Does keeping boys and girls apart at school make for a better education? Frank McGinty, Raisingkids' guest expert, considers the pros and cons of single-sex schooling.

Raisingkids member's problem
I am looking into the advantages of the schools in my area. Do you consider single-sex schools to produce better results?

Frank McGinty's advice
Having taught in an all-boys, an all-girls and in mixed schools, my experience would suggest that this is the case for the majority of pupils. Strange things start to happen to boys and girls in their teens. Hormonal changes in girls tend to make them very 'body-conscious' and this can be a trying and threatening period for many.

They can become inhibited or at least not as pro-active in class as they might be if there were no boys present. On the other hand, some girls become very 'boy-conscious'. Both reactions have obvious implications for their progress.

Boys, too, respond to hormonal changes and the surge of testosterone can make many of them not so much 'body-conscious' as 'image-conscious'. Many boys like to play to the gallery but if the gallery has no beautiful girls, their ardour is somewhat dampened. And that can only be good for their concentration. School records show that in single-sex schools girls tend to opt much more for subjects that are, I'm sorry to say, still considered a male preserve, such as the sciences and technical subjects, and they tend to do well in them. And boys tend to do better in general in all-boys schools, possibly because there are fewer 'distractions'.

Single-sex education doesn't tend to affect young people's ability to relate to the opposite sex. Indeed, most children consider the concept 'laughable'. You can see their point; there are 168 hours in a week and only 35 of these are spent in school. Consider, too, the abundant school holidays and the fact that, nowadays, young people have many more opportunities to meet and socialise than ever before. Some local authorities are so impressed by the world-wide body of evidence favouring single-sex schooling that they are coming up with a compromise: girls and boys attend the same school but are taught in separate classes. Perhaps this is a way forward.

But let's not lose sight of the fact that many young people will do well no matter where they are. And there are many excellent co-educational schools the length and breadth of the country.