Sarah Harte: One size rarely fits all when it comes to educating our children

Parents who want send their children to single-sex schools are often characterised as out of touch or deluded — but this is not helpful

Cheerful female students wearing blue school uniforms walking in locker room

Our education system is rarely out of the news, but there’s nothing like a spate of headlines on single-sex schools to get a swathe of columns penned in response.

A study has found that, on average, having adjusted for factors such as socioeconomic backgrounds, there was no academic advantage to attending single-sex schools.

Conducted by the University of Limerick in conjunction with the University of Murcia in Spain, the study used a sample of almost 5,000 15-year-olds examining the association between attending a single-sex school in maths, reading, and science literacy.

Jennifer O’Connell in the Irish Times wrote that none of the evidence “stacks up” for the advantage of single-sex schools. She wrote that there was “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”.

Last Thursday, in this paper Jennifer Horgan said that parents’ fears are fed “about genders mixing and learning from one another”. She thinks there is a nexus between de Valera’s “envisaged Ireland” and the notion of “athletic youths” and “happy maidens” being schooled separately, which is an interesting point.

About 17% of primary schoolers and roughly a third of second-level pupils attend single-sex schools.

Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, Labour spokesperson on Education, called on the Government to ban single-sex schools, saying that they didn’t reflect who we are now.

Arguably, ‘who we are now’ depends on whom you ask.

On RTÉ Radio 1’s Drivetime, Ó Ríordáin made the striking statement that choice was not as important as equality, that choice was not as important as integration.

Some might disagree. How you define equality also seems pertinent. You can be equal but different. The legal concept of reasonable accommodation means adapting systems and processes in response to individual needs and is recognised under Article 40.1 of the Constitution.

It’s vital, for instance, for providing for people with disabilities.

A strong view is that co-education promotes gender equality providing children with opportunities to observe one another from day one. Against the backdrop of rising violence against women, the need to instill a sense of gender equality feels pressing.

However, some educators and parents continue to believe that children’s interests are best served in a single-sex environment, and not solely in an academic context.

Study was 'limited'

Dr Darragh Flannery, a lead researcher on the University of Limerick study, points out that the study was “limited” by only referring to academic achievement and not to “non-cognitive outcomes such as confidence levels or measures of well-being”, which they hope to measure in the future.

Leading American studies comparing single-sex education with co-educational models have been divided. Some show benefits, and others indicate no difference. For every study with a thesis, you will find a study to prove the opposite. There is rarely a definitive study in any field. The pros and cons of a single-sex education aside, the bottom line is that more American parents are voluntarily choosing single-sex schools.

At home, the truth is some people are also happy with single-sex schools, either because of their own positive experience of attending one, due to religious beliefs, or because the local single-sex school is a good one. Many people favour the local school because it’s nearest, regardless of whether it’s multi-denominational, religious, single-sex, or co-educational.

It’s rough on parents lumped with a single-sex local school they don’t want if that’s the sole practicable choice. 

It would be interesting to know how many people are in this cohort. It’s possible the Government hasn’t fulfilled its promise to phase out single-sex schooling because it intuits that a majority of parents are reasonably happy with the status quo.

Within a family sometimes parents will make different choices for siblings because of varying needs. 

On Drivetime, Sarah McInerny spoke of one family she knows where the mother has chosen to send one son to a single-sex school and another to a mixed one because she decided that their individual needs would be best served by these different environments.

This presupposes that you have the luxury to do this but it’s not an uncommon phenomenon. One size perhaps does not fit all.

A sports-focused all-boys school may be hell for a sensitive boy with no interest in sport. An all-female environment may be torture for particular girls. The reverse may be true.

Where educational equality bears close scrutiny is in the context of private schools, many of which are single sex.

Families may opt for these because they can afford to or because it’s a family tradition and they want to access the old-school tie and the advantages they believe this confers on their child. It may be the case that on encountering the product of this education singing their old school song 40 years after they last walked through the gates you sharply side-step them and question the wisdom of this parental choice, but it is a choice.

Yet, currently, the Irish State subsidises private schools in a way that it doesn’t in England, where you have to pay through the nose for the privilege. This touches on the important question of how State resources are divvied out when it comes to its educational policy, and the broader common good definitely comes into play here.

It was also reported in this paper last week by Jess Casey that plans for students to sit half their Irish and English Leaving Cert papers at the end of fifth year have been delayed following stiff opposition from teachers and students. One concern was that many boys in fifth year would not be developmentally ready to sit the exam.

Gender-based brain differences

The reversal of this proposal is perhaps a partial acknowledgment of the fact that while boys and girls are equal, they may be different. There is also a belief that gender-based brain differences mean that girls and boys need to be taught differently.

Many of us suspect that while home-schooled kids can excel academically, they fail to learn vital lessons about rubbing along in a world that is not to their liking. As you read this, you may be thinking of flesh and blood examples of well-educated people with firm principles often in the news who struggle to accommodate others’ different choices.

Regardless, the Irish Constitution supports the decision to home-school because it supports parental choice when it comes to education be that moral, social, or intellectual. Home-schooled children are not integrated into the mainstream because their parents have chosen a very different route that is reflective of ‘who they are’.

The number of kids who have been excluded from school or have dropped out of school is rising particularly since the pandemic.

The online service ‘iScoil’ — which provides kids with an alternative path from traditional school to progress their education — is an example of a learning tool that acknowledges that some children have different requirements.

Characterising parents who are happy to send their children to single-sex schools as out of touch and deluded is unhelpful. The strong suspicion is that when enough voters want only co-educational schools, the Government will get the lead out.

Last week, in an interview in this paper with Helen O’Callaghan, children’s author Jacqueline Wilson said that “almost as important as feeding a child dinner is feeding their mind”. Extolling the virtues of reading, she said it helps children develop empathy: “You discover people are so different, that people think in different ways.” 

It’s a point well made.