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Jennifer O’Connell: Single-sex schooling is a peculiarly Irish mash-up of Catholicism and post-colonialism

Why are we convinced we know something the rest of the world does not?

When I was on the cusp of secondary school in the late 1980s, my parents were summoned to a meeting at the coeducational national school in the country to which I had fled for my final years in primary, a grateful refugee from a city convent school. The parish priest wanted to determine which secondary schools we would be attending. There was usually nothing much to see here: the choice generally came down to one of the convents or one run by the Christian Brothers. He nodded along as the script unfurled as expected. Then it was my father’s turn.

I would be going, my dad said, to a multidenominational school run by Quakers. He might as well have announced he was shipping me off to Tristan da Cunha to learn folk dance.

Not only was it not Catholic, it was coed. It was fee-paying, but I had been awarded a scholarship (I was so anxious not to return to the nuns that I stayed up late studying for the entrance exam). Those two facts – not Catholic, coed – had conferred upon it a reputation for turpitude and debauchery which was, sadly, wildly overstated.

The priest was alarmed. He urged my father to say extra prayers with me at night to preserve my faith. My father replied that he hadn’t said prayers with me in years and regarded prayer as an individual’s own business. The conversation ended fairly abruptly after that.

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Single-sex schooling in Ireland was never really about a belief it offered some educational advantage. Rather, it is rooted in a peculiarly Irish mash-up of Catholic ideas about the need to protect girls and a postcolonial hangover of woolly ideas inherited from Britain’s elitist school system.

Girls are seen primarily through the lens of their relationship to boys – tamers of the male beast or coy victims of its gaze

These days, different arguments are made in its favour, all equally untroubled by supporting data. They claim that pupils do better when they’re surrounded by their own gender. Boys are more disruptive, more enthusiastic about maths and science, calmed by the presence of girls. Girls are seen primarily through the lens of their relationship to boys – tamers of the male beast or coy victims of its gaze. They might be intimidated by boys, or distracted by the need for male approval. Teachers pay more attention to boys in coed classrooms. And so on.

None of it stacks up. The theory that single sex schooling confers any educational advantage was comprehensively rebutted this week by a paper published in British Educational Research Journal by researchers from the University of Limerick and the University of Murcia. They analysed 5,000 15-year-olds and found no difference in students’ performance in maths, science or reading when other factors are accounted for. Any gaps are to do with the socioeconomic background of the students and whether the school is disadvantaged. And yet Ireland remains wedded to the single sex model, as though we – along with Malta and the Arab world – know something the rest of the world does not. One third of teenagers here attend a single sex school, and 17 per cent of primary students.

Loaded arguments

There’s a whiff of exceptionalism about the way Ireland clings to fictions about single-sex schooling in the face of all the evidence and the norms in most other countries. To bolster this fantasy, innate gender differences must be exaggerated to a cartoonish degree – boys do better under stress; girls hear better. Politically loaded arguments about girls needing “safe spaces” because of male violence are dragged into it. Gender-based violence is an urgent issue for society, but there’s no credible research to suggest it can be solved by keeping the genders apart during their formative years.

If the role of education is to prepare young people for life, cutting them off from the other half of the population – and implying girls have something to fear from boys – is harmful and illogical

It is sometimes argued that class snobbery is a factor. In Dublin, the Venn diagram between single-sex and private fee-paying schools is closer to a very large circle. “Children in single-sex schools tend to come from households with higher socioeconomic backgrounds who tend to perform better in school in any case,” Dr Darragh Flannery of University of Limerick said this week. We don’t actually know why children from higher income households are more likely to go to single sex schools. It may simply be lack of choice, in Dublin particularly. When Rathdown school in Glenageary opened admission to boys, enrolment shot up by 33 per cent in three months.

If the role of education is to prepare young people for life, cutting them off from the other half of the population – and implying that girls have something to fear from boys – is harmful and illogical. “Sex segregation increases gender stereotyping and legitimises institutional sexism,” a 2011 study in the journal Nature concluded. The research published this week didn’t look at non-cognitive outcomes such as confidence levels or wellbeing, but it would be interesting to see those differences. Coed schooling would also make life easier for gender-questioning, non-binary or transgender children.

In reality, of course, the Government already recognises the merit in the coed model. No sanction for a new single-sex school has been awarded in nearly a quarter of a century. Single-sex schools are due to be phased out within 10 to 15 years. But don’t expect it to happen quietly.

Supporters of single-sex schools point out that no parents were consulted about this. They’re right. On this, as on so many issues, we would benefit from a grown-up, evidence based national conversation about the benefits of each system. Parents are entitled to choice when it comes to the education of their children. But if they are making decisions based on cherry-picked or misunderstood arguments, bad science, trumped up fears or nostalgia for a time when schools serve as Petri dishes for religious inculcation, then that rationale needs to be challenged.