Dear Mr Cairns,

I am writing to express my deep disappointment regarding your recent comments about single-sex education producing young women who are unable to communicate with men. As someone who attended an independent single-sex school, perhaps I am more than a little biased in writing to you, but I cannot help but feel that you are also a little biased in your comments, as the male headmaster of a co-educational school who has made an op-ed piece into a pleasant advertisement for Brighton College.

If nothing else, I hope that this letter might persuade you that, despite my eight years of single sex education, I am somehow still capable of "meaningfully convers[ing] and communicat[ing]" with those of the opposite gender.

It may come as a surprise to you to hear that during my education, I was not committed to a locked down institution, forced to sign a contract forbidding me from socialising with boys and men, or given a chastity belt as part of the uniform code. On the contrary, I had male friends and continued to have a brother, male cousins and relatives, as well as dating, both casually and seriously, throughout my schooling.

Furthermore, my school – like many other single sex institutions – had a good relationship with its brother school, and many activities were co-educational. We produced theatrical shows, participated in the Combined Cadet Force and trekked through North Wales for our Duke of Edinburgh awards together, to name a few such activities. These were fantastic opportunities to work together, understand our mutual strengths and weaknesses, and forge firm friendships. Your claim that it is only an ideal of co-ed life that "girls admire the boys who dance, sing or act, and so, therefore, do the boys" is in no way exclusive to co-educational schooling.

I find it particularly interesting that you do not extrapolate your logic to boys’ schools, but focus only on girls being unprepared and unable to speak to the opposite gender through single-sex schooling. Do you believe that, by your own logic, boys will be deprived of the chance to socialise with girls and thus be incapable to work alongside them? Or are boys born with an innate understanding of how to work alongside and with women, and this is a feminine deficiency which must be corrected? Is it the fault of the female "emotional intensity" you speak of as diluted by male presence that frazzles our brain circuits – because, of course, boys are not also undergoing hormonal changes that could contribute to emotional upheaval?

You write that your female students would make a face that "would say it all" when asked if the boys in their classrooms held them back academically. I hope that you will forgive me for saying that my face when I read your op-ed piece would similarly ‘say it all’ – in fact, it would provide enough material for a thousand letters, far longer than this one. Or perhaps this is just my natural female "emotional intensity", which would do well to be diluted with a male presence.

I would be among the first to admit that single-sex schooling has its flaws – particularly among LGBT+ students whose identities are rarely acknowledged, let alone incorporated into sex education curricula or the wider context of the school. And yet I cannot help but be frustrated by your piece which seems to trot out so many classic stereotypes about all-girls’ education, such as their existence as high-security nunneries pervaded by emotional hysteria at all times, or that girls lack "kindness" in their interpersonal relationships, or that highly accomplished girls who obtain "a clutch of A*s and a first class degree" spontaneously combust whenever they see a man.

It pains me to write such a hostile letter to you, considering that other comments you have made about GCSE formulaic mark schemes penalizing brighter students or tackling homophobia in schools seem broadly reasonable. I am, however, very much disappointed to read a puff-piece advertising your school, which hides in the guise of a conglomeration of assumptions, stereotypes and a single citation. I am certain that if the pupils of single sex schools could speak to you there would be a wealth of anecdotes about the confidence instilled within them by their education, as well as some healthy disdain for their particular experience of schooling, which all students carry with them. What a shame, then, that they may never gain the ability to communicate with you.

               

With best wishes,

Sarah Sheard