From the Principal Dr Geoffrey Shaw - Principal
ALL Saints' College Principal Or Geoffrey Shaw will spend the first two months of 2009 in the USA (see page 16). He will examine research on co-education and work with the Heads of several major US private schools, discussing programs which can maximise the learning effectiveness of co-educational schools. Here, he reflects on co-education in Pertn.
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ONE of the common educational debates, one which obviously is of importance to us at All Saints' College, is over the comparative effectiveness of co-education and singlegender schooling. It is a curious situation that some Perth parents who are considering sending their children to All Saints' occasionally see our being co-educational as a peculiarity or even as a disadvantage. The schools they consider as their other options are all-boy or all-girl schools and they assume these provide a higher quality of education. This is a perspective I encounter from time to time when I interview prospective families, and some of our College parents have reported encountering it among their friends outside the All Saints' community. I believe there is a simple historical explanation for this: the private schools which have long-standing reputations in Perth are the traditional single-gender schools; these were established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and were based on old models of the English, boys' "public schools", and the separate set of schools founded to educate, or finish, "young ladies". All Saints' appeared on the scene decades after the foundation of these traditional Perth schools which had since formed two distinct
and easily identified groups through their sporting associations. Because we belong to a different historical period and are not a member of their sporting associations, we are separate. We are now widely regarded as a school of comparable quality but it has taken considerable effort for us to be viewed in that way, and the short-hand thinking still sometimes omits us when quality is equated with membership of the boys' or girls' school sporting associations. This sort of short-hand judgment is much rarer in other Australian states or England or the USA, where larger numbers of high-quality co-educational schools are present as an expected part of the range of choices. Is there any more substantial, thoroughlyresearched basis on which to compare the quality of the two styles of school? There is no accepted research showing that either boys or girls achieve more highly in either single-sex or mixed schools. With that furphy failing to find a supporting foundation, when the educational merits of the two forms of schooling are considered now, some people refer to differences in the ways boys and girls learn. In her very important 2004 book, Beyond the Great Divide, Judith Gill considered the
