Boarding School Single Sex School

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Winchester College (Photo by In Pictures Ltd./Corbis via Getty Images)
Is the age of the single-sex boarding school over?
As Winchester College prepares to turn co-educational, Alexander Larman asks if single-sex boarding schools may soon become a thing of the past
Since its foundation by William of Wykeham in 1382, Winchester College has established itself as one of the country’s most prestigious schools. It has also remained an all-male environment – the school famously has “Manners Makyth Man” as its motto, something often remarked upon when discussing the famously polite Winchester alum Rishi Sunak – along with only a handful of other boarding schools, including Radley, Eton and Harrow.
This will now change from September 2022 when girls will be admitted to the school for the first time as day pupils in the Sixth Form; it is planned that a dedicated girls’ boarding house will then allow them to join the school as boarders from 2024. All previous attempts to implement such change have failed.
When I was a pupil at Winchester a quarter of a century ago, it was a strange, almost monastic place
As an Old Wykehamist myself, I was canvassed for my own opinion on the matter in 2005 when the idea was staunchly rejected by the school’s former pupils by a ratio of roughly 9 to 1. Yet, under the reforming headmaster Dr Timothy Hands and the Warden Sir Richard Stagg, once-unthinkable change is on the verge of taking place. As Dr Hands told me, the Governing Body came to a unanimous decision to admit girls after hearing a wide range of differing perspectives: “The Governing Body would like as many as possible who would benefit from a Winchester education to come to the School – irrespective of financial means or gender.”
When I was a pupil at Winchester a quarter of a century ago, it was a strange, almost monastic place. Although the intellectual life of the school was exciting and dynamic, it was also socially and emotionally repressed, with many of the boys leaving the school both academically brilliant and rather strange. A deep-seated fear of homosexuality was expressed in near-hysterical mockery and women and girls were objects of either lust or derision. I hope that there is now a more ecumenical attitude towards the female sex that will make the transition to co-education seamless, but this will depend on how far the school itself has evolved in the meantime.
One of my contemporaries was Maria Cleminson, a daughter of one of the teachers. Today, she looks back on her experience of being the only female Wykehamist in her year with a mixture of fondness and bemusement at what she calls her “unique and weird situation”. Cleminson agrees that the single-sex education that the school offered has led to numerous emotional difficulties, even before one considers the “bad and abusive things that happened behind closed doors”.
As she says, “I think a lot of the boys were, and probably still are, misogynists. I think the only available images of women being from magazines created unrealistic expectations of what women are and ‘should be’ and, for some of them, those years of assumptions about girls will have been irreversibly formative.”
Nonetheless, she still speaks warmly about the “many brilliant boys” she encountered, commenting that, “Winchester College wasn’t just about getting straight As; it also gave us an extraordinarily broad curriculum and taught you how to talk, how to own the place, how to get away with it. It inspired extraordinary confidence that other schools just don’t have the opportunity or tradition to provide … Will a mixed Winchester College still offer that? Or will it change irrevocably? I don’t know.”
This innovation seems unlikely to be taken up by the few remaining single-sex boys’ schools, at least for the time being; when asked for a comment for this piece, a school spokeswoman for Eton declined, instead directing me towards their earlier statement that “Eton has no plans to become co-educational.” Radley similarly stated that it “has no plans to introduce girls”.
There also seems no concomitant urge to make all-girls schools such as Badminton, Cheltenham Ladies’ College and Wycombe Abbey co-educational. Perhaps this is a reflection of a general belief that, while the introduction of girls into hitherto all-male environments will be a civilising and academically invigorating innovation, the reverse would be true if boys were brought into girls’ schools.
Certainly, parents wary of the existing fierce competition for places at the best boys’ schools will be apprehensive about the idea that it will be even harder to get a place there should they go fully co-educational. Yet it seems unjust that the finest educations in the country should be denied to half the population purely on the grounds of their sex and historic precedent.
And, as Hands points out, progress and evolution are inevitable, rather than things to be frightened of. “Winchester College has evolved significantly during the course of its 600-year history. At its beginning, the only women allowed were the school’s ‘washer women’, who could go no further than the outer courtyard. Winchester has thrived over the centuries by adapting, not by standing still.”
Time will tell whether the school will embrace market forces and changing times alike and open their doors to co-education. If they do, perhaps we shall come to regard the centuries of dominance of all-male schools as a rather interesting but deeply anachronistic phenomenon, rather like wearing bowler hats in public.
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Do you think that single-sex boarding schools perpetuate entrenched sexism?
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No. The reverse. I went to one; and with no boys around there was no opportunity for men and women to be "compared" in any way work-wise. So I just assumed that I could do anything; it simply never occurred to me that men and women might be treated differently in the workplace.
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I also went to one and agree with AmI from the girls point of view.

However I've sometimes had the impression (but no firsthand knowledge) that all-boy schools may be rather sexist.
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Yes! They are total hothouses of

Girl Must Achieve and be gorgeous and anorexic. You will only achieve if we remove the dangerous men. However, whe men are there you don't have a hope so make sure you are good looking, and can cook, and are thin.
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I think they can fight blatant sexism pretty well, but often fall victim themselves to perpetuating more subtle sexism - for example my girls' boarding school made great efforts to say we could do anything, but then failed to offer opportunities such as design/tech for GCSE or decent computer tuition, and made no efforts to counter the idea that maths was for geeks and the Chinese. On the plus side, it did have excellent science teachers, including the female head of Physics who explained that when she was at uni in London 30 years earlier, she was the only woman among 300 men and never had to buy her own lunch.
Times have changed, she said. Now you would be one of around 10 women out of 300 students. And you'll have to buy your own lunch.

And while careers guidance emphasised we could do anything, the line was always "how are you going to support yourself doing X" - not once was it ever suggested one might want to be able to afford to support a family. Talks were on medicine, law, and various arty careers - engineering, computing, government etc weren't covered.

Only having alumnae do Speech Day was also restricting in that we only had two very mildly famous ones, one of whom was only for whom she married.

Thing is, single-sex schools and their staff and pupils are still part of society. In some ways there was more obsession with looks, weight, and getting a boyfriend than there might have been if the lads from [nearby schools] had been hanging around all the time instead of only when they'd scrubbed up for a Saturday night dance.
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No. No more than any other school. Have come across sexism and its reverse in day schools too. Depends on child and which phase it is in as well as parental ambience.
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"However I've sometimes had the impression (but no firsthand knowledge) that all-boy schools may be rather sexist."

Yes, that was what provoked my OP. When I think of the men I know (several generations) who have been to the big name all boys boarding schools, they are all (without exception) MCPs. Not always overtly, but they are, underneath.
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"Girl Must Achieve and be gorgeous and anorexic. You will only achieve if we remove the dangerous men. However, whe men are there you don't have a hope so make sure you are good looking, and can cook, and are thin."

Voice of experience?
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First hand experience of them arriving in the sixth form of my co-ed school and then university. I couldn't believe the eating issues. They all looked amazing and had to take Prozac around exam time.

My SiL still bears the scars of the pressure. She is beautiful, has straight A's double first from Oxford (top of year in subject) Grade 8 piano and on and on. And is so stressed about her underachievement.
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OP what sort of sexism are you thinking might exist?
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Nothing in particular - I just want to know what others think. I met some people recently who were considering single sex boarding in England for their DC and it got me thinking about the sort of values that families who send their children to these schools are looking for.
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SundaeGirl - I do think that there is an issue when girls/women get together (and have time to spare) of focusing hugely on appearance.
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I think the kind of parents who send their girls are the sort looking for results.

The girls I think of all did really well academically and often excelled in other areas too. They were charming and pretty. Lots of them had breakdowns at around 25 and most of them had little issues with anorexia, self-esteem and so on. Very few would expect their husbands to do even a 65:35 split of childcare/house hold stuff - far fom it.
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We send DS2 to one if the few remaining boys only full boarding schools left in the UK. I don't know what values we were looking for or even for that matter hold. We looked at two single sex schools, my DS would have had to full boarded at both, we liked the schools and felt comfortable there we did not feel like this at any of the mixed schools we looked at. Until I read you thread OP I hadn't really thought about what values we were looking for we or whether being all boys influenced the general ethos in our favour we just liked them. But probably because they held similar values to ours I guess. I am not a raving feminist going on about how women have been oppressed by men because that is not my experience.
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I really couldn't be more convinced of the value of co-ed vs. single sex but even I would have to weigh that against the advantages of my DSs going to Eton or Winchester. The teaching and resources are just so, so incredible. I think I would still choose co-ed, I'm pretty sure I'd choose co-ed, but I can't be certain. Not a decision I'll ever be troubled by, though.

I went to a Top Public School. I was the first year of mixed girls and boys coming in at 13. And, fwiw, the bullying in all boys years was horrendous compared to ours.
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When we looked at schools we werent especially choosing single sex I asked teachers which they felt was best and they were non committal. I work in a coed boarding school and it certainly has a different feel to it but thats not because it is fighting sexism at every turn. I don't think my DS is going to be turned into an entrenched sexist why should he? There are female teaching staff matrons HMs wife's all who he likes and respects he meets the sisters of friends and girls from other schools I doubt it even crosses his mind that women are anything but equal. The school would not promote anything else either. OP Im curious to know what the values your friends looking at boys schools had or were hoping to find obviously no school can filter our entrenched sexism if the parents.
I do think many send their DS's to single sex because they think boys will be better understood at them but not to turn them into sexists
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There was no pressure in my top single sex boarding school to be thin or over achieve. Most people just got on with it tbh. Cool clothing was important but no more so than any other school I imagine.

The only disadvantage I felt was that when I left school I had no male friends, no real idea of how to deal with men and behaved in some bloody silly ways towards men that I wouldn't have if I had male friends I think.
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re the eating disorders thing, you get them wherever you get a lot of high achieving, perfectionist girls, so academically selective independent schools are always going to have a high quota whether ss or coed. From my own days, I can think of a couple of co-ed boarding schools that seemed to have a lot of eating disorder problems and a few all girls ones with relatively few. within those , some yrs were definitely "problem years" for EDs whilst others were unscathed. We have to remember that ED's are not about "appearance" per se (i.e. looking good for boys). They're about control/ perfectionism/ warped sense of self-discipline.

I imagine my DC's will probably board for secondary. I'd be inclined to send both DS and (as yet hypothetical) DD co-ed. I would consider sending DD single sex, but what I definitely wouldnt do is send her somewhere that is boys to 16 and co-ed for the 6th form. My sceptical head says that then they're just bait to stop the boys wanting to switch schools at 16.
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The culture in most single sex boys schools is definitely sexist, hg. The boys peers and competitors are all male and it is against them that the boy learns how he measures up. Women and girls don't feature. High praise for all traditional males values. School and team and personal identity formed away from women.

As I say, I was the first year of girls in an all-boys school. 30 girls in a school of 500. I saw it up close. And, no, it won't be any different now because it's to do with the prizes and sports and tradition (assuming the school is older than 1980s).

The idea that boys would be better 'understood' at an all boys school is a bizarre one. Teachers and those doing the 'understanding' are individuals, understanding of people or not. It sound like this is a question of values. The school don't value the things that appeal to and absorb teen girls and so would rather not divert resources and dilute identity with those things. Not difficult for a teen boy to pick up on and convert into... Sexism.
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I went to a (very academic) all-girls' boarding school, where I was one of the high achievers. Last weekend I found my diary from age 12, which was entertaining to read but also tugged on the heart strings a bit now that I am the mother of a very bright little girl myself. One entry read "I am very disappointed today because I only got 94% in Latin."

At my school, good results were expected. However, I don't see the problem with that, if a child is capable of getting those results. I wouldn't want to push a child who was struggling, but I see nothing wrong with putting able children in an educational environment where their best is expected.

Several of my year group left for sixth form to go to the mixed (nationally recognised as outstanding) sixth form college and got all Es at A level, having got all As at GCSE. The reason was the amount of time they spent with the boys.

I wouldn't send my DCs to boarding school but I absolutely would send them to single-sex secondary schools.
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"The girls I think of all did really well academically and often excelled in other areas too. They were charming and pretty. Lots of them had breakdowns at around 25 and most of them had little issues with anorexia, self-esteem and so on. Very few would expect their husbands to do even a 65:35 split of childcare/house hold stuff - far fom it."

Yes, SundaeGirl, that's the sort of entrenched sexism I'm thinking of.
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DD was a day pupil at a all girls boarding school. DS was a boarder at a co-ed boarding school. DD & DS say you get pupils of both sexes with eating disorders so can't see it being a single sex school thing. Also schools are much better at pastoral care now so the issues that happened in the last should not be such of an issue now..., or at least they're dealt with earlier.
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SundaeGirl I'm interested in your comments "boys peers and competitors are all male and it is against them that the boy
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