Colman Noctor: Parents need to find a secondary school to fit their child 

There is a lot of debate about the academic performance of single-sex schools versus mixed schools but our focus needs to be on the social and emotional development of students 

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'Boys do better in a mixed school, and girls do better in a single-sex school', is a well-worn phrase that undoubtedly influences parents and young people, but the strength of this statement lies solely on what we consider 'doing better' to mean. 

Soundbites like this one can over-simplify several nuanced factors. The statistics do not reflect other socio-economic factors such as attendance at private, fee-paying secondary schools which naturally greatly inflates a student's chance of accessing higher education. It just so happens that a large majority of these schools are single-sex schools, thereby impacting the final results.