‘Triumph like a Girl’ – 150 years of the Girls’ Schools Association (GSA)

Today’s blog is in the form of the contribution by HEPI’s Director, Nick Hillman, to ‘Triumph like a Girl – An Anthology for Hope: Letters and Poems’, which is a new book marking the 150^th anniversary of the Girls’ Schools Association (GSA), which hosted their Annual Conference in Manchester earlier this week. The piece is written in a personal capacity and abridged.

I write as a former teacher in a GSA school, as a current policy wonk who was made a GSA Fellow in 2021 and [having being turned down by our first, second and third choice of state secondary school] as the father of a daughter who recently joined a GSA school as a pupil. In all three roles, I have seen the benefits that girls’ education can deliver.

In my first career as a teacher, I witnessed how girls often come into their own when educated alongside other girls. More able to express themselves academically, creatively and socially, it is clear that girls’ schools enable many pupils to thrive and go further than they might elsewhere. While few believe that single-sex schools are right for absolutely everyone, the hard data are clear: girls’ academic achievements are significantly better in such an environment.

For example, research by FFT Education Datalab finds,

‘girls in single sex schools are particularly likely to get top grades in single science GCSEs compared to their peers in mixed schools.’

There can be benefits in terms of the confidence of individual girls and in their willingness to try out new things too.

In my current profession of policy work, mainly in conjunction with universities, I have seen how schools like those in GSA membership are so often doing the heavy lifting in terms of strengthening at-risk subjects – most notably modern languages, which have been in catastrophic decline since the abolition of a compulsory language until the age of 16 back in the 2000s. They are also continuing to lead the way in showing that education is about the whole person not just pouring in facts – albeit bolstered by the [much] greater level of resources than those available to state schools.

Indeed, the work girls’ schools are doing is part of a much wider societal trend in which girls now do considerably better than boys in education. The gap between young women and young men entering higher education is stark. In the words of the House of Commons Library,

‘Women are much more likely to go to university than men and have been for many years. They are also more likely to complete their studies and gain a first or upper second-class degree.’

Girls are now doing so well that perhaps the single biggest challenge facing the UK’s education system is the underperformance of boys and young men. It is in the labour market afterwards – not the education system – that women, especially mothers, fall behind as gender pay gaps and unfair working practices abound.

This makes the career-focused messages that girls’ schools typically foster especially important.

Last week, HEPI published a paper looking at why women receive fewer top-class degrees at Oxford and Cambridge while outperforming men in higher education as a whole. HEPI hopes to revisit the issue of educational disparities by gender through a new look at the underachievement of boys / young men early in 2025.