Girls need the safe space of single sex schools

When choosing a school for my eldest daughter twenty years ago, I asked friends who knew the local area better than me what the options were for a traditional, rigorous education for a girl. 

Fortunately, the first of the suggested places I visited was the right one; perhaps less fortunately, it was fee paying. Nevertheless, some £300,000 later (I sent her sister too), I have no regrets.

From the minute we were swept into the imposing head’s office, to the guided tour by the sixth form prefects, I knew. Here she would thrive, be nurtured and protected and one day grow up to be like the poised young women showing us round.

Going down the all-girls’ school route was instinctive, given that I was schooled entirely in a convent, but over the years I found myself defending single sex institutions and accidentally becoming an advocate.

Now, in the wake of the heart breaking ‘rape culture’ revelations by young girls, who have documented in disturbing detail the abuse that has blighted their school days, it is time to make the argument again for segregated education.

Although many of the thousands of anonymous entries on the Everyone’s Invited website – set up so girls could share their experiences – took place at parties, the extent of the harassment inside schools is shocking.

That by no means excuses what happens elsewhere but at least when children are under the care of teachers, there is an expectation that they will be safe.

Yet, there are accounts of girls as young as 11 being molested; 13 year-olds tell of being groped in chemistry lessons and lunch queues; and there seems to be a pandemic of teens and even pre-teens sending nude pictures of themselves to boys.

The response to the latter from one school involved, wrote a pupil, “was to call a meeting for the girls and talk about why they felt the need to send them (putting the responsibility on us).”

Because these reports, which include allegations of rape, emerged first from an independent school, it was initially presumed that this was a problem among the elite. But Everyone’s Invited has shown that bad things happen to girls in all kinds of schools. Unless they are lucky enough to find themselves in an exclusively female environment. 

The founder of Everyone’s Invited, 22-year-old Soma Sara, went to the girls’ only boarding school Wycombe Abbey but her own abusive encounters took place during the holidays, in London social circles.

Her school must have felt like a refuge. Away from the physical presence of boys, girls can be themselves. Teenagers are free from the distractions that only the opposite sex can provide, and free from being ranked, like cattle, according to their appearance.

There is plenty of evidence that girls excel academically when taught alone – Wycombe Abbey, St Paul’s Girls, Tiffin Girls (but not Boys), independent and state schools, dominate the league tables.

But it is the less tangible rewards that make these establishments so successful. My daughters’ school had a reputation in the neighbourhood for uniform transgressions; some girls were practically déshabillé compared to the knee-length kilted decorum (this was Scotland) of their co-ed competitors.

At PTA meetings, parents of younger children would complain to the head that sixth formers, with ladders in their tights and inappropriate skirt lengths, gave the school a bad name.

But the legendary Dr Judith McClure put them right. Within our grounds, she said, the girls can learn who they want to be without fear of judgement. Let them make their sartorial mistakes here among friends. Besides, she was far more concerned with their diligence than their decorativeness.

This is how self-esteem develops. When all your role models, and your youthful crushes, and the entire student and staff leadership teams (bar one male maths teacher) are female, you never question what is possible.

Female athletes were the school’s most celebrated stars and hockey captains walked on water. On sports day, girls took all the prizes.

With no boys, the girls got the best parts in school productions. Today it is gender blind wokeness to cast a female Hamlet, but in a girls’ school it is the norm. My eldest daughter played one of Chaucer’s young men, with moustache, in The Pardoner’s Tale and was Joseph in the nativity play.

It was just accepted that the tallest would take the lead in ceilidhs, which only became an issue when they started going to dances with boys. And the Secretary General of the Model UN was, of course, a girl, a feat yet to be matched in the real United Nations.

The unconverted may argue that the real world is not segregated and girls’ schools exist in a parallel universe of privilege. But although single sex schools may be in the minority and dwindling in both the independent and state sectors, selective secondaries buck the trend: girls’ schools make up 37 per cent of grammars, while 34 per cent of grammars are all boys, according to a report last year in the Daily Telegraph.

Could these bastions of brilliance not serve as a template for how the educational landscape of the future might look?

From what I’ve seen, girls who attend girls’ schools adapt easily to mixed company and then some. There is no social phobia when they reach university and their friendship groups include boys as well as girls.

But during the day, while they are learning, they are not conditioned by stereotypes or silenced by self-consciousness. My daughter said that in their sixth form common room they could talk about anything with no danger of being overheard by mocking boys. It was a totally safe space, and girls, as we are witnessing, need safe spaces.