2001: PRINCIPLES & NEGOTIATIONS

BY JFX MILLER HEADMASTER (94-08)

‘I am therefore delighted to announce that the RGS has approached the relevant government authorities for permission to admit girls into the school. We are looking for a formal start date for the admission of girls into the Sixth Form of September 2002 but all the necessary arrangements and facilities should be in place for September 2001. We hope eventually to extend the co-educational principle to the whole school, though that would clearly need wide consultation, time and investment.’

It was thus that, at Prize Giving in November 2000, I announced one of the most significant and, I would argue, most beneficial changes in the RGS’ history.

This was very far from a sudden decision. I had raised the possibility with John Fenwick (Chairman up to 2000) before I was even appointed; I drafted my first paper for Governors in 1996; the Governors decided in early 1999 that they favoured the principle. It had been a long time in the planning.

So what were the reasons? I stand by those I presented in 2000.

Part of our job is to prepare our pupils for university; all universities are coeducational; no Oxbridge colleges are male-only; a single-sex education is not a very good preparation. I would go further: for some boys and, yes, for some girls, a single-sex educational background can mean that they are at sea for some considerable time. Our single-sex environment here means that we are failing our pupils in a critical way.

Part of our job is also to prepare our pupils for the world of employment, where RGS old boys increasingly find that they will be working with women and for women. A male only education may (and I do stress ‘may’) have been acceptable when professional and managerial jobs were largely the preserve of men; it now makes no sense.

More generally, we need to counteract the sexism that tends to emanate from male-only environments, where the opposite sex is frequently seen as sex objects and where boys (and girls in girls only schools) can find it difficult to relate to the opposite sex purely as friends.

A boys only environment can produce a laddish element. The experience of other schools, which have admitted girls, is that the move immediately counteracts that and leads to a significant improvement in behaviour and general sensitivity.

There are good straightforwardly educational reasons too. Some subjects, for example, clearly benefit from a wider range of perspectives than is possible in a male only environment. A male-only set studying Sylvia Plath is surely missing something; the same is true of a girls-only set studying Ted Hughes, and indeed of much advanced level study in the arts..

Co-education, certainly in the Sixth Form, tends to produce a much better working environment, with a much better work ethic for some and less of a pressure cooker atmosphere for others.