A new report from the Girls’ Day School Trust (GDST) has called upon co-educational schools to review and improve how girls are being educated.

The report ‘Designing the Future of Girls’ Education,’ has been created by specialists, researchers, teachers, pupils and campaigners, offers advice for schools about unlocking girls’ potential through a framework of practical steps.

Key features if the report include:

Girls in the classroom

All those involved in education are urged to do everything they can in the classroom to close the gap in authority and confidence between boys and girls. Contributors provide accounts of how they encourage girls to find their voice and then use it with conviction and courage. Contributors to the report emphasise discussion and collaboration, in tandem with embracing complexity and failure, as paramount to enabling girls to learn without limits.

The curriculum and co-curriculum

The report explores the importance of delivering a curriculum and co-curriculum that removes barriers, breaks stereotypes and develops essential skills for girls. The report explains why educators must remove barriers to STEM subjects and sport participation for girls during their time at school. It goes on to explore the urgent need to provide girls with the right conditions and opportunities to develop their leadership skills, financial literacy and entrepreneurial intentions.

Culture

The importance of forming an unwavering girl-focused mission acts as a springboard for another recommendation, which explores how school culture can be used to deliver better outcomes for girls. This emphasises why it’s important to discuss, openly, the challenges girls will face in their lives and careers. Contributors to the report discuss the importance of finding internal and external role models for girls, with particular emphasis on teachers as role models.

GDST’s chief executive Cheryl Giovannoni said: “Girls’ schools play a critical role in preparing girls for the real world, and work hard to close gender gaps in areas such as STEM, sports participation and leadership positions. The girls and young women in co-ed schools also deserve to learn the necessary skills to navigate a world that is still characterised by structural inequalities and personal prejudices. They need to learn how to challenge and influence authority, find effective forms of self-promotion, and to pursue a less-prescribed career path. I hope these new insights will spark action for schools to educate the next generation of girls with tried and tested principles that will enable them to achieve their full potential.”

Dr Kevin Stannard, director of innovation and learning at GDST, added: “Decades of independent research has shown that girls behave differently in the presence of boys, often to their own detriment. Co-ed educational environments create unintended constraints on, inter alia, girls’ academic risk taking, their assessment of their own abilities and their subject choices. All-girls’ schools show just how artificial those constraints are, and what can be achieved when they are removed. Our own research shows just how that difference is realised, and the contributory factors include not just what goes on in the classroom, and what options are made inviting and accessible in the curriculum; it extends to the whole ecology of a school. Our aim is to use our expertise in educating girls in dedicated settings, to identify those factors that might still be applied even in co-ed settings, in order to ensure that girls are no longer held up or held back from realising their potential, wherever they go to school.”

To request the report click here