Apparently, we are witnessing the decline of the all-girl school. Due to the end of the VAT exemption for private schools, a number of independent institutions are at risk of closure – and girls’ schools are uniquely at risk.
As The Daily Telegraph recently reported, girls’ schools are less likely than boys’ schools to have generous alumni or healthy historical endowments, purely because they haven’t existed as long.
Loyal state-school teacher that I am, I don’t lament the erosion of a two-tiered education system that cements the class chasm in our society. But with the decline of the private girls’ school, the relevance and necessity of girls-only schooling more broadly has been called into question.
Some argue that in our modern world, girls’ schools are outdated and even perpetuate patriarchy. Besides, the slightly Victorian concept of keeping away fragile burgeoning girls from delinquent males, and churning out prim and proper young ladies at 18, is hardly something that most parents consider when sending their kids to school.
But as both a seasoned alumna of a (very much non-private) girls’ school, and as someone who has taught in various settings where boys were a species only rumoured to exist beyond the school gates, I’m here to tell you that girls’ schools need to stay.
Of course, there are the statistics. Girls perform better academically in single-sex environments. But girls’ schools offer something more – something rarer than the opportunity to excel and achieve.
They provide a haven for girls to just exist, in a society otherwise intent on judging, controlling, hypersexualising and maligning them from birth.
It’s difficult to convey if you’ve never spent time in one, but a girls’ school is like an alternate universe. A place where it’s perfectly acceptable to shout “has anyone got a sanitary towel?!” in the middle of a French lesson because finding women’s biology shameful hasn’t been drummed into you yet.
Where you can perform a dance routine at the Christmas concert without lewd remarks from your peers, or do your eyeliner at the back of maths class not to impress a lanky specimen called Callum, but because you feel like it. Where every text you study is through a feminist lens, the “female perspective” is simply default, and women’s history is just, well, history.
Most of all, within their gates you believe that you can do anything because the football champs, the maths whizzes, the Oxbridge applicants and even the class clowns are all girls.
Girls’ schools allow young women to spend their formative years away from the insatiable male gaze, sheltered from macho culture seeping into the classroom, which teaches them to make themselves small and palatable before they’re even fully grown.
Of course, teenagers are teenagers wherever they are, and girls’ schools don’t shelter students from the cornerstone dilemmas of adolescence like bullying, friendship issues or even poor mental health.
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I went to an all girls’ school – but I’d never send my daughter to one
Read MoreThere’s also the argument that mixed gender classrooms create a more balanced, dynamic environment that better reflects the working world. But I’ve taught in both single-sex and mixed schools, and the girls in single-sex schools not only seem genuinely happier and less inhibited, they seem younger at heart and unafraid to take up space.
And on the flip side, I have seen first-hand how exhausting it is to be a girl not just trying to grapple with all the baggage of adolescence but to do so surrounded by teenage boys who have been fed a diet of Andrew Tate and the like. In mixed schools, girls face a constant barrage. From before puberty, they are either a “slut” or “frigid”, hassled for nudes, or dismissed as too ugly to be desirable, sexually harassed or told to get back in the kitchen. All day, every day.
Before I am dismissed as a misandrist, let me clarify that I don’t think teenage boys are the devil incarnate, and my advocacy for girls’ schools isn’t to say that I think all schooling should be segregated from birth until adulthood, just for secondary school. But we cannot deny the facts – a generation of young men has been let down by this virulent strain of toxic masculinity.
The fact is that teen girls need safeguarding from the impact of our violently misogynistic culture just as much as boys need shielding from being the perpetrators of it – and until violent misogyny magically vanishes, preserving girls’ schools is the best way to protect them.
Nadeine Asbali is a secondary-school teacher in London
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