Mixed blessing: do single-sex schools have a future?

If you were starting with a blank screen to design an education system today, it seems unlikely that you would think of creating single-sex schools, any more than you would single-sex professions or single-sex restaurants. Education for life is something we do together, like working or eating. Their existence is explained by the fact that when the first were established, most girls didn’t go to school. William of Wykeham founded Winchester in 1382 for ‘poore scholars’ who would be boys — that was obvious. Dean John Colet founded St Paul’s School in 1509, taking advice from Erasmus of Rotterdam and putting the management of the 153 scholars ‘from all nacions and all countres indifferently’ into the hands of the Mercers’ Company. These men were visionaries who thought about wide access and international reach. Were they alive today, would they exclude girls from that vision?

Schools for girls developed much later.