No academic advantage to attending single-sex school, study finds

Outside Muslim countries, Ireland has one of the highest proportions of single-sex schools in the world and is second in Europe only to Malta, which also has a history of religious involvement in education.

There is no academic advantage to attending an all-boys or all-girls school, new research suggests, prompting fresh calls to phase out single-sex education.

Outside Muslim countries, Ireland has one of the highest proportions of single-sex schools in the world and is second in Europe only to Malta, which also has a history of religious involvement in education.

A common argument made in their favour is that girls tend to perform better academically in a single-sex school.

However, critics of single-sex schools say they are “outdated” and that they affect students’ attitudes towards members of the opposite sex.

Now, a new study analysing thousands of Irish teenagers in co-ed and single-sex schools has found “no significant difference” when it comes to the academic performance of students.

The joint project between the University of Limerick (UL) and the University of Murcia found no major differences when it came to reading, maths, or science for students in single-sex schools compared to their peers in mixed schools.

This was after adjusting for factors like students’ socioeconomic backgrounds.

Co-author of the study Dr Darragh Flannery, senior lecturer at the Kemmy Business School, UL, said: "There is limited evidence around the relationship between attending a single-sex school and academic performance.” 

Using a sample of almost 5,000 Irish 15-year-olds, the study used data from the most recent round of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment.

The analysis initially showed significant gaps, with pupils in single-sex schools performing better than those in mixed schools.

However, these gaps did not present as statistically significant, once the researchers considered different factors.

Socioeconomic background

This included the socioeconomic background of the student, the school's student-staff ratio, the quality of teaching material available to the school, and whether the school was disadvantaged.

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

Differences in the unadjusted scores seem to be driven by what is known as "selection efforts", he added.

“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.” 

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Future research may be able to explore the relationship between attending single-sex or mixed-sex schools and things like confidence levels or measures of wellbeing, he added.

Labour TD Aodhán Ó Ríordáin said he understood parents have concerns when it comes to adolescence and interaction between girls and boys.

“But any well-run school will deal with that. We can’t really expect a situation where children go from a mixed creche and a mixed family to a single-sex secondary school, and then revert back to co-ed third level," he said.

The Department of Education has not given sanction to a new single-gender school since 1998, he added.

“So it is de facto policy, what we are dealing with is a legacy.”