New study has found single-sex secondary schools have no academic benefit for students

According to a new study, there is no “academic advantage” for students attending single-sex schools in Ireland. Although pupils typically score higher in assessments than their co-educational peers, this may be more linked to a student’s background.

“Children in single-sex schools tend to come from households with higher socio-economic backgrounds who tend to perform better in school in any case,” Dr Darragh Flannery of the University of Limerick (UL) has said.

“On average, there is no significant difference in academic performance for girls or boys attending single-sex schools compared to their mixed-schooling peers,” he continued.

The research was a joint project between Dr Flannery’s and Professor José Clavel of the University of Murcia in Spain, and has been published in the British Educational Research Journal.

The study titled, ‘Single-sex schooling, gender and education performance’, is based on a sample of around 5,000 15-year-olds from 2018’s Irish wave of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) dataset.

PISA looks at students’ performance in applying what they know in maths, reading and science, and includes an extensive amount of information about each student, and the school they attend.

An examination of PISA raw data for Ireland highlights significant gaps in outcomes in reading, science, and maths, with pupils in single-sex schools performing better.

However, once factors such as socio-economic background of the student have been taken into account, the quality of teaching material available to each secondary institution, and whether the school is disadvantaged, the gaps become insignificant.

“Our analysis shows no evidence of an academic advantage to attending a single-sex school for boys or girls in Ireland,” said Dr Flannery.

The differences in raw scores according to the professor seemed to be driven by what is known as ‘selection effects’.

“In other words, children in single-sex schools tend to come from households with higher socio-economic backgrounds who tend to perform better in school in any case,” he outlined.

'No academic advantage' from single-sex schools, finds University of Limerick study

The research involving almost 5,000 Irish teenagers found performance of girls and boys was similar regardless of whether their school was mixed or single-sex:https://t.co/qCe3oLYdol#Research pic.twitter.com/D74OTKCPTe

— University Of Limerick (@UL) February 22, 2023

Currently, almost one-third of Irish teenagers are in single-sex second-level schools, most of these under Catholic patronage.

The new study found that most of these tend to be urban-based, and struggles less with staff shortages, higher student-to-staff ratios and higher levels of parental engagement, whilst less likely to be disadvantaged.

The PISA data for Ireland also showed that girls in single-sex schools had the highest average socio-economic status.

Further research indicates how students in single-sex schools are more likely to be in a school which was selected by their parents, and that those from higher professional backgrounds are more likely to be attending schools outside their locality than those from other social classes.

“This implies some degree of social gradient in the social mix of single-sex schools versus other school types,” the research outlines.

The debate of single-sex versus mixed-sex schooling has not only been widely contested within Ireland, but outside of it too, with Dr Flannery suggesting the high ratio of secondary students attending a single-sex school provided an interesting setting for exploring the outcomes.

These findings closely align with the University College Dublin’s recent research that concluded fee-charging schools did not significantly increase a student’s prospects of getting into a high-points university course.

This study, which was led by Dr Michael O’Connell of the UCD School of Psychology, concluded that the achievement of better grades is associated with the student’s own ability.