'We decided to give it a twirl': single-sex teaching in English comprehensive schools
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GenderBehaviour
How did single sex teaching affect pupils' achievement?
The researchers found that:
- more than half the schools claimed improvements in achievement for either boys or girls or both; and
- some schools abandoned single sex teaching because they judged it had been ineffective.
Findings relating to the impact of single sex teaching on pupil achievement varied: for example, in a Derbyshire school where maths had been taught in single sex groups for several years, results in this subject tended to be better than in other subjects for both boys and girls. Schools in Great Yarmouth and Solihull both felt that low achieving boys gained most, middle achieving boys gained little and that girls' results remained unaffected. This contrasted with results from a school in Peterborough where teachers believed girls’ results had improved whilst boys’ results had remained the same as a result of introducing single sex teaching in maths.
The researchers found that schools which abandoned single sex teaching were those where staff lacked commitment to the initiative, or where little thought had gone into teaching strategies or management issues. However they concluded that enthusiasm and commitment from the teachers might well contribute to the raising of achievement, whether the students are in mixed-sex or single-sex groups.
