I left my all-girls’ school in 2013. By 2023 it went co-ed. Down the road, St Joseph of Cluny girls’ school welcomed boys for the first time last week. This is the way things are trending. Single-sex schools are slowly being tossed out – they are too arcane, reminiscent of a darker time when Ireland was under the thumb of Rome, ill-suited to the demands of modernity, yada, yada – and replaced with the spectre of the coeducational school.
And we are supposed to accept all of this as a fait accompli – the arc of time bends towards justice, mixed-gender-education and all that? The detractors of single-sex school argue something simple: why, in 2025, would we harden, not loosen, all those rigid gender norms we have fought so hard to be rid of elsewhere?
I have never quite understood this argument. Ireland, no matter the directional trend, has some of the highest levels of same-sex schooling outside of the Arab world. And yes, that came to be under the strictures of a religious society. But now, after that rapid and vertiginous liberalisation we like to talk about so much, Ireland is not a place riddled with conservative mores. Our mainstream media is liberal, our social politics broadly progressive. And – if you believe in these kinds of surveys (though a pinch of salt is always advised) – the latest available data ranks Ireland much higher than average in the EU on the Gender Equality Index.
Taking all of that together – and the de facto argument that now is the best time ever in Ireland to be a woman – I find it quite hard to accept an argument about single-sex education holding all these women back, or enforcing sexist stereotypes. Those never quite percolated through the rest of society – they are certainly not conspicuous in 2025. Whatever vestige of Ireland’s hyper-religious society remains, single-sex education will rank low on the culpability list for its continued existence.
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It’s not enough to bat away the rather thin arguments of the anti-single-sex-school lobby, however. What’s the positive case for the continued existence of the all-girls’ school? It is hard to argue for in the data. It has perhaps become something of an urban legend that single-sex schools consistently outperform their co-ed counterparts in academic terms. But reducing the quality of an education to quantifiable performance is a mistake. If we were to think along those lines, we might as well bin arts degrees in their entirety and angle every student to the more practical, lucrative and productive Stem subjects. No one serious – certainly no one who cares about education in a broad, spiritual sense – would argue for this.
[ Single-sex schools provide ‘no academic advantage’, study findsOpens in new window ]
Instead, at my single-sex school, I found a broadly liberating environment, away from the pressures of daily interaction with teenage boys. I found freedom to pursue academic interests and encouragement to cultivate a sense of self, not in the eyes of what the other sex might think. Still, the majority of school-aged children say, at least according to a survey conducted in 2024, they would prefer to be in a co-ed school .
But I suspect all of those values I mentioned about my education were probably only valuable to me in hindsight; proven worthwhile to my life overall thanks to the winnowing effect of time and the clarity afforded by (slightly greater) maturity. It needn’t be said that teenagers are rarely good at identifying what’s best for them – we certainly deny them many things (smoking, drinking) with reference to similar arguments. It would be strange to cede something as important and formative as education to their whims.
This all sounds rather haughty and Dickensian. But I look at my old school and recognise very little of it from the six-years I spent there. I definitely feel a kind of disappointment at its evolution (demanded, I suspect, primarily by market forces rather than any lofty or principled ideas about education). And I mourn the increasing lack of space for teenage girls to exist on their own. Not even in double maths at 9am on a Wednesday morning?
If single-sex education really created societies ravaged by damaging gendered norms, then I cannot detect that in Ireland. Certainly no more so than in the majority mixed-educated United Kingdom. If we did reduce education to matters of quantifiable achievement, then maybe the mixed-schools would win out – but I certainly think a valuable education goes farther than that. And finally, if we want to remove places for teenage girls to flourish away from teenage boys, then moving to a majority co-ed society is the right thing to do.
Shame the arguments for doing so don’t hold any water at all.
