Single-sex teaching in a co-educational comprehensive school in England: an evaluation based upon students' performance and classroom interactions
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Gender
Does it matter whether children are grouped by sex for schooling?
"Comprehensive reorganisation of schools in England was thoroughly uncontentious in terms of gender considerations", say the authors of this study.
It is salutary that it is the issue of apparent underachievement of boys which has brought single-sex teaching onto the agenda of mixed comprehensive schools, and significant that it was rarely voiced as an appropriate strategy when the concern in the 1970s and 1980s was with the provision of more equal opportunity for girls.
In the last ten years British schools, researchers, policy makers and the media have been concerned about an apparent gender gap between girls' and boys' achievements at school. This gap varies at different key stages and across subjects, but is most apparent in English. It also persists amongst most subjects at GCSE. Research has suggested explanations can be found in a combination of factors including individual schools, the economic environment, and factors such as ethnicity, social class and parental education. (There is also recent research which questions whether the bulk of boys are underachieving at all). For more information, click here to see the digest: Investigating the Patterns of Differential Attainment of Boys and Girls at School.
There has been a lot of research into potential solutions to improving boys' learning of including:
- altering teaching styles;
- supporting boys (and sometimes girls) through mentoring;
- focusing on literacy issues for boys;
- improving motivation by refining merit systems and short-term targets; and
- implementing single sex groupings.
However, the authors of this study point out that many of these strategies have been on trial fairly briefly and there has been little evaluation of their success. In consequence 'it is clear that, along with other strategies, the long-term effectiveness of single-sex groupings as an appropriate intervention strategy has yet to be established.'
