How To Make a Case For Co-Education

As VAT on fees and other pressures bite, a steady stream of well-loved independent schools have announced they are to go co-educational. It has been a natural solution to recruitment issues for some, but it can be awkward explaining to the families of existing pupils how their child will benefit from such a change.

Schools have long debated whether boys and girls learn better together or apart, but I think the argument for co-education is relatively easily made, and the research backs it up.

Arguments for separation usually arise from practical concerns: distraction in the classroom, the management of adolescent behaviour, differences in development, and anxieties about what happens when boys and girls spend extended time together.

Separating boys and girls may in some cases reinforce the very attitudes schools are trying to challenge.

These concerns are familiar to anyone working in schools and are not without some basis in experience. They also rest, often implicitly, on a wider assumption that relationships between males and females are inherently unstable, and that friendship across sexes is fragile at best and problematic at worst.

However, recent large-scale social research suggests that this assumption is not only overstated, but that separating boys and girls may in some cases reinforce the very attitudes schools are trying to challenge.

I was reminded recently of an article published last year that brought together several strands of research under the question: Can men and women be just friends? Central to the article was work by researchers from Meta and New York University who analysed social connections between more than 1.8 billion Facebook users worldwide, covering almost 1.4 trillion friendship ties in “Cross-Gender Social Ties Around the World“.

Societies where men and women rarely form friendships are also societies where sexist attitudes are more entrenched.

From this, they developed a measure of how often men and women form friendships with one another in everyday social networks. The scale of this dataset matters, because it allows patterns to emerge that are simply not visible in smaller or more localised studies.

The pattern that emerges is consistent and impossible to ignore. Societies where men and women rarely form friendships are also societies where sexist attitudes are more entrenched, women participate less in the workforce, and views about female leadership are more negative.

By contrast, societies with higher levels of cross-gender friendship tend to show more egalitarian attitudes and higher levels of trust between men and women. These are not marginal differences. Regions with more mixed-gender social networks show significantly lower agreement with statements such as “men make better political leaders than women” and stronger support for equal rights in education and employment.

While online friendships are not a perfect proxy for real-world relationships, the close alignment between these findings and independent survey data on gender attitudes suggests that the measure is capturing something real about how societies function.

For schools, the implication is uncomfortable but important. The data suggests that segregation and inequality do not simply coexist, but reinforce one another. This raises an obvious question. Are boys and men less sexist because they have female friends, or do they have female friends because they already hold more egalitarian views? The evidence points to a feedback loop in both directions. Social environments that normalise routine, non-sexual interaction between boys and girls appear to shape expectations and behaviour over time. Schools are among the most significant of those environments.

The data suggests that segregation and inequality do not simply coexist, but reinforce one another.

This conclusion is reinforced by more focused psychological research on cross-sex friendship. A study by April Bleske-Rechek and colleagues is often cited to support the claim that boys and men are more likely than girls and women to experience sexual attraction within ostensibly platonic friendships. That finding exists, but the way it is often used in educational debate is misleading.

When Bleske-Rechek’s team observed naturally occurring friendships in everyday settings, the difference between male and female attraction levels became statistically weak. In real-world friendship pairs, both sexes reported wide variation in attraction, and many reported none at all. The dramatic gender gap that appears in controlled or imagined scenarios largely disappeared when friendships were studied as they actually occur.

This aligns with wider developmental research on adolescents. Longitudinal studies show that boys who have more female friends tend to become more egalitarian in their attitudes over time, while girls’ views on equality are relatively stable. The implication is that boys, in particular, learn expectations through experience. Equality, in other words, is learned socially before it is fully internalised morally.

Co-educational schooling is not simply a logistical choice but an important formative social context.

Seen in this light, co-educational schooling is not simply a logistical choice but an important formative social context. Schools are one of the few places where sustained, structured, and age-appropriate interaction between boys and girls takes place under adult guidance.

Classrooms, tutor groups, sports teams, and shared projects allow pupils to work alongside one another as peers rather than abstractions. They learn how to collaborate, disagree, lead, and support across gender lines, often imperfectly, but with the space and structure to reflect and improve. 

Separating boys and girls during the school years in the hope that they will later learn to relate well as adults risks postponing this learning rather than supporting it. It assumes that maturity develops independently of experience. The wider social data suggests otherwise. Where segregation persists into adult life, through education, work, or social norms, misunderstanding and mistrust tend to persist alongside it.

Mixed environments require clear boundaries, strong pastoral systems, and thoughtful teaching.

None of this is to suggest that co-education is effortless. Mixed environments require clear boundaries, strong pastoral systems, and thoughtful teaching. They do not regulate themselves. But the response to immature behaviour is guided interaction rather than avoidance.

The evidence suggests that segregation and sexism can reinforce one another. Schools that take seriously their role in preparing pupils for adult life need to recognise that relationship. 

If education is about preparing young people for the world they will enter, then learning how to live and work constructively with those of the opposite sex is not an optional addition. It is a core element of social development.

Separating boys and girls does not remove the challenges of gender relations but just delays them, often until the structures that might have supported healthier learning are no longer in place.

 

Article published in School Management Plus Magazine