Boys’ own

 Co-education is now so much the norm, even in the independent sector, that those single-sex establishments which remain, especially boys-only schools, might be thought eccentric, old-fashioned or even wrong-headed. Independent schools have transformed themselves in this respect: a quarter of boys-only schools have gone co-ed in the past ten years, and there is — almost incredibly — only one independent boys’ prep school left in northern Britain. But this revolution is not wholly a result of heartfelt arguments for co-education. Finance and, to a lesser extent, fashion, have also spoken powerfully in favour.

Which does not mean that those former boys’ schools, now co-ed — Ampleforth, Rugby and Wellington, for example — are less excellent than they always were; but they are different, and their new identity does not in itself amount to a repudiation of the old way of doing things.

Anthony Goddard, headmaster of that defiant northern prep school, Aysgarth, in the Yorkshire Dales, speaks of the school keeping its nerve.