Jrh Mcewen

Boys’ own

J.R.H. McEwen on the value of educating the sexes separately

 Co-education is now so much the norm, even in the independent sector, that those single-sex establishments which remain, especially boys-only schools, might be thought eccentric, old-fashioned or even wrong-headed. Independent schools have transformed themselves in this respect: a quarter of boys-only schools have gone co-ed in the past ten years, and there is — almost incredibly — only one independent boys’ prep school left in northern Britain. But this revolution is not wholly a result of heartfelt arguments for co-education. Finance and, to a lesser extent, fashion, have also spoken powerfully in favour.

Which does not mean that those former boys’ schools, now co-ed — Ampleforth, Rugby and Wellington, for example — are less excellent than they always were; but they are different, and their new identity does not in itself amount to a repudiation of the old way of doing things.

Anthony Goddard, headmaster of that defiant northern prep school, Aysgarth, in the Yorkshire Dales, speaks of the school keeping its nerve. Co-education has been mentioned, of course, even considered, but Mr Goddard, who became headmaster after a career in business, and his board of governors stand firm: Aysgarth was founded in 1877 and purpose-built to provide boys with a first-rate, boarding-school education and prepare them for public school, and the objective has been achieved. Aysgarth, by staying true to its original purpose, finds itself not only distinct but paradoxically progressive, and in a position to demonstrate why educating the sexes separately is also thought, for solid reasons, to be the better way.

Visiting the school, I can see how passionately Mr and Mrs Goddard (she oversees the pastoral side of the school) and their staff believe in the particular benefits of single-sex education. The chief benefit is freedom: freedom, in particular, from the self-consciousness that girls would induce.

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