Mixed or Single-sex School? Volume 2

Some Social Aspects

R. R. Dale

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138042537
• eBook ISBN: 9781351701341
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Originally published in 1971. This second volume in this three-part set examines specific aspects of social relationships within the school and demonstrates that co-educational and single-sex schools are fundamentally different communities. These volumes examine in detail the social and psychosocial differences between co-educational and single-sex schools. This volume provides a wealth of evidence from pupils and ex-pupils about such aspects as discipline, bullying, happiness, anxiety and attitudes to sex.

1

The investigations

The research on which this volume is based is derived from those enquiries which were described fully in Chapter I of the first volume of the series.¹ The present chapter repeats in a shortened version the account of the procedures and samples in order to make this book independent of the earlier volume, but some changes are made to bring the chapter more into relevance with the new material. However, those readers who do not wish to bother with these details are urged to turn at once to Chapter 2, where the account of the results begins.

This book examines the attitudes of pupils and ex-pupils towards their lives in co-educational or single-sex secondary schools, including their attitudes towards their fellow-pupils. The most important part of the research is probably that which assesses the reactions to school life of those pupils who had experience in both single-sex and co-educational schools. There is an exploration over a wide field of attitudes, rather than a study of one attitude in depth, a choice deliberately made because it seemed appropriate to a survey of unknown territory. The size of the field dictated the technique of research. Attitude scales, in which a large number of questions are asked on a single attitude, were considered inappropriate because of the number of attitudes investigated. This seemed to call for a questionnaire approach, but some of the virtues of the attitude scale were added by making each question in itself a miniature scale. For example, ex-pupils were asked, ‘Was your life in school Very happy/Happy/Jogging along/Rather unhappy/Very unhappy?’ and they could choose their answer from any one of these points of a linear scale. Throughout the book these judgments are called estimates. An important addition was that the principal questions were usually followed by a few blank lines on which respondents were invited to state reasons for their answer. These are termed the comments or free responses. They proved to be a rich source of additional information, though time-consuming in analysis. They deepened the understanding of the estimates made, gave an excellent idea of the reliability and seriousness of the answers and also enabled the respondents to protest against any ambiguity or looseness in the question and to qualify their estimates. The evidence derived from these comments, and also from the estimates, in spite of its limitations, has implications for education which reach far beyond the comparison of co-educational and single-sex schools.

The request for these comments or free responses was a technique common to most of the surveys, and the method by which quotations were selected from them is described now to avoid repetition. For those items regarded as the most important the number of replies selected from each category of comment was kept in proportion to the total for that category, except where this would have produced such a small number of comments that they would have been inadequate to illustrate the argument. The co-educational and single-sex samples were always treated alike unless this procedure gave inadequate illustration to the arguments for single-sex schools. Sometimes, however, selection of comments in proportion to the total was considered unnecessary, the classified Tables themselves having set out the proportions of responses in the various sections and whether they were favourable to co-education or not. The responses were then chosen because of their interest, their humour or their contribution towards an insight into the minds of the pupils. Whatever the procedure is, this is clearly stated to avoid giving a wrong impression. A method considered and rejected was selection of the responses randomly; this would have been more scientific but it would have produced a much less interesting book and almost certainly a less useful one.

Not all the survey procedures are described fully in the following section; those which are of a minor character are given as they arise in the text, and one which affects only one chapter is given in that place. The others are outlined here to avoid the repetition that might have been necessary where the findings of an enquiry are scattered through many chapters. The investigations are divided into those concerning ex-pupils and those concerning pupils, but when they examine the same topic, which is quite frequently, the results are assessed together in the same chapter.

The ex-pupils

The three surveys which come under this heading used as subjects students who were training to be teachers. Before describing each of them in detail it is convenient to mention some important aspects of the samples which are common to all three enquiries.¹

The use of student-teachers has both advantages and disadvantages. The subjects are adult, interested in education, responsible and have a wider experience of schools than have other ex-pupils of similar age. The use of the same type of persons as representatives of both co-educational and single-sex schools also helps to put the two kinds of school on an equal footing. A further safeguard is that one of the surveys consisted only of ex-pupils who had attended both a co-educational and a single-sex grammar (or technical) school. On the other hand certain disadvantages are present. The student-teachers cannot be said with certainty to represent all types of grammar school ex-pupils, though the differences in attitudes between the co-educated and single-sex educated ex-pupils of the research samples are so marked as to make it seem unlikely that these would disappear or even be reversed if the attitudes of the remainder of the ex-pupils were ascertained. If the student-teacher ex-pupils consider prefects in single-sex schools to be much more officious than those in co-educational schools, it seems highly improbable that the other ex-pupils would find no such difference. Some of these results also receive support from a small-scale investigation among sixth-formers, who are at least a wider cross-section of the ex-pupils than are the student-teachers.

In the previous volume it was shown that the high proportion of co-educational colleges in the Second College survey had no undue influence on the estimates, nor did the college courses in general (including teaching practice) reverse the preference of more than a negligible number of students for co-educational or single-sex schools. Though the theoretical preference of an appreciable number of ex-pupils for co-education was strengthened by their college experience, this influence is likely to have been much less when the ex-pupils were asked specific questions about their experience in the schools they attended; for example, ‘Do you think the school’s concern with the out-of-school conduct of the pupils was excessive?’ This opinion receives some support from the estimates of those ex-pupils (rather more than half the men and slightly less than half the women) who said their college course had made ‘no change’ in their attitude. Yet one will await with some interest results obtained from entirely different samples.

We now turn to the description of the surveys. The questionnaires themselves, however, are given in Appendix 1.

(i) The First College survey

This was a first, exploratory survey, made to see whether there appeared to be a prima facie case for investigation. As it concerns only Chapter 11 it is described there.

(ii) The Second College survey

The Second College survey used a more detailed questionnaire than that of the First College survey, covering a number of the points at issue between the opposing schools of thought. It was sent to those colleges of education and university departments of education that were willing to co-operate, with the request that it should be administered to students in large groups. Sixteen colleges and five departments agreed, and although one college and one department failed to observe the group administration the return of forms was almost 100 per cent. The students were limited to those who had attended secondary grammar or technical or comprehensive schools ; if they had attended such schools for less than one year they were removed from the sample. Almost all had been day pupils and no separate analysis was made for boarders. In order to encourage students to write frankly and to minimize possible external pressure or undue influence, replies were made private and anonymous and directions about this were issued to the questionnaire administrators. Provision was made for those who had attended more than one school of either type. Questions were designed to make a first exploration into such aspects as happiness in school, the state of pupil-teacher relationships, type of school preferred, effect of school life on relations with the opposite sex, attitude to the opposite sex in general, marriage and parenthood, and, for minor reasons, attitude to games and (for women) domestic subjects. As exactly the same questions were asked about the co-educational and the single-sex school the possibility of bias in the questions was reduced. Students were asked to make judgments by means of a five-point scale, e.g. Very happy/Happy/Jogging along/Unhappy/Very unhappy. Requests were also made for free comments in relation to six of the more important questions. The percentage of ex-pupils who selected each value was calculated, and the distributions for co-educated and single-sex educated were compared by the Chi-square test.

For a representative part of the sample, data were secured on parental occupation. Almost 2,000 students participated, scattered throughout England and Wales, so the replies must express opinions about many hundreds of secondary schools (excluding secondary modern). Nine of the colleges were mixed, three were for men and three for women, the proportion of students from mixed colleges being twice those from single-sex colleges. There was no Roman Catholic college and such students are therefore under-represented. The percentage of College of Education students in the sample at 81.7 is only slightly smaller than the 85 per cent in the whole student-teacher population, taking as a basis the number of trainees entering each year.

The written replies again showed that the students had a highly responsible attitude to the investigation. The previous discussion about college samples applies to this inquiry, notably that the college course and experience would not be expected to create any appreciable bias which would influence the comparison between co-educational and single-sex schools, as most of the questions were on the life of the school the students had attended.

(iii) The Third College (‘Both schools’) survey (1965–6)

The Second College survey suffered from the disadvantage that the great majority of respondents had attended only one type of grammar school. At the time this survey was made the number of students who had been pupils at both a co-educational and a single-sex grammar or technical school would probably have been too small to have formed a satisfactory sample, but the recent reorganization of secondary education has been increasing these numbers appreciably.¹

As its name implies, this third (‘Both schools’) survey therefore consisted of an inquiry among ex-pupils who had attended both a mixed and a single-sex secondary school, excluding those from secondary modern schools because in that case other unwanted variables would have been brought into action, such as comparative prestige, equipment, building and staffing. The respondents were students in Colleges of Education, and are not therefore a representative sample of all ex-pupils of these schools. We wrote to 169 colleges and received offers of co-operation and completed forms from 71, distributed in random fashion all over England and Wales; of these, 5 were men’s colleges (out of 10), 29 were women’s colleges (out of 72) and 37 were mixed (out of 88). These figures show no heavy imbalance and for reasons already stated it was not considered necessary to persist until a similar proportion of each type of college was reached. There was, however, through no fault of our own, an under-representation of Catholic colleges (one men’s and two women’s out of two men’s, eight women’s and one mixed), and the number of students from each of these colleges was also low (20 in all). This last fact may be due to Catholic families tending to be of lower social class and therefore obtaining a low percentage of grammar school places; another reason may be that Catholic families do not move about the country from one school to another as much as Protestant families. To put the matter into proper perspective, the addition of merely one R.C. women’s college—and possibly the mixed for good measure—would correct the slight imbalance. Even if the missing R.C. students were to be appreciably different in their judgments compared with Protestant students (and the differences shown by the 20 in the sample are in fact heavily in favour of mixed schools), the impact of their small numbers on the average ‘scores’ of the 795 respondents (620 women and 175 men) would indeed be negligible. A corrective factor is that many Catholic students attend non-Catholic colleges.

Colleges were asked to administer the questionnaire (see Appendix 1) to the students in large groups under examination conditions, with emphasis on anonymity, privacy and the great importance of the work. To minimize undue influences in any direction the student was asked to place his completed form in an envelope and seal it before handing it in. Most of the colleges observed the request for group administration and returned all the forms completed. A few distributed the forms to individual students and found it administratively too difficult to ensure that each student obtained one and then to collect it when completed. With the many calls on the time of the staff this is understandable and thanks are certainly due for the high degree of co-operation obtained. The number of ‘abstentions’ is, however, not definitely known, but it would be so small as to have no material effect on the comparison of the two types of school, even if the nature of the replies had been different, and no reason can be given why they should differ. Any ‘abstention’ would be an abstention from both the mixed and the single-sex school statistics, because the student attended at least one of each.

It will be seen that the first part of the questionnaire (in Appendix 1) asks for judgments relating to the co-educational school attended, and the second ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The investigations
• 2 Happiness in school: (a) the estimates
• 3 Happiness in school: (b) the free responses
• 4 School atmosphere
• 5 Inter-pupil relationship
• 6 Bullying and related aspects
• 7 Life in school I
• 8 Life in school II
• 9 Unhappy pupils
• 10 Out-of-school conduct
• 11 School preference
• 12 Attitude to the opposite sex
• 13 Social relationships between boys and girls
• 14 Comparative attitude to sex
• 15 Some sociological questions
• 16 Preparation for the adult world
• 17 Marriage
• 18 Anxiety about school
• 19 Neuroticism and introversion-extroversion
• 20 The amalgamated schools
• 21 Conclusion
• Appendix 1 The questionnaires
• Appendix 2 Additional tables
• Bibliography
• Index