School Standards Improve In Single Sex Education
In a move to improve their learning performance, boys and girls in the same school are being taught in different classes. Schools in the trials have found educational concentration improved without the distraction of the opposite sex.
A conference of head teachers from academies, state and independent schools met recently in Cambridgeshire to discuss this issue. If adopted this would reverse the trend for co-educational school which stems from the 1970s. What has changed? Apart from the maxim of “what goes around comes round” why has this issue taken so long to resurface in our educational scrutiny? If this trend is ratified how many of our children have lost out in the past 40 years?
Maybe the element of competition is at last emerging more effectively in schools. Girls consistently outperform boys in maths and science by the age of 14, but then slip down in the standards by age of 16. Rather correct this trend schools have been guilty of pushing girls into less demanding subjects. Has the key influence behind this move been schools striving to maximise target performance? It may have been easier to get the numbers up than correct the fault, with girls, maths and science loosing out.
Single sex lessons have removed the element of embarrassment, ridicule and showing off associated with mixed emotions and adolescence. The greatest shock is perhaps that this is a surprise! Boys and girls grow, develop physiologically and mature at different rates. They have done so for a couple of millennium. How come we just noticed, and how many children have we messed up as a consequence?
