The Making of Her: Why School Matters

What are days for?

Days are where we live.

They come, they wake us

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:

Where can we live but days?[1] (#litres_trial_promo)

In a school, the regular set pattern of each day is often punctuated and symbolised by the ringing of bells for lessons and break time. Some might think this restrictive: imagine being an adult and still having your day determined by a bell every half an hour or so. In my experience, as a teacher, it’s a way of making sure you have the most exceptionally productive day. You might long for a precious free period to get your marking done, but it isn’t possible to find you’ve wasted over half an hour noodling around on your phone if you have twenty eager faces in front of you ready to discover the Russian language and you only have that particular thirty-five minutes in which to help them do so. A class cannot be kept waiting! And again, there is comfort in the familiar regularity. We conducted an experiment at St Paul’s to see whether to change the shape of the school day, but after a lengthy and highly consultative process, we decided more or less to keep things as they were. There was something in the rhythm and pattern that seemed balanced, as if we were biologically adapted: the changed day felt by turns piecemeal and baggy, lacking in proper flow – just wrong, somehow.

Living to the discipline of the academic year, week and day has its frustrations and constraints. At the same time, it provides a familiar rhythm from which we can draw confidence, security and comfort. I believe that the pattern and structure which we become used to at school meets a more fundamental and lifelong human need: to feel ourselves located, grounded, placed in relation to the world around us. To lack that – and sometimes in life if we are untethered from our moorings and face periods of confusion or loss – produces a feeling very like the homesickness we might recall from childhood. In a world of expanding possibilities and greater uncertainty we are fortunate that in schools, our children’s lives still have this regular pattern: its cycle of peaks and troughs of concentration, anticipated special days and traditional events, giving the school year a safe and familiar rhythm. And just as a school encourages ambition and challenges its pupils to take intellectual risks and aim high, it balances this with a longer perspective, with patience and compassion. If you mess things up, there will be a chance to start again: next half, next term, next year.

CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_963a8f5e-d5f3-57dc-93d3-07f3d3db2a44)

October (#ulink_963a8f5e-d5f3-57dc-93d3-07f3d3db2a44)

A question of gender – still vindicating the rights of women? (#ulink_963a8f5e-d5f3-57dc-93d3-07f3d3db2a44)

The leaves are turning, the wind is gusting and I arrive in the office having lost yet another umbrella. As October starts, the academic year is well underway, corridors are humming with conversation and everyone is settling into the familiar rhythm of the term. In the admissions department, thoughts are already turning to next academic year, this being the month of open days for families considering applying to the school, so it’s time to brush up my speech for the prospective parents. It’s also the annual service in St Paul’s Cathedral, known as Colet Day, held jointly with St Paul’s Boys’ School, where each year we celebrate our foundation. Two reasons for me to be reflecting on John Colet’s vision for education, the case for single-sex schools, the education of girls in particular and what happens when girls will not be girls: in other words, the wider issue of gender identity schools are facing today.

Dean of St Paul’s, member of the Worshipful Company of Mercers and pioneering educationalist, John Colet used the fortune he inherited from his father to found St Paul’s boys’ school in 1509. At this time, the height of the Renaissance in England, Colet counted among his friends the great Dutch scholar Erasmus, who assisted both with writing textbooks and a Latin grammar for the school and with appointing staff. Colet also knew Thomas More, another progressive thinker and advocate of the education of women – his own daughter Margaret Roper becoming a distinguished classical scholar and translator. Amongst the early high masters of St Paul’s was Richard Mulcaster, appointed in 1596, who wrote extensively on education, advocating proper training for teachers and the development of a curriculum determined by aptitude rather than age. He too thought women should have access to formal education, including attending university. Another contemporary, Robert Ascham, became tutor to Queen Elizabeth I and was the author of The Scholemaster, published in 1570 after his death and which, as well as being a treatise on how to teach Latin prose composition, explored the psychology of learning and the need to educate the whole person. These were forward-thinking men. Widely travelled himself, Colet believed that education generally and his school in particular should be for the children ‘of all countres and nacions indifferently’ and that it should, as the humanists of the Renaissance believed, concentrate on developing the life of the mind through the study of Latin and Greek and the scholarship of antiquity, all of this becoming more achievable with the advent of printing. Colet was ambitious for his school as an institution of learning but also as an instrument of social change. Given this and the cultural climate in which the school was founded – a time of burgeoning exploration, discovery and scholarship – it is perhaps surprising that it took another 400 years for the Mercers’ Company to establish a girls’ school. But in 1904 they did, and as I was fond of telling prospective parents, by the early twenty-first century, we had more than made up for the time lost, the two schools by then equally established and known for their breadth of education and academic excellence. As a result of a developing bursary programme, they were also no longer just the preserve of the wealthy, but educating a widening range of bright children from across London, reflecting the cultural diversity of a capital city.

To the contemporary Paulina, with her characteristic wit and taste for unexpected juxtapositions, John Colet is part embodiment of her love of tradition and part teen icon. Colet’s unblinking black bust, staring straight out and dressed in austere sixteenth-century clericals, presiding over the long, black-and-white chequered corridor known as ‘The Marble’, often appears in the background of selfies, with added sunglasses or perhaps a Father Christmas hat. ‘John Colet rocks!’ the girls exclaim with affectionate irreverence. And Colet’s legacy is extraordinarily alive in the two schools today, where his vision finds fresh and contemporary expression. I feel sure that the addition of the girls’ school is something of which he would have wholeheartedly approved.

Colet Day itself is a high point in the calendar anticipated with great excitement. The vast cave of St Paul’s Cathedral with its unnerving acoustic (open your mouth and you think you are singing on your own – very disconcerting) is packed with proud parents and in the front rows, under the echoing dome, the two schools sit, flanked by their tutors. A monumental rustling as the organ swells and the service begins, the clergy processing and everyone rising to their feet, anticipating the ritual that is to come. Moving to the lectern to speak my allotted words (the high master and high mistress alternate their lines each year, in careful observance of equality) I wonder again about the respective characters of these two schools, with their brother and sister relationship of familial closeness and sibling rivalry, and whether one day they will become one. For the time being, Colet Day brings the two schools together in symbolic unity and the question dissolves unspoken in the air.

Whatever form schools take in the future, the length of time it has taken us to take seriously the education of girls must remain one of history’s great opportunity costs. We can reflect that despite the efforts of early pioneers, for all the women who have risen to prominence in the world, there are so many more whose capability and contribution have rested either unsung, unrealised or unfulfilled. That’s half the potential of any single generation. And when we talk about the education of women today, even though so much progress has been made, there is still always an underlying sense that we are righting a wrong, catching up with something which has been given insufficient importance and which now therefore needs special explanation or attention. As part of this, we are also still working out how women fit into the public, professional world and therefore to what kinds of roles they are best suited: are they bringing something different from men to strategy, to leadership, to getting things done? Should the fact of your gender be celebrated or ignored? While the debate continues, at school level the emphasis is overwhelmingly on integration. Worldwide, the modern default school model that is regarded as more ‘natural’ is not single-sex education but having boys and girls learning alongside one another in a co-educational setting. Single-sex schools might have been all right a hundred years ago, when girls were only just progressing from being taught refined accomplishments by governesses in the safe and sequestered setting of their homes, but that time has passed. This is the twenty-first century. Aren’t single-sex schools just an anachronism, encouraging outdated ways of thinking and walking out of step with the real world?

This is a question that cannot be sidestepped with sentimental appeals to custom and tradition. If single-sex education is to have a future, for girls or indeed for boys, it has to be not merely nice, but necessary. This means being based on something more than a nostalgic affection for how things used to be when time stood still and a school was its own little citadel, shut off from the real world like Hogwarts or St Trinian’s. Boys’ schools, perhaps because many are so long established, have not often felt the need to explain overtly the advantages they offer boys. Why would you, if you’ve been going strong for hundreds of years and produced many of the people (men) who have been the opinion formers and leaders of their day? And perhaps too with the prevailing attention being on addressing the needs of women, it hasn’t been easy for them to do so. As more and more boys’ schools admit girls to buttress their finances and academic profile, and boys-only establishments become a rarity, a few are now advancing their unique proposition with more clarity. Girls’ schools on the other hand have been in campaign mode from the start: the only way to educate girls properly is to educate girls only. But is it? Any movement championed by women for women faces challenges, not least having to weather being caricatured by some as shrill, desperate, unfeminine or just downright hoydenish – think of the suffragettes. At the same time advocates for girls’ schools have not always helped themselves by choosing the most robust and persuasive grounds on which to prevail. I’m a passionate believer myself in women’s education and empowerment, but not every argument for having girls educated separately is necessarily convincing and we do ourselves no good by appearing to grasp any new ‘proof’ instrumental to our cause.

I’m particularly dubious, for example, about there being a scientific, biological justification for girls’ schools. In a no doubt well-intentioned attempt to ensure their immortality, a body of so-called ‘science’ has developed arguing that girls need to be taught separately because they are neurologically different – they literally have differently wired brains and therefore it follows that they require teaching in special ways that would be wasted on boys but can make differently wired girls flourish. We can call this the ‘nature’ argument. A few years ago, for example, advocates of girls’ schools latched with great enthusiasm onto the work of the American psychologist JoAnn Deak and her book Girls Will Be Girls. Here was the ‘proof’ the girls’ school movement had been looking for. Along with a great deal of very sensible and pragmatic advice about the raising of daughters, Deak – renowned, as the cover blurb says, for her knowledge of ‘what makes girls tick’ – makes this claim: ‘brain research now clearly shows that the structure of the male and female brain is different at birth, apparently the result of oestrogen or testosterone shaping it in utero. In other words, female brains have more neurons in certain areas than male brains as a result of having more estrogen bathing them during fetal development.’[1] (#litres_trial_promo) Bathed in oestrogen in the womb, the female brain also has a predisposition for effectiveness in certain cognitive areas: language facility, auditory skills, fine motor skills and sequential/detailed-thinking. Deak goes on to argue that the amygdala, the emotional centre of the brain, is especially sensitive in females, making them experience more frequent and more intense emotions. Given the biologically different nature of the male and female brains, both genders, she advises, need to spend time on activities that are counter to their neurological grain. To grow into properly balanced individuals, little girls should spend more time with building blocks and little boys in the drawing corner, and so on. You can see at once how its central point – that girls are wired differently – could be used by advocates of girls’ schools to propose an entire curriculum and approach to learning that would be uniquely girl-centred, justified – indeed essential – because the science says they need it.

Not everyone is so convinced by this correlation. The idea that men and women are biologically different in more ways than the obvious is explored with some vigour by Cordelia Fine in her wonderfully acerbic book, Delusions of Gender. The clue is in the title: Fine ruthlessly demolishes what she sees as the dubious scientific proofs of the neurological differences between men and women and the so-called male and female brains. Distinguishing between the brain as a biological structure and the more complex notion of the mind, and surveying hundreds of years’ worth of evidence which has been used to build the concept of ‘neurosexism’, she points to the fact that in a world where we love referencing gender differences and learn to do so from very early childhood, time and time again those differences are seen to be derived as much – or more – from our own preconceptions, born of social customs about the characteristics of gender, as from any actual physiological evidence. In other words, for her it’s about nurture rather than nature.

Fine argues that men and women behave and perform certain tasks differently, and might presumably also learn differently, not so much because of any intrinsic neurological difference but because they are fulfilling a social expectation. Society and the self thus become reciprocally defining – the one informs and reinforces the other. Here for example is what she has to say about housework and who does it:

In families with children in which both spouses work full time, women do about twice as much childcare and housework as men – the notorious ‘second shift’ … You might think that, even if this isn’t quite fair, it’s nonetheless rational. When one person earns more than the other then he (most likely) enjoys greater bargaining power at the trade union negotiations that, for some, become their marriage. Certainly, in line with this unromantic logic, as a woman’s financial contribution approaches that of her husband’s, her housework decreases. It doesn’t actually become quite equitable, you understand. Just less unequal. But only up to the point at which her earnings equal his. After that – when she starts to earn more than him – something very curious starts to happen. The more she earns, the more housework she does …

What on earth could be behind this extraordinary injustice in which she returns home from a hard day at work to run the vacuum cleaner under his well-rested legs? A few popular writers have made some creative suggestions. John Gray, author of the Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus books, has recently made a valiant stab at arguing that performing routine housework chores is actually selectively beneficial to women, including – if not especially – those with demanding jobs. His idea (which to my knowledge has not been empirically tested) is that because the modern woman has removed herself from her traditional home sphere with its babies, children and friends on whom to call with a pot roast, she has dangerously low levels of oxytocin coursing through her blood. (Oxytocin is a mammalian hormone associated with social bonding and social interactions.) Thankfully, however, ‘nurturing oxytocin-producing domestic routine duties like laundry, shopping, cooking and cleaning’ are available in plentiful supply. Phew! Such chores, however, have a very ill effect on men. For them, the priority is testosterone-producing tasks – for without the stimulating rush of that sex hormone, men become little better than limp rags (and not even ones that wipe themselves along the countertops).[2] (#litres_trial_promo)

This fascinating debate will go on, but I’m inclined to agree with Cordelia Fine that the perceived differences in behaviour – and as part of that, learning preferences – are more to do with cultural and social influences than biology. In my experience, generally speaking, there are certain ways in which girls and boys tend to differ in their habits and behaviours. I say tend. Of course I know more about the girls – based on twenty-odd years of leading girls’ schools I can say for example that the girls I have known are often inclined to be self-critical, to be more concerned than their brothers about getting things right first time, to be dutifully good at planning and completing things (which is why they sometimes do better when assessed continuously and less well if taking exams). They are also sensitive to social dynamics and can read the subtext of conversations and behaviours very skilfully. This of course is linked both to why they value and nurture lasting friendships as well as why they are also so much better than boys at bullying. Where boys are inclined just to hit one other, girls can torture one another slowly over weeks using only gestures of their eyebrows, making the behaviour so much harder to detect and pin down. I also know that generalising is dangerous and there are many girls at St Paul’s who would pull me up for stereotyping and say they didn’t recognise themselves here. But actually these are my general observations, based on the 25,000 or so girls I have known. The question for us here is not so much whether they are different from boys – which in my opinion they are – but more how does that difference come about? Are girls born different, or is it that society makes them so because of its expectations? What actually can we say to justify educating girls (and therefore boys) separately?

In many ways, when I hear recent leavers from St Paul’s who are now making their way in professional life talk about their experiences, it is more and more clear to me that girls’ schools are indeed oddly out of step with some of the ‘realities’ of the so-called modern working world. In a well-regarded modern company, for example, a Paulina in her thirties told me recently how she was surprised at having to fend off the unwelcome advances of a more senior male colleague at work who would approach her desk, stand too close and suggest drinks after hours. When I asked why she didn’t tell him to get lost, she replied that as he controlled her promotion prospects and her pay, she had to be very careful. Another told me that when the male staff packed up on Fridays early to go and play football and she asked to join them, she was told that wasn’t how it worked and she might like to go and have a manicure instead. We may be providing a stimulating intellectual experience and nurturing a love of scholarship, but as regards preparation for life and work, our messages – our assumptions – about equality are by some standards hopelessly off-message. Because it turns out that the real world has a long way to go and still needs a great deal of cleaning up.

The disconnect is simple: at a school like St Paul’s (or Queenswood, or Sunny Hill where I was a pupil, or at most girls’ schools I’m aware of), girls learn an instinctive, fundamental confidence that far from being girl specific, has nothing to do with their gender. As one alumna wrote in a survey carried out amongst the 25–35-year-olds who had been to St Paul’s, ‘We commanded respect in our very nature.’ Note that masculine-sounding word ‘commanded’ which she uses without self-consciousness. Paulinas, along with other girls’ school-educated young women, assume that their opinions are of intrinsic interest, and are even happy to revise those opinions, as one inspection report memorably suggested, ‘if convincing evidence is put before them’. They take themselves seriously in the best way: they have never been taught to ‘play nicely’ because they are girls, to assume they will be less talented at science and maths, to defer to male opinion because it is more loudly expressed, or to assume they are being educated to be the wives of top men. If they are articulate, confident and full of opinions (as they tend to be) they do not expect to be treated as if this were unusual and slightly unfeminine, or actually rather admirable, given they are only girls. They enjoy sport, but generally prefer to play it rather than be WAGs on the touchline, watching their brothers and boyfriends play rugby. If the school play is Macbeth, they assume it is not beyond the talents of one of them to play the main part – in fact to play all the parts. In short, they think they can do pretty well anything, because at school, they can.

When they emerge into a workplace and a wider society which rather lags behind in that everything is still pretty much weighted in favour of men, where organisations work according to male tastes, behaviours and preferences, they just don’t get it. One former head girl, who visited St Paul’s to address the students about her career in the decade since leaving, put it this way: ‘I just had no idea that it would be so much more challenging making your career as a woman – at school, it never occurred to us – everything seemed possible.’

Everything seemed possible because it was. Despite some progress, the realities in the so-called ‘wider world’ of unequal pay, unequal promotion prospects and unequal opportunities generally are a continuing concern to everyone who would wish to see society benefiting – equally – from the talents of both men and women. Girls go out into the workplace, full of confidence and capability, and come up against a very different culture: at one extreme, they may be subjected to active prejudice or harassment: being excluded from the Friday afternoon game of football or being pursued by the older boss. But equally disturbing is that experience that some women describe of becoming invisible – their views going unheard or ignored. This was a new idea to me until comparatively recently; I experienced it for the first time myself when attending the conference of a traditionally male-dominated professional organisation. It was a very odd feeling standing in a circle at a drinks reception and feeling like a pane of glass – I could easily have disappeared without anyone noticing. Ah, so this is what they talk about, I thought.

Change is afoot in some quarters, stimulated by the more recent opening up of the question of gender identity. A case in point was the decision in summer 2017 by the then newly appointed (female) artistic director of the Globe Theatre, Michelle Terry, to commit to ‘gender-blind’ casting and a 50/50 split of male and female roles – presumably because, otherwise, men would be getting the lion’s share of the great Shakespearean parts, as they always have done. This is great, but I reflected that in girls’ schools, gender-sighted – rather than gender-blind – casting in drama productions has always ensured that women win not just half, but all the most significant roles, producing generations of practised Macbeths, Hamlets and Henry Vs. It was with some satisfaction that I thought how well prepared these girls’ school-educated actors would be for the new and more empowering approach to casting at the Globe. That even-handedness and neutrality is of course emphasised further when we also see men playing female roles with great brilliance: who can forget Mark Rylance as Olivia in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, for example. Twice as many actors to choose from, twice as many roles to audition for, and it becomes about talent and skill, not about the limitations of gender.

This is all very well, say the detractors of single-sex schools, but the real world is mixed – what’s the point of pretending otherwise? Girls just have to get used to it (which usually means playing nicely to get what they want), so they might as well start at school. Of course education must prepare young people for reality, for society as it is. But it must and can do more: inform and drive the values by which that society is shaped. When all things are equal – my former head girl and I agreed – there may be no further need for single-gender schools. But it seems that despite some excellent work going on to change things (spearheaded by men as well as women) we are still very far from that point. Until then, St Paul’s and its fellow girls’ schools have a vital and influential role to play in ensuring the continued disruption of social norms, so long established that no one even thinks of them as norms. The impetus towards genuine equality cannot be assumed but must be actively led by the talented and confident young women emerging from our gates. Whether girls are wired differently or not really does not matter in the end. Either way, what we’re dealing with is a society that has deep-rooted, often subconscious expectations about women and structures which still limit the contribution they can make. While this is so, we need to educate girls themselves to change that. The case for girls’ schools is as much about preparation for what is to come, as it is about the experience of the here and now.

So what do girls’ schools do differently? Many things. By freeing girls to be themselves so they don’t feel the pressure to conform to predetermined patterns of behaviour, girls’ schools make them more aware of how the media seeks to manipulate them. They train a lens on the problem to make girls think critically. In doing so, they give a framework to evaluate the image of girls in today’s media. Is that the image we want for ourselves? What is the image of female attractiveness to which young women are taught to aspire, for example? Who is shaping it? The insidious encouragement to conform to an absurd idea of beauty embodied by emaciated fashion models has, for example, caused great damage to many young women’s self-esteem and health. We want them to pay attention to this and develop the resilience to reject it, because nobody else is going to in an industry that is making money out of controlling them in this way. When the then editor of Vogue, Alexandra Shulman (a Paulina herself) came to talk to the girls at St Paul’s about her career in fashion journalism, as part of the weekly Friday lecture programme, this highly intelligent, unexpectedly normal-looking woman – chic in a reassuringly rumpled way – was asked by one of the girls what she was doing about the fact that Vogue’s models looked ‘emaciated’. Her magazine was still implicitly promoting the idea that size zero should be every girl’s dream. Her reply was that she saw the problem but this was down to the designers: with clothes being created for tiny figures, fashion editors could only provide tiny models to wear them. I looked at the faces of her difficult-to-impress audience and saw politeness warring with scepticism. Surely this was an issue on which a female-run magazine like Vogue should be making more of a stand? As so often, it was in the post-lecture informal conversations that the most interesting thinking emerged; here about the tension between principles and commercial imperatives – an example of how a girls’ school can give time to foregrounding a subject of special significance for women and enable untrammelled discussion.

Girls’ schools don’t just concentrate on protecting their pupils: they also empower them, confidently promoting a positive ‘can-do’ philosophy. There are no barriers, real or perceived. In terms of academic life, for example, girls do not face unspoken prejudices about subject choices. No one is particularly amazed that you like physics. An enormous amount has been written about why physics is seen as a male subject: more boys take it at A level and beyond so it is seen as inhospitable to girls; it is associated with ‘hard’ skills, such as making circuits, which are typically perceived as isolated and not involved with other people, and hence also ‘unfeminine’. Textbooks also tend to employ traditionally boy-friendly examples, such as car construction. All this is changing gradually, but physics is still a subject where girls are having to fit in. That said, and somewhat to my surprise, I was gratified to learn about a recent international initiative to encourage more young people into engineering through designing, 3D printing and racing Formula One-inspired cars. This scheme, F1 in Schools, has attracted girls in large numbers. Where the girls win out is in the leadership and organisation: the mixed teams have proved more successful in galvanising themselves to raise funds and see through the project than those with boys only, and guess what? The most successful teams of all are those who have a girl as the leader.

The great head start in a girls’ school of course is that the whole curriculum is tailored to their interests. There is no subject area or activity in which girls do not excel or are seen as less apt or capable, or where their capability is seen as somehow surprising or counter-cultural. The scientists are all girls, as are all the mathematicians. The significance of this has been highlighted in a new way now that we are seeing so much more emphasis on capability in the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths) and their link to higher pay. In the summer of 2017, Emma Duncan wrote a very well-researched article for The Times (‘Maths for girls is the way to close the pay gap’) arguing that as the best-paid jobs are in technology and computing, and as boys tend to choose maths more often and do better at it than girls, the answer to closing the pay gap is to have more girls do maths. This recommendation is already long since in place in girls’ schools, where maths and science are not, and never have been, seen as boys’ subjects – where so-called ‘maths anxiety’ isn’t a thing and where girls take up these subjects with all the enthusiasm and confidence you could wish. The Girls’ Schools Association, for example, analyses the take-up of all A-level subjects in its schools against national data, revealing that a girl educated in a GSA school is twice as likely to take maths and two and a half times as likely to take physics as her peers in all other schools taken together. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the numbers applying to read physical sciences, medicine and dentistry at university from GSA schools far outstrip national figures.

As well as giving them unprejudiced access to the curriculum, training women to expect to lead is also a vital part of their education. A girls’ school is fertile ground for the emerging leader as there are so many opportunities to take initiative and show responsibility. In most schools, you can aspire to be form captain – or library monitor, or playground helper, or lunch queue supervisor – from the age of eleven. Later you may graduate to being on the school council or being captain of a sports team. And eventually you may reach the heights of house captain or even prefect. I recently saw a magazine advertising the open day of a distinguished co-ed competitor of ours in London. The photograph showed two smartly dressed senior pupils: a dark-haired boy looking confidently out at the camera and a blonde-haired girl, a little shorter as shown in the picture, looking happily up at him. Here was an image of confident leadership, certainly, but what an unfortunate and presumably unconscious message about gender. In a girls’ school, there is no question of being marginalised: girls hold all the senior leadership positions; all sports teams have a female captain, the first violin in the orchestra is always a girl and, as we’ve seen, girls get the chance to play the leading roles, whatever the school play.

Those youngest girls who joined a month or so ago are getting to know one another, gradually piecing together their independent world of school, letting their parents into it a little, inviting them to watch their netball matches, or describing their teachers perhaps – and all the time keenly observing the older girls and their ways. As they become more confident, they become bolder: the senior girls say to me (as they do every year): ‘We were never as confident as that! I used to be terrified of the girls in the senior school! Yesterday I actually saw a MIV girl roll her eyes when I told her to go to the back of the lunch queue! What’s happened?’ So the new ones are settling in well, I’d think wryly … The desire to lead and the confidence for it is often there from an early age and will receive regular encouragement throughout the school.

Some of my most rewarding times as a head have been spent with these all-female student leadership teams. The moment of appointing the new head girl was always a particular high point, making up as it did for some of the less edifying exchanges that occasionally took place in my office. The girl would arrive having been sent to see me. She must have had a good idea of the reason but could not be quite certain. The door would open and I’d invite her in. A cautious, slightly stilted exchange ensued:

‘Juliet, with the strong support you have received from your peers and from the staff, I’m delighted to invite you to become the next head girl. Of course I mustn’t assume you would want this … What do you say?’

‘Err … thank you very much …?’

‘I mean … you’d like to accept? You’ll be happy to do it?’

‘Totally … Yes!’

And as she struggled to contain her delight in an attempt to convince as being entirely unflappable and mature, we would go on to discuss the practicalities of the announcement, before inviting in and appointing, together, the deputy head girl and team of prefects. By the time they had all been sitting shifting uneasily on my sofas stealing glances at each other with polite restraint for ten minutes, I realised they were about to burst so would release them into the school – hearing, once they thought themselves out of earshot, an explosion of excited mutual congratulation and pent-up laughter.

The novelty over, it was impressive to see how quickly these teams would organise themselves without fuss, choosing the areas to work on during the year and hatching plans: building relationships with the younger year groups to tackle friendship issues or bullying; giving an assembly on phubbing (no, I didn’t know what it meant either: it’s tapping away on your phone when someone is trying to speak to you – a form of ‘snubbing’) or helping with revision strategy for those taking GCSE. I loved to watch the economical efficiency with which they would divide up a problem, assign tasks, get things done. And of course I watched them learning some of the lessons of leadership: the challenges of getting large groups to work together, the difficulty of fronting something your peers don’t necessarily like (‘Look, guys, we have to get to morning registration on time … okay? Just get over it’); the difference between the people who talk and those who get things done. It was with both sympathy and amusement I watched them one year plan their summer ball in liaison with the boys’ school prefect team, which obviously had more pressing things to think about:

‘How’s everything going with the ball?’

‘Well … We met with them [the boys] last week and they hadn’t really done anything since the previous meeting? They kind of just sat around wanting to know if they could bring their plus-ones … Why would we want girls from other schools at our ball? I mean … Then they were just arguing about the price. So we’re going to see some venues this weekend. Do they actually even care if this gets organised?’

Those girls were important role models for the younger students. In a girls’ school, there are also strong role models of female leadership amongst the staff. While there are of course female heads of mixed schools, and even of boys’ schools, male head teachers still predominate, especially in the private sector. In girls’ schools, girls learn that it’s normal for a woman to be in charge and that just as girls aren’t expected to prefer certain subjects, women don’t have to be the ones fulfilling the more traditionally pastoral or caring roles, underlining gender expectations about their skills and preferences. A woman can be pastoral deputy head but she can also be finance director – or indeed take on any other responsibility that interests her without it seeming unusual.

Importantly, it isn’t only girls who need to learn to accept and be at ease with the idea of female leadership – boys do too. Many of the boys growing up in today’s schools will find themselves working for female bosses; if this seems awkward to them, they will be at a disadvantage. The key at school level is for the staff to model relationships of genuine equality and unforced mutual respect. To that end, schools should try to ensure they do not have a predominantly single gender common room but one where roles of responsibility and leadership are held by both men and women. Boys’ schools might look to ensure that they have women in their senior leadership teams (and not only in pastoral posts, where they underscore the idea that women are best at looking after people) and girls’ schools should welcome employing capable men, including in those posts. I found it hugely beneficial and enriching in both the schools I led to have a mixed staff team, adding to the diversity of perspective and demonstrating to the girls that talented men had no difficulty in working with a female leader; to work in a girls’ school was to be a modern man, not to be emasculated and therefore commit career suicide. But perhaps the ultimate female role model was created when a much-admired and well-liked member of the senior leadership team at St Paul’s became the first woman in the 700-year history of Eton College to be appointed as its ‘lower master’, the most senior education post after the headship itself. This was an immensely proud and exciting moment for both schools – proof if it were needed that girls can indeed aspire to do anything.

A girls’ school then is where tomorrow’s women can really flex their capability, expand into all areas of potential interest and revel in learning for its own sake. They can unselfconsciously display their intelligence and curiosity, regardless of those powerful age-determined notions of popularity, attractiveness or peer pressure. Even super-confident Paulinas report that they don’t necessarily do this in a mixed group, where even bright girls can have a tendency to check themselves and to dumb themselves down, especially if hormones are coursing round the system and getting mixed up with the brainpower. Where girls are accustomed to being heard and being valued for who they are, irrespective of what they look like or what they wear (did we have to endure so many cartoons of Theresa May’s animal-print shoes?), they are encouraged in their capacities as confident individuals, leaders and agents of change.

Every school has its own personality which is only partly a matter of whether it educates boys, girls, or both. As the head of a girls’ school with a brother school just across the river, I had ample chance to think about the benefits and drawbacks of single-sex education in relation to two specific institutions. I came to know St Paul’s boys’ school in both a professional and personal capacity, because my son Adam was a pupil there, thriving on the academic stimulation and strong sense of tradition. As a mother I liked the proudly masculine ethos, in which personal responsibility and brotherliness were encouraged through the vertical tutor system, where boys of different ages were grouped together in a form. I saw my son grow in confidence, forging respectful and friendly relationships with his teachers, loving sport and then loving acting even more, learning to look up to older boys and look out for younger ones while building lasting friendships. The ‘Paulines’ I encountered hanging out in my kitchen were likeable, well-grounded young men who knew how to speak to adults in a natural way, neither gauche nor ingratiating. They teased each other mercilessly but were essentially kind and I saw that there was room for gentleness in this version of masculinity. The large school site, the generous rolling pitches (unusual to have so much green space in a London school) where rugby and cricket are passionately played and which lead down to the river, underline an expansive and confident sense of identity. Did I feel that my son was missing out because there were no girls in the school? No. True, he had a sister at home with all the independence of mind a mother could wish, but there was no sense to me – or to him – of something missing. He was busy, stimulated, committed: growing up in a healthy environment that was thoroughly positive and right for him.

The girls’ school I came to know quite differently, both more intimately and less objectively. I loved it as my home and my all-consuming project for eleven years. As you look at the school across Brook Green, it is a fine prospect. Gerald Horsley’s elegant main building of rose-coloured brick and white Portland stone is set off nowadays by elegant green and white landscaping behind the clipped hedges and curled ironwork. It has an orderly grace. As one of the first purpose-built schools for girls, this is where some of the most prominent intellectuals and thinkers of the twentieth century were schooled: former pupils, or Paulinas, as they are called (never Old Paulinas) include Rosalind Franklin, Kathleen Kenyon, Shirley Williams and Jessica Rawson, as well as those who have carved their original careers in other fields, such as actresses Celia Johnson and Rachel Weisz. Its smaller, compact and more urban site and buildings feel scholarly and focussed, the setting for a fierce sense of the pioneering spirit of women’s education, marked by a secular foundation, a commitment to liberal learning and a confident emphasis on independence of mind – the policy of having no uniform is matched by having remarkably few rules. All this can make some of the Paulinas, these latter-day bluestockings with their steady gaze, ripped jeans and dyed hair, somewhat daunting. Known for their quick intellect and an uncompromising mental tenacity, their reputation for asking awkward questions can make eminent speakers quite nervous while waiting in the wings to deliver a lecture. They are unconventional, individualistic and confident. As one of my son’s friends summed it up, while a sixth-former at the boys’ school: ‘We are just fairly normal guys, know what I mean? Your girls, well … they are just – you know – more out there …’ Yes, more out there perhaps, but also wonderfully warm, informal, friendly and completely unstuffy. That pungent, irrepressible sense of intellectual curiosity is all-pervasive while, as my predecessor Elizabeth Diggory beautifully put it, the classrooms and corridors ring with laughter.

Schools develop their particular character according to location, tradition, culture, the built environment, the pupils and, perhaps most of all, the cast of characters that make up the staff. So, here we have two very different schools, each with its own distinctive qualities. Would we really want to combine them and have just one, large, vanilla sundae? The lively balance between mutual respect and competition always seemed to me a good thing and in no way impeded the continuing conversation about how we might work more closely together. We all enjoyed doing so. Despite the unignorable and inconvenient geographical fact of the River Thames dividing us, necessitating a brisk thirty-minute walk across green-and-gold Hammersmith Bridge, there had long been joint plays; shared university preparation classes in some subjects (notably in my time English and economics) were working well, joint musical concerts had seen a renaissance and by the time I left in 2017, a shared sixth-form conference was in the making. Rowing was another obvious area for collaboration. All this provided excellent opportunities for the students of both schools, who could learn from each other. I would hear about ‘uni prep’ in my Friday morning break-time meetings with the head girl and her team:

‘How was uni prep this week?’