Freedom from stereotyping John Doy, Head of Sixth Form, Mayfield School, celebrates an inspiring environment One of the main arguments for an all-girls’ education is the freedom from the stereotyping that seems to creep in to any mixed environment. At A Level the statistics are quite startling. For example, a girl at a GSA school (Girls School Association, of which Mayfield is a member) is 75% more likely to take Maths at A Level, 70% more likely to take Chemistry, and two and a half times more likely to take Physics, all subjects traditionally considered as ‘hard’, male-oriented subjects. This is certainly something I have witnessed at Mayfield – Maths and the Sciences are far and away our most popular subjects at A Level (as an English graduate I concede this with a slightly heavy heart) and, if I look at our latest batch of university hopefuls, almost half of the cohort of 60 are going on
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to study Maths or Science based courses: we have engineers, physicists, chemists, earth and planetary scientists, medics, vets all going on to develop their skills in higher education. It is genuinely exciting to see young women fired up about science and technology and my experience tells me it is because they have been given the space to develop these interests in an environment that by its very nature dispenses with any kind of concept of boys’ or girls’ subjects. Engaging with these kind of statistics and thinking in this way, however, always seems, to me at least, to court a kind of counter-factual approach to the individual narratives of the students involved. The nature of time and space dictates that we can never know precisely which
