and science.

About a third of second-level students attend single-sex schools in Ireland, one of the highest proportions in Europe.

The topic of single-sex versus mixed-sex schooling has been a source of ongoing debate in education circles.

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However, there is limited evidence surrounding the relationship between attending a single-sex school and academic performance.

The analysis found significant “raw gaps” with pupils in single-sex schools performing better than those in mixed schools. However, once researchers applied a range of individual and school-level factors – such as the socioeconomic background of students and whether or not the school is disadvantaged – these gaps did not present as statistically significant.

On average, there was no difference in maths, science or reading performance for 15-year-old students after adjusting for the background of the student and other school-level factors. This result was found for both boys and girls.

The research, published in the British Educational Research Journal, is a joint project between Dr Darragh Flannery, senior lecturer at University of Limerick’s department of economics, and Prof José Clavel of the University of Murcia in Spain.

The student data was taken from the 2018 Irish wave of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) data set.

The research echoes findings from the Economic and Social Research Institute and elsewhere indicating that “school effectiveness” rather than gender has a bigger impact on student outcomes.

Dr Flannery said its analysis showed “no evidence of an academic advantage to attending a single-sex school for boys or girls in Ireland”.

“The differences we see in the raw scores seem to be driven by what is known as ‘selection effects’. In other words, the fact that children in single-sex schools tend to come from households with higher socioeconomic backgrounds who tend to perform better in school in any case helps explain the gaps we see in performance between the different school types,” he said.

“In Ireland, relative to other countries, a high proportion of secondary schoolchildren – roughly one-third – attend a single-sex secondary school. For this reason, the Irish educational system provides an interesting setting for exploring the outcomes of single-sex schooling.”

He said the results were presented as associations rather than causal effects, as there may be other characteristics that may impact Pisa performance and be correlated with the selection of single-sex schools versus mixed-sex schools.

However, given the “relative richness” of control variables in the study’s data, he said the paper made an important contribution to the existing literature on single-sex schooling and the analysis presented should prove useful to the policy debate.

“While this study is limited to looking at one type of outcome in academic achievement, future research may be able to explore the relationship between attending single-sex or mixed-sex schools and non-cognitive outcomes such as confidence levels or measures of wellbeing,” Dr Flannery added.