Single-sex vs co-ed: a view from 2025

Single-sex vs co-ed: a view from 2025
By Graeme May, Senior Deputy Head, Abingdon School

Founded in 1256, Abingdon School is one of the oldest in the UK – and it has been an all-boys school for all of its 750 plus years since that point. With such a history behind it, one might expect it to be steeped in tradition and very reluctant to contemplate change. And yet, in May 2024, the school made public its plans to start accepting girls from 2026 (and indeed, girls have already started arriving in its prep school).

There are multiple reasons for this move but, unlike many British schools that have moved from single sex to co-ed over the past 30 years, concern about the prospect of falling pupil numbers is not high up on the list. Abingdon has been consistently over-subscribed and maintains long waiting lists for places, particularly at the senior school where there are usually two to three candidates for every place, with boarding applications being even higher.

So what is the rationale behind the change?

The first thing to know is that Abingdon has never made a big deal out of its single sex status or suggested that it felt that ‘single sex is best’. If you look at any of its marketing and publicity for at least the past 20 years, it talks about being highly academic, about its enviably wide co-curricular offering and about its excellent pastoral care: you won’t find it championing the idea that boys-only is better. Its teachers don’t believe that boys and girls learn in distinctly different ways. Differences in ‘preferred learning styles’ are as observable across the individual sexes as they are when you look at both sexes put together.

When asked about its single sex status, Abingdon has pointed to three things that have kept it all-boys up until now. Firstly, as an oversubscribed school, the impetus for change has been on a gentle build, with several understandably risk-averse voices on the “don’t fix what isn’t broken” side of the argument. Secondly, its partnerships programme and its liaison with St Helen and St Katharine have meant there have been some co-ed opportunities for pupils, particularly in the Sixth Form. Thirdly, there have been some benefits that have come from the simplicity of boarding arrangements when you only have to think about one sex. The same goes for sports arrangements.

However, the feeling that Abingdon’s single sex model is in danger of appearing old fashioned and not really suited for the 21st Century has been increasing for some time (for more than a decade, in fact). Single sex education was born in an era when the expectations for the sexes were vastly different – and certainly the opportunities for men and women once they left school were deeply mismatched. Things are hugely different these days – thank goodness – and Abingdon believes it should reflect that. People learn about themselves and the world in relation to each other and it now seems very odd that we have been separating boys from girls for a crucial period of their adolescence when they are working out who they are and their place in the world. And this has been the trend in UK schools for some time – there are roughly half the number of single-sex independent schools in the UK compared with 30 years ago.

The changes that Abingdon anticipates are all positive – as cultural diversity and enrichment tends to be. The school’s amazing educational offering will be available to the other half of the population (i.e. the girls) and those girls will bring with them an exciting difference of viewpoint and approach which cannot do anything other than make the educational experience deeper.

There will still be a place for single-sex education in the UK, though it will probably become the preserve of the all-girls schools rather than all-boys. Despite educational research suggesting that, when you filter out for differences in things like socio-economic background, there is effectively no difference in outcomes for pupils in single sex schools versus the co-educational ones, some schools (and parents) nevertheless continue to believe there is a difference. Abingdon has done its research on this issue and points to pieces of work like the Alan Smithers report for HMC in 20061 that concludes with this telling final sentence, effectively debunking the notion girls and boys necessarily do better if they are separated:

“There are excellent single-sex schools and excellent co-educational schools. Our conclusion is that they are excellent for reasons other than that they separate, or bring together, the sexes for their education.”

Abingdon has also considered the argument that girls are put off from taking STEM subjects in Sixth Form if they come from a co-educational background. Here too, the research does not back this up when you look at what happens to the kind of high-ability pupils that Abingdon attracts. In a study2 by the Institute of Physics, though a large difference is observed when considering girls of all abilities taking up A Level Physics compared with boys, when just the top band of GCSE achievement is considered, the picture is rather different:

“In [government funded] co-ed schools, the percentage of students going on to take physics A-level increases with the academic achievement of the school. But it increases more for girls than for boys. Girls are more than twice as likely (2.2 times) to take A-level physics when coming from a school in the highest band compared with a school in the lowest band.” (p.18)

In other words, academically selective co-educational schools – such as Abingdon – will be places where girls feel empowered to study STEM subjects if that is where their interests lie – just as is the case for boys at the moment.

In conclusion, everyone at Abingdon is tremendously excited about the richness and diversity that the arrival of girls will bring, building on the decades of experience already built up from its long-standing liaison with St Helen and St Katharine. Over 80% of the senior school staff have taught in a co-ed environment previously, so there’s plenty of teacher experience to draw upon.

Institutions that refuse to adapt and embrace change are doomed to inevitable failure. Far from being weighed down by its history and tradition, Abingdon has actively initiated this change and the opportunity it offers for reinvention – as any institution with 750 years of history has no doubt already done several times on its journey through the ages.

1 https://alansmithers.com/reports/Paradox27Jul2006.pdf
2 https://www.iop.org/sites/default/files/2019-04/its-different-for-girls.pdf