Introduction

Moves away from single-sex schooling are apparent as many elite schools in Australia respond to changing parental demands. Public concern about sexual violence, racism, and homophobia has focused on high-fee independent boys’ schools, where pressure for coeducation is greatest (e.g. Harris & Krusche, 2022; Tu, 2022). High-fee single-sex independent girls’ schools appear to have retained their reputations, with wide media coverage of research conducted by the sector (e.g. Collie et al., 2022; Fitzsimons et al., 2018; Forgasz & Leder, 2017). Single-sex secondary schools occur in all three school sectors in Australia—independent, Catholic and, notably in NSW, in state-funded government schools. Parental concerns about the provision of single-sex versus coeducational government secondary schooling is also contentious with a ‘shake-up’ of public high schools recently announced to guarantee local access to coeducational secondary education (Cassidy & Rose, 2023). Differing views on girls’ and boys’ schools have been reported amongst parents of students in government single-sex schools, with girls’ schools perceived more favourably (Carroll, 2023). NSW is anomalous amongst Australian states in its extensive and historical provision of single-sex secondary schooling. Although no new single-sex government schools have opened since the 1960s, in 2023, there were still 43 single-sex secondary schools in NSW, with 36 local catchments offering only single-sex options (Carroll, 2022). Within all sectors, there are vast disparities of privilege; however, the independent sector includes the highest proportion of elite schools, and the state-funded government school sector serves communities of least privilege. It is difficult to extract indicators of success from socioeconomic privilege and material aspects of school advantage. Most research into single-sex schooling in Australia is conducted in high-fee independent schools, with advocates arguing for social, attitudinal, and educational advantages. However, when socioeconomic advantage is factored out, such claims must be greatly moderated. Single-sex schooling intersects with a melange of societal influences and cultural values including location, familial histories, ethnicities, class, culture, religion, and more. Gendered configurations of schooling elide complexities of differences that exist within and between schools. The centrality of secondary schools in shaping gendered subjectivities, aspirations, and opportunities make it imperative to attend to single-sex schooling. Existing research rarely includes young people’s accounts of how their schooling experiences are shaped by gender and how this is inflected by other dimensions of difference. Further, few studies consider young people’s experiences of single-sex schooling across multiple schools and multiple sectors. This paper responds to both of these gaps.

Our research privileged student voice and narrative accounts of experience, opening space to explore the affective dimensions of schooling. Accordingly, the latter half of this paper explores affectively potent moments of gendered experiences from 14 recent graduates mostly from non-elite single-sex secondary schools. Accounts are drawn from one strand of our research into gender and schooling, where recent school leavers aged 18–24 recounted their experiences of gender at school. While single-sex schools were not an intentional focus of the research, a distinct cohort emerged who had attended single-sex schools. Reflecting the diversity of school sectors, they attended single-sex government (8), Catholic (5), and independent (1) schools. Rather than thematise and flatten out their accounts in order to generalise across the data set, I have constructed fourteen discrete micronarratives that distil each participant’s thoughts, feelings and affects pertaining to their single-sex schooling. These fragments retain the descriptive detail that makes each micronarrative distinct, and my intention is that their multiplicity provokes resonances between the accounts and with research on single-sex schooling. The micronarratives indicate what lingers, what seems now to be problematic or frustrating, what still moves them when they talk about their school experiences. The contributions of this paper lie empirically in these accounts of single-sex schooling from an under-researched cohort, and methodologically in its analytical deployment of affective intensities with micronarratives of single-sex schooling. They speak back to some of the common claims and evidence in research about single-sex schooling. Before turning to existing research on single-sex schooling and the micronarratives from this study, the next section frames how I am approaching gender and single-sex schooling through affect and affective intensities.

Genders, affects, and single-sex schooling

Throughout this paper, I refer to single-sex boys’ and girls’ schools. However, gender is contentious and increasingly understood as mutable, offering a spectrum of ways of being in the world, including people who refuse to see themselves in binary categories that are limiting and make no sense to them. All categories are ‘contested and contestable’ and research concerned with gendered school experiences is ‘informed, inflected—and, too often, inflamed’ by sex/gender (Stengel, 2021, p.2). Although single-sex schools assume clear distinctions, gender can be understood as a set of practices, rather than an essentialised category tethered to a biological sexed body. Since the work of Judith Butler (e.g. 2004), feminist scholars have understood gendering practices as dynamic, elaborate, contingent, and subject to recognition and repetition. Educational researchers have used the concept of ‘gendered subjectivities’ to describe the dynamic practices through which subjects take themselves up within their material-discursive milieus, including the school as a critical site (Gonick & Conrads, 2022; Gonick & Gannon, 2014). Poststructural feminists theorised that gendered subjectivities are produced, performed, negotiated, and sustained within the discursive, material, and relational affordances of everyday life (Gannon & Davies, 2011). Gendered subjectivities inform our evolving sense of who we are and who we might be. Increasingly, the term ‘gender identity’ is deployed to emphasise that a person has agency within those processes, and to underscore ethical commitments to respect people’s dignity and capacities to define themselves. Recent definitions of ‘gender identity’ include ‘a person’s deeply felt internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond with the sex assigned to them at birth’ (Jones et al., 2019, p. 304), and’the internal perception of someone’s gender, and how they label themselves, based on how much they align or don't align with what they understand their options for gender to be’. (Tsouroufli & Redai, 2021, p. 262). In these definitions, the ‘feltness’ of how one takes up gender is emphatic, as is the insistence that people have the right to define themselves and to have this respected. In the accounts explored in this paper, gendered identities are sometimes taken for granted and sometimes overtly discussed, but the single-sex school is understood as an institution with an enhanced impact on how gender is understood, experienced, and regulated—that is, on the production of gendered subjectivities.

This paper understands gendered subjectivity as a process of continuous becoming, inflected by class, ethnicity, ability, location, and innumerable other factors (Gannon & Davies, 2011; Gonick & Gannon, 2014). Every dimension of school experience might impact gendered subjectivities: curriculum; pedagogies; institutional structures; rules, values, and ethos; buildings, spaces, and other materialities; traditions and reputations; and relations amongst students and teachers. These factors and more contribute to the material-discursive-affective regimes of schooling within which students (to varying extents and with a myriad of variations) take themselves up as boys or girls or in other ways. These are not neutral or solely a matter of choice but are subject to covert and overt operations of power that can enforce hegemonic versions of femininities and masculinities as they are understood in a particular culture, time, and location.

While there is a large body of research on gendered subjectivities in schools, recent work draws on theories of affect to understand the ineffable, unstable, inherently relational, and interdependent dimensions of gendered experiences. Affect is always implicated. Any research that deploys gender as a concept ‘relies, explicitly or implicitly, on a theory of affect’ (Stengel, 2021, p. 2). Affects disrupt conventions and assumptions and expand possibilities. Affects emphasises movement, dynamism, flows, and capacities that exceed the individual and the animate. Affect is not something that can be located outside or inside us but ‘happens to, with, on, through, and across us in divergent ways’ (Dernikos et al., 2020, p. 8). Attempts to pin down affect for definitional purposes may be futile given the breadth of directions, sources, and influences that have catalysed into an ‘affective turn’ in educational research (Dernikos et al., 2020). Dernikos et al. (2020) suggest that it is more productive to ‘feel out what affect does rather than what it is’ (p.2). This includes the orientation we take to any research interested in affect: requiring us to feel out what affect does, where affect takes us. Thinking through affect means attending to how ‘bodies are endlessly entangled with other bodies—human and non-human in a rich symphony (or …cacophony) of encounters’ (Dernikos et al., 2020, p. 5). Affect is constantly in circulation between bodies including bodies of knowledge and non-human bodies; configuring pasts, presents, and futures; including how we come to know ourselves and each other, and come to understand and feel about our experiences. Tracing encounters and their influences becomes the analytical goal. In research on gender and schooling,’affective intensities’ were proposed by Ringrose and Renold (2014) as a creative analytic practice for entering feminist research assemblages where data, theory, researchers, and participants are always already entangled and enabling researchers to appreciate ‘singularity, texture and affective complexities’ of data (2014, 773). It is in this spirit that I have traced affective intensities through micronarratives of single-sex schooling.

Tracing affective intensities through empirical data is not straightforward, as each inquiry must develop its own bespoke analytic approach. It requires creativity and attunement to nuances and subtleties beyond simple declarative statements. Analysing data through affective intensities means ‘looking at when energy is free-flowing, when things heat up and congeal, and when they cool down and dissipate’ (Ringrose & Renold, 2014, 774). Ringrose and Renold followed ‘slut’ as a ‘discursive-embodied category’ that moved through focus groups, interviews, and public events and was reconfigured and recuperated. McCall sought moments in classroom observations and focus groups ‘where emotions run high about what knowledge, whose knowledge and what the knowledge does’ (2020, p. 51) as she explored perceptions of female success in single-sex schools. Interested in the animating force of positive affect, Errázuriz (2021) explored how affective intensities of activism connected students with political histories, joy, and friendship in a Chilean girls’ school. Keddie (2022) revisits two decades of interviews with one participant to find moments of affective intensities that suggest how gender is configured and reconfigured, and offers scope for gender transformative work. These diverse explorations of affective intensities emerge from the particularities of each study and do not seek to be replicable or reducible to generalisation. Yet they offer new lines of sight to enrich research on gendered dimensions of schooling. As the field of single-sex schooling is so contentious, the following section outlines existing research and common claims about single-sex schooling before turning to our study.

Research on single-sex secondary schooling

Research on single-sex schooling draws on a range of assumptions about gender that are conceptually incompatible. Some research assumes that categories are ‘relatively static, biological, and binary designations’, while other research investigates how gender is produced, intensified, mitigated, and problematised (Bailey & Graves, 2016, p. 688). Research across this spectrum critiques the rationales underpinning single-sex schooling and interrogates its claims. The premise of single-sex schooling is that inherent and overarching differences exist between boys and girls, and the paradoxical promise is that segregated schooling will better prepare them for the coeducational worlds of social and cultural life, work, and higher education.

Advocates claim improvements in learning outcomes and aspirations; however, large-scale quantitative studies often fail to support these claims. In Ireland, where a third of students attend single-sex secondary schools, PISA analysis found no significant performance gaps in science, maths, or reading between students in single-sex and coeducational schools—when controlled for individual, parental, and school-level factors (Clavell & Flannery, 2023). An Australian study on gender disparities in sciences found limited influence of single-sex schools on career choices compared to parent characteristics, academic achievement, and teacher qualifications (Sikora, 2014). A meta-analysis across 21 countries found no high-quality evidence of benefits of single-sex schooling in attitudes, performance, aspirations, self-concept, and gender stereotyping (Pahlke et al., 2014). The caveat is always that gender is not as significant as other factors. A recent scoping study across 12 countries found volumes of contradictory evidence and competing claims (Robinson et al., 2021). The authors conclude that research has failed to demonstrate benefits in academic achievement; disruption of gender norms is subject to contextual complexities; and, unless gender theorising is included in curriculum, single-sex schooling reproduces limiting binary notions of gender. Variables including school selectivity, race, class, socioeconomic status, curriculum, and parenting are as salient as gender. These large-scale studies provide no compelling or consistent evidence that single-sex schooling is advantageous for academic outcomes or challenging gender stereotypes.

Single-sex schools are often justified through rationales of parental choice of sector and ethos but these arguments are blind to intersections of gender with class, ethnicity, and other dimensions of difference. In a broad scoping of the field, Herr and Grant (2020) identify three broad justifications: removal from distraction/ harassment, assumptions of different learning styles of boys and girls, and remediation of disadvantage for high poverty students of colour. Yet they conclude that these are spurious arguments. Race, ethnicity, and class shape sex-segregated schools as much as gender. Young people in US single-sex schools are subject to ‘entrenched educational apartheid’, with elite schools operating to further entrench privilege (Herr & Grant, 2020, p. 4). Intersections of class, gender, ethnicity, and locale with single-sex schooling are explored in numerous qualitative studies. Oral histories with elite Australian boys’ school alumni (Proctor, 2011) explore how masculinities of privilege and leadership are cultivated alongside Christian values. US elite boys’ schools cultivate hegemonic masculinities that are inimical to gender justice and premised on homophobia, heterosexism, and misogyny (Howard & Keddie, 2023). Interviews with female teachers in elite Australian boys’ schools indicate that misogynistic gendered oppression is ‘inextricable’ from the masculinities produced in such schools (Variyan & Wilkinson, 2022). Single-sex girls’ schooling is implicated in the neoliberal fashioning of postfeminism in ways that obscure practices of racialisation and class reproduction (Charles & Allan, 2022). The ‘schizoid’ conditions of elite girls’ schools mean that ‘empowerment’ for girls simultaneously challenges and reinscribes normative femininities and sexualities (Charles, 2013). In research in two single-sex US girls’ schools, McCall (2020) identified discourses of ‘saving’ and ‘empowering’ Muslim young women in the public single-sex school, while in the elite private school, feminism had become almost passe. In government single-sex schools in south-west Sydney, Reid (2014) explored intersections of ethnicity, class, locale, and gender. Stark differences emerged between perceptions of students in girls’ schools (upwardly mobile, focused, resilient, compliant) and boys’ schools (less focused, passive, uncertain about futures). In these non-elite single-sex government schools, gender segregation intensified existing educational disadvantages (Reid, 2014). In a government semi-selective girls’ school in western Sydney, Gannon and Naidoo (2020), explore how class and gender inflected young people’s imagined futures. These studies offer complex and multilayered accounts of experiences in heterogeneous single-sex schools and point to some of the contradictions, gaps, and complicating dimensions of any claims about single-sex schooling. The micronarratives of this paper speak to these complex issues.

Gender Matters

The Gender Matters research aimed to investigate young people’s experiences of gender at high school. It privileged student voice and sought a design that was dynamic and student-led. This paper draws on Phase 1 of the research with university students reflecting on their recent secondary schooling in NSW. A later phase took place in schools with senior students and their teachers. Focus groups were guided by open-ended questions that allowed conversations to develop between participants. We recognised that gender is elusive, complex, and affectively potent and that language has its limits for expressing ideas and feelings. Nevertheless, we hoped that stories offered by participants would ripple around each group, provoking new memories, comparisons, feelings, and thoughts. In effect, focus groups were a live space for a relatively free-flowing discussion amongst participants. However, as Mayes (2022) points out, student voice is a problematic concept—infused with asymmetrical power relations before people even open their mouths. Practices such as ‘self-censoring’ and ‘tone-policing’ are always present and impossible to disentangle in any research encounter (Mayes, 2022, p. 153).

Participants were recruited through posters, social media, and university email, inviting university students who were recent school leavers (18–24) to share their experiences of gender and secondary school in focus groups facilitated by the research team. Focus groups were held in three rounds between 2019 and 2021. Each participant attended one extended focus group or interview (av. 1½ hours), with some returning for a later component entailing arts-based workshops. Focus group size ranged from two to eight students. Thirteen focus groups were held; however, five students requested individual interviews as they were unable to meet at scheduled times. More than a quarter of the 47 participants had graduated from single-sex schools. These 14 participants were scattered across 11 different focus groups. They were studying planning, policing, criminology, law, linguistics, history, political thought, and teaching. Eight participants described themselves as multilingual, in English and Arabic (4), Hindi (1), Bengali (1), and Turkish (2). They had attended government (8), Catholic (5), and independent (1) single-sex schools across western Sydney. Four had attended boys’ schools, and ten had attended girls’ schools. Focus groups comprised students from different courses, school sectors, ethnicities, and genders who were not previously known to each other. We did not provide definitions of ‘gender’ or any other terms. Focus groups began by asking participants to describe their school, and how it differed from others. Participants explored gender equity policies at school, their own understandings of gender and equity, and how these differed from their parents and teachers, and shared stories of how gender had impacted their secondary schooling. These accounts layered and accumulated within and across focus groups as participants responded to each other’s stories with their own. Focus groups took place on university campuses in 2019 but as our research in schools was delayed, we added additional online focus groups in 2020 and 2021. Online focus groups were smaller and may have provided fewer points of tension, contradiction, or affirmation. However, all focus groups have potential to flatten and homogenise responses and may not be felt as safe spaces by young people meeting for the first time. Different combinations, different days, and different modes of engagement would likely provoke different conversations, memories, and different details of secondary school experiences. These accounts form an idiosyncratic, fragmented archive of gendered experiences of secondary school. Yet, those moments that linger, that rise to the surface, that indicated the affective intensities of gender and single-sex schooling seemed pertinent to our broad questions of how gender matters in secondary schools.

Earlier, I outlined how other researchers have focused analytical attention on affective intensities of gender and schooling. In our research, affective intensities were rarely spectacular outbursts, but were more subtle and ordinary. Invitations to ‘share stories’ about schooling were already oriented towards the affective intensities inherent in narratives of the self. Affects are by definition elusive, conveyed through language choices, but also through quickening of tone or voice, hesitations, reframing, and rephrasing as a person searches for another way to say something important, or as they expand and layer in extra detail in response to an interruption, query, challenge, or other response from someone else in the conversation. Affects may be indicated through a shifting of the body, a gesture, a gasp, a sigh, or an interjection. Moments of affective intensities were produced in the thick social-material spaces of the focus groups. All stories were shared in relation to other stories and to other story-tellers, including at times the researchers. However, in order to trace single-sex schooling through the data, I have stepped each of these participants back from the focus groups to look at how they articulated their schooling experiences. I revisited transcripts, the contexts, and rhythms of conversations, audio recordings, and my own senses and memories of participating in the focus groups. For each of the single-sex school alumni, I have distilled a micronarrative of what seemed most salient to their single-sex schooling and what was most affectively potent in their contribution to the focus group, in order to powerfully encapsulate how they feel about their single-sex schooling. While stepping the individual narrator back from the focus group encounter in which their story is enmeshed may seem inimical to an approach through affect, this meant I could follow ‘single-sex schooling’ and its resonances across multiple focus group times and events. Within each micronarrative, affects circulate across and between bodies and the myriad of material and relational elements that form the detail of each account. The gendered subject is imbricated with and produced through uniforms, spaces, school rules, subjects, school values or ethos, teachers, parents, students, and more. These details shape the affective intensities of their stories. While some interpretation is included, my hope is that the micronarratives resonate and animate, and that some sense of the uniqueness of each school’s milieu and each individual’s experience remains.

Micronarratives of single-sex schooling

The micronarratives are ordered according to the single-sex composition of the schools, and by sector—beginning with boys’ schools (4), then girls’ schools (10), and within each group through independent, Catholic, and government sectors.

LIAM attended a Catholic boys’ school. Bodies, behaviour and school reputation were regulated via appearance and conformity:

Our top buttons always had to be done up, with a tie, especially in the senior year… we had to wear a blazer to and from school…it would be like 35, 40 degrees plus on a summer day and we’d be wearing this heavy blazer with a tie and it was a little bit of a punish….Teachers at every gate asking us to put it on and then there would be a teacher walking probably 300 metres down from the school to the bus stop making sure everyone else had their blazers on.

Liam adds detail about the ‘punish’ of bodily regulations through uniform.

We weren’t allowed to have our hair below a two … Two ml [millimetre], we weren’t allowed to shave our head pretty much, and if we did we had to wear a hat until it was at a reasonable length….Some kids would come to school with a funny hair cut or something but it would be too short and then they’d be like, you can either go home for two or three weeks until it grows out, or you wear a hat.

Uniformity, conformity, compliance appear to be more important than learning. If a student is given an option to ‘go home’ until their hair grows, then the stakes are high. Liam amplifies affective intensities through contrasts (heavy blazer/ hot day; ‘we’ students/ ‘they’ teachers), absolutism (every gate, two ml). This suggests rigid, punitive and uncompromising – almost militaristic – training of young men.

NOAH attended the same Catholic boys’ school as his father and brothers, exacerbating the segregation of his already ‘very male-orientated’ home. Studying PDHPE teaching, he realises what he missed:

I’m finding out from others that I basically got no sex ed. I hear from people at other public schools and co-ed schools that they…explained a lot more things, whereas I just didn’t get that same sort of learning…they’re trying to teach all the Catholic values and you should have abstinence and whatnot.

While Noah thought that the school must have done the minimum required for accreditation, the attitude was ‘go off and learn it yourself’ leading to ‘risky situations occurring because you’re not informed’. Noah’s education happened in his part-time job at KFC: ‘where I learnt how to talk to another woman that was my age, and a lot of them went to the public school around the corner. That is essentially where I got that understanding of what’s what and that, where I didn’t get it directly through school’. Noah’s account emphasises lack, of both sex education and how to socialise in the ‘real world’. Affective intensities attach to uncertainty, naivete, wilful ignorance maintained by the school, the poignancy of loss and inadvertent pleasure and reassurance of unofficial knowledge from girls at work. But the story is shadowed by unspecified ‘risky situations’, implying any number of potential consequences.

SYED attended a government single-sex boys’ school. Syed introduces his school through cultural differences: ‘probably 80 per cent were of Arab background’. Narrow norms of masculinity are realised through ‘unwritten rules’ opposing ‘weakness’ to ‘manliness’:

If a guy appeared weaker than let’s say the others then he was criticised for that or he was told to just be manly, etcetera. Nothing official….it was peers, it was teachers, even higher.

Syed elaborates these ‘rules’ through regional exceptionalism. Not strictly geographic, ‘south-west Sydney’ connotes working-class, conservative, immigrant communities. Not an island adrift from its community, the school reflects what Syed understands to be its dominant values.

In that region, so Punchbowl, Bankstown, etcetera, I wouldn’t say the social sciences have advanced as much into the general population. So the expectation is very much what you would say maybe a traditional one.

As a social sciences student in a focus group at university, Syed ascribes more expansive ways of thinking about gender to outsider knowledges. Though changing notions of gender might seem remote from people’s lives, Syed recalls a teacher who presented differently:

She doesn’t identify with a gender or they didn’t identify with a gender, etcetera. But when the other students would interact with that teacher specifically then it would be, what would you say, like a critical fashion, a critical manner. Looking at that teacher as if, what’s wrong with you, in a sense. So they stood out, they were the black sheep, you could say, in the crowd. …They stayed, mostly because they were there to do the job. A great teacher, a very good teacher, but they understood that such a population can’t really relate. Like they didn’t explain their position.

This teacher was not an out advocate for non-binary identities but, in a school milieu that shames students into normative masculinities, and at least sporadic attempts to shame the teacher, the ‘great teacher’ becomes (retrospectively) an object of admiration, an anchor onto which Syed attaches more expansive ways of doing and understanding gender.

ALI attended a government single-sex boys’ school, whose key feature is its proximity to its companion school: ‘An only boys’ school, it was a single-sex school and there was obviously a girls’ high as well’. The logic is of one plus the other, side by side, rather than erasure or invisibility. Ali’s account evokes positive affects associated with friendships and sociality between students:

After school I would meet up with the girls so we can kick back together and then go out for lunch or something. At that time the schools are very close to each other so we’d meet up there and that’s when we’d talk together and that’s pretty much it. It was kind of, how do I say it, what the two schools would do, generally for male boys, our boys’ school, after school we would meet up with girls from the other school. Even though it’s the same school we’d just meet up and then we’d all go our separate ways and some people would just talk and then they would just leave. Some people hop in the same car and go home. Some people used to sometimes go to the movies, so it was more of a thing that people in our school used to do. This was only with people that started slowly getting driver licences as well so towards Year 11 and 12-ish.

Although friendships with girls may have a heterosexual overlay, in Ali’s account, they comprise many ordinary non-exclusive activities—talking, driving home, lunch, and movies. Though students are in segregated schools, the sense of separation is slippery. In two sentences, Ali moves through ‘the two schools’, to ‘the boys’ school’ and the ‘other school’ to end up at ‘the same school’. Although Ali does not mention any shared formal learning opportunities, this remembered sociality collapses barriers, suggesting warmth, reciprocal interest and casual camaraderie between the student cohorts.

MOUNA attended what she described as an independent religious single-sex girls school; however, it is a co-ed K-12 school, bifurcated at secondary level into separate schools with different principals, staff, and buildings. After primary school, boys and girls ‘never really met each other’ during the school day:

I don’t really hear that many high schools that do that…, that they cater to K to 12 and then they shove them into different corners of the school because that’s what worked out for them.

Uniforms were strict because a private school is ‘all about first impressions and what all the students look like’. Mouna’s phrasing implies her disdain. Rules were ‘constantly handed out… You know, follow this, follow that’ to keep girls and boys apart, based on the assumption, shared by Mouna, of (hetero)sexualised adolescence:

Being older now, I totally get that. Like if you let them—I don’t really know what the word—like mesh together and talk to each other, it’s like they’re adolescent kids. They’re not going to be focusing on what needs focus.

Talking to each other (‘meshing’) compromises learning. Yet, the girls did not have equal access to curriculum or facilities. For PDHPE, the boys had the ‘big oval’, while the girls had the ‘quad’—‘just a rectangle fake grass area’, too small for sport. The girls fought for equal curriculum when their music teacher took leave:

The girls were very, very angry about that. So they went all the way up to the principal of the girls’ high school. So what happened was music became a combined class for the HSC because the boys had a music teacher.

Physics was run only in the boys’ school, though girls were allowed to cross over for mixed classes. The boys’ school seems to be the default for curriculum and facilities with equality contingent and temporary, achieved only through advocacy from the girls. Mouna’s account coheres around anger and perceived gender injustice.

LILY attended a Catholic girls’ school which was ‘unusually progressive’ with a ‘very close-knit’ community. The neighbouring Catholic boys’ school provided Lily’s ‘first introduction to sexism’. Although there were opportunities to engage, including a shared Olympic-sized pool, Lily and peers stayed away from the ‘quite sexist, very conservative’ boys’ school. The proximity of the pool produced what Lily called ‘weird’ interactions:

They had their classroom right next door. And you’d have all the year 7 boys waiting for their teacher like whistling at you and like knocking at the window and stuff. And we were only allowed to wear one pieces ….The older boys weren’t too bad, but the younger ones that were just hitting puberty, making noises or trying to shout out stuff. In lunchtimes, you could go but even then, you’d be under supervision.

There is a sense that girls are in constant danger and that male behaviour is out of control and dangerous. Lily explains why the Year 10 combined formal was abandoned:

There was a rumour that four years ago, a girl fell pregnant. They just stopped it. So even though I say progressive, I say progressive for Catholics right. Do you know what I mean?

The fallen girl is a long-standing trope of Catholic doctrine and appears well inculcated amongst these students, with defensive and avoidant behaviour becoming integral to their interactions. Affective intensities cohere collectively around fear and sexual harassment, uniting the girls in their tight-knit community in defence against the boys.

AVA attended a Catholic girls’ school which she describes by contrasting it with neighbouring repressive coeducational religious schools. Ava shared the school bus with students at schools with overt regulation of normative (hetero) sexualities and binary gender:

I remember in Year 9 or Year 10 hearing that the kids at the Anglican and Christian school had to actually sign an agreement about things relating to gender and sexuality. Basically, saying that homosexuality is wrong and there’s only two genders. …This kind of conversation wasn’t really in my sphere of knowledge at that time…

It’s impossible to gauge the accuracy of people’s memories, and how these meld with or are informed by recent media reports of such practices, but in positioning this practice as differentiating her school from others, Ava implies a more progressive milieu. Ava evokes her younger self as an emerging advocate for gender justice:

I got in disagreements with them about that on the bus, but they kind of believed it, but I think they could still see that it was a little bit strong, to have to sign—give consent to something like this, and agree to these ideas that you don’t even really know anything about at that age. It just seemed like silencing mechanism, to me.

Ava relates this memory to her university teaching placement in a Catholic school where ‘a lot of’ students are ‘reflecting on their gender and sexuality’. The kids are ‘confused’ and:

Teachers find it hard to navigate, because they’re a little bit conflicted between their Catholic values that the Church is pushing them to focus on, but also the twenty-first century rules that—how we exist today and what’s acceptable today and how we’re moving.

Ava’s account slides from conservative schools of the past, to contemporary Catholic schools locked into values that are inconsistent with ‘twenty-first century’ mores and where an impasse arises between gendered identities and school inclusion. Current students who are confused may not be so different from younger Ava grappling with ideas outside her ‘sphere of knowledge’ and ‘not really knowing anything about at that age’. Understandings of gender complexities are attached to a developmental trajectory. Affective intensities shift from outrage at the imposition of narrow values to a progressivist narrative of gender expansiveness, or ‘how we’re moving’ in the present, assuming agreement from other focus group participants.

ZOE moved from a Catholic coeducational high school in years 7–10 to a Catholic girls’ school for years 10–12, and her account emphasises their differences. Attitudes and uniforms were inequitably policed at the coeducational school with mid-calf skirts and blazers mandatory in all seasons. At frequent uniform inspections, girls with ‘one strand of hair on their face’ would get detention, while boys had ‘so many less rules… they just had: wear your pants, wear your shirt, put your tie on’. In the girls’ school, there was more ‘respect’ and a more ‘relaxed’ atmosphere. Uniform policy was only enforced ‘if there was major, major uniform issues’ and was managed discreetly. To Zoe, uniforms signalled school culture more broadly. In the coeducational school, Zoe and her peers ‘went into classrooms where we felt less—we already felt kind of less than’. In the single-sex school, Zoe felt ‘more respected as, like, a human, to be honest. I wasn’t just seen as like a girl who needs to wear uniform like this to be seen as okay’. For Zoe, uniform is potentially dehumanising, detracting from one’s worth, presence, and right to be in class; however, the affective intensities of shaming in her story arise in the co-ed school, while positive affects evoking comfort and belonging accrue as a senior student in a single-sex girls’ school.

EMILY attended a Catholic girls’ school. Emily felt that being ‘segregated and separated from each other, purely based on sex’ had significant impacts and produced perverse effects. Her account describes how uniform regulations extended into other school spaces. The senior school social between girls’ and boys’ schools had an ‘enforced dress code’. Students in her year wrote to the principal to express their discomfort with the mandated dresses, skirts, and shoe styles because ‘that’s just not who we are’. Those students ultimately refused to attend with parents providing ‘medical reasons’ to excuse them from the event. In PDHPE, Emily noted ‘we were not allowed to be taught about contraceptive methods at all, no contraception’. However, a male PDHPE teacher subverted the ban by saying at the end of a theory lesson before lunch:

If anyone would like to stay back, I’ve prepared a PowerPoint presentation, going through contraceptive methods. And it’s not part of the curriculum, and I’m really not supposed to be showing you but I have daughters and I would want them to know. That’s what he said. And everyone stayed.

Emily summed up school practices as being about:

really heavily implementing, Catholic based women’s roles and traditional clothing and femininity… in a world where gender diversity is not celebrated, or even really acknowledged the assumption would be that femininity is, you know, that uniform is what femininity looks like.

Emily was now aware of students who were gender-questioning who would have been alienated by constant references to ‘girls’ in school policies, practices and facilities. Emily’s school seems to offer multiple opportunities for shaming around non-conformity to narrow notions of (Catholic) femininity.

CHLOE attended a government girls’ school that was academically selective, entering via an academic placement test. The high academic status of Chloe’s school was its most significant feature, and this had a strongly competitive and gendered dimension, particularly in STEM:

We have a robotics team, people doing things in physics, engineering, these kind of what used to be quite manly fields, a lot of stress was that, like we’re girls, we can do it too. Or if we beat another boy’s school in it, they’d also quite stress that we can do anything. So quite a lot of pride in that, really pushing us to be whatever you want to be while you’re still a girl, you don’t have to be anything.

The feminist trope that girls can do anything is mobilised in curriculum at Chloe’s school and is outwardly realised in interschool competitions, where beating a boy’s school amplifies their pride. Being in a girl’s school appears to expand curriculum opportunities; however, it is difficult to disentangle this achievement from the hothouse of selective schooling. Chloe’s account emphasises ‘stress’ in both senses of the word—the stakes are high, causing stress; but ‘they’ (being teachers) also ‘stress’ the postfeminist rhetoric of choice and self-invention. Ironically, Chloe’s account slides from’[you] can do anything’ through ‘be whatever you want to be’ to ‘you don’t have to be anything’. This slippage is existential—from doing, to being. What the ‘anything’ is that you don’t need to be is presumably a career that is stereotypically limited to women.

LAYLA attended a government girls’ school, in her local area, with a boys’ school next door. However, Layla’s memories suggest more limited and infrequent interactions between schools. Layla felt that ‘mixing’ should have been a focus for her school because students were ill-prepared to interact with boys:

A lot of the girls were uncomfortable with guys. It was a little bit of an issue when a boy would be at our school. Everybody would freak out, like they’ve never seen a boy before.

When students did interact socially, peer opprobrium was the likely result:

If you were seen talking to, I’d say for example a boy or a guy outside of school, people would always make comments like oh you like him. It was a joke in a way but then a lot of people took it too far... there would be a rumour going on, she likes him and she doesn’t even see him every day and she doesn’t even know him.

Layla was cyberbullied by a boy she knew from her primary school, but although she sought help, her year advisor said nothing could be done. She hazily remembered a rumour that a student had committed suicide, which Layla describes as a ‘heartbreaking’ consequence of school inaction on bullying. Whether or not this is accurate is irrelevant, but the sense of Layla’s account is that even the single-sex girls’ school is not a safe space in a hostile world. Gender segregation produces affects associated with hypersensitivity, anxiety and risk-averse behaviours—ideal qualities for a segregated and unequal society but not conducive to producing confident young women ready to take their places in a coeducational world.

RHADA attended a government girls’ school and felt very comfortable there as the environment was friendly and encouraging. Students from the neighbouring boys’ school would mix with the girls on the oval before school but inside class Rhada had no experience of learning alongside boys, which made it ‘awkward’ when she came to university. There was a gap in her education about gender and sexuality diversity:

They could have like maybe promoted a bit of the LGBT rights that’s happening, like maybe a bit more information based on that, because I guess during my high school years, that’s the peak time where for any student, they are kind of developing what their sexuality is as well.

The human rights frame that Rhada mentions, and her awareness of developmental trajectories, suggests that all students should see themselves in school curriculum and culture. While a lesbian student was accepted as ‘so cool’ when she came out after leaving school, a gender-nonconforming student was relentlessly bullied at school and, despite complaining, left the school because ‘it wasn’t properly addressed’. Curriculum offerings were influenced by numbers so Environmental Studies was withdrawn when only three students enrolled, and students in the girls’ school were not encouraged towards non-traditional subjects such as Engineering. Double standards for uniforms were apparent between the two schools, with the boys’ school being much more lenient. Rhada explains:

They’re male and we’re female, while I am being a bit sexist here to be very honest, they’re a bit more dominant compared to us in a way, I feel, they can do whatever they want, but we’ve got boobs and we’ve got arses, and like you have to cover up, like a very traditional mindset and the girls are the ones that are meant to be poised and well-mannered and well-cultured, while men are men, [they] can go off and do whatever they want.

Rhada’s comment references binary, hierarchical, archaic notions of gender that position women’s bodies as inherently sexual and provocative, and consequently demands that those same bodies must be decorous, constrained, and cultured. Men do not suffer this impossible contradiction. Rhada’s school did not prepare her for understanding the sexism of ‘the real world’ more broadly. She would have liked more discussion of gender identity, gender equality, workplace equality, ‘freedom of speech and freedom of rights’ for women. Affective intensities attach to Rhada’s sense of gender injustice across a range of domains of her schooling. Despite her comfort with her girls’ school, Rhada’s re-evaluation suggests that essential knowledge was missing and inequity was uncritically tolerated.

MAYA attended a government girls’ school. She introduces herself to the focus group as ‘a scarfie’, indicating that she chooses to wear a headscarf as a sign of her Muslim faith. However, in year 7, she refused to attend the Islamic school that her ‘very very strict’ parents had chosen for her secondary schooling. She insisted on going with her friends to the local girls’ school. During her time at the girls’ school, a parent designed ‘a specific customised uniform for our type of Islamic … a maxi kind of dress and pants’. Maya says ‘we never thought that they would accept but they actually did. The school… took it into consideration’. The scarves had to be white and girls who wore black scarves would get three warnings and then detention. In contrast to accounts where school uniform regulations indicate inequity, and despite rules and punishments, Maya’s example indicates the school’s cultural inclusion and willingness to adjust to its community. Maya was very pleased with her school, but observes that her younger sisters are no longer offered the breadth of languages she had, particularly Arabic. Positive affects in Maya’s account attach to the sense of belonging and welcome of cultural and religious difference in the secular setting of the government school.

YASMIN attended the government girls’ school from half-way through year 8. She experienced this as a liberation from the gender constraints at the private Islamic coeducational school that she had attended from the beginning of year 7. However, the government girls’ school was not free from misogyny or sexualised danger. Yasmin’s account of curriculum offerings morphed into a story of predatory male teachers. Beyond gender stereotypes about STEM subjects, students were discouraged by the hostile and dangerous environment produced by the way a teacher interacted with students:

There were people who wanted to do information technology, but they were deterred by the fact that the teacher was…a really sexist male, so just being in his class was pretty unbearable.

This was not limited to the single IT teacher who was eventually dismissed, but the ‘few male teachers in the school’ tended to band together. Three teachers would ‘hang out together in the computer room at lunch’ where girls walking past would overhear ‘locker-room talk’ that was ‘disgusting’ and disrespectful to women. This manifested in the classroom as a particular tone and classroom climate that was provoking and offensive. She explained this in terms of: ‘people are projecting on others all the time, right, with everything that they say. So, maybe something in the news, and he would make a comment about it’. Yasmin remembered a teacher who ‘creeped’ girls out by finding ways to look under skirts and another who would ‘just get way too close to girls and touch them’. These were exceptions because all the other teachers could ‘follow the rules’. Yasmin’s account suggests that in her school, there was a small group of male teachers who created a defensive sort of ‘lad culture’ that legitimised and strayed towards verbal and physical sexual harassment that, unsurprisingly, made ‘everyone so uncomfortable’. There is an absence of school leadership, and no capacity for girls to act, except by withdrawing as soon as they can from subjects that are taught by those men. As well as adding to their broad experience and expectations about how the world is, these pockets of toxic masculinity inside their girls’ school impact on students’ careers pathways and options.

Discussion

These fragments cannot be considered representative of single-sex schools, of school sectors, or these schools in particular. They are fragments that rose up from memory in the focus groups as students shared and explained their experiences of secondary school to their peers and the researchers. The micronarratives condensed from each of their accounts include narrative elements: scenes, images, characters, settings, and temporalities that allow participants to conjure the past through present understandings and thus to reframe and represent their experiences both with rational hindsight and affective attunement to the feelings that linger and that they wanted to share with the others in their focus groups. In their efforts to help others to picture, understand and feel how they feel about their experiences, they use colloquialisms (‘jigging’, ‘scarfie’, ‘whatnot’), asides that reinforce (‘to be honest’, ‘basically’, ‘very very’, ‘actually’) or indicate the struggle for the right ways to say it (‘what would you say’, ‘how do I say it’, ‘whatnot’, ‘etcetera’, ‘kind of’, ‘like’), or they rephrase (‘in the sense that’, ‘she doesn’t identify…they didn’t identify’), use expressions that signal emotion (‘I feel’), or select words that convey approbation (‘shove’), or deploy rhetorical questions to engage their audience (‘do you know what I mean?’). It is never straightforward to express the complexities of our lived experience, and we need all the resources we have. I have tried to retain a sense of this labour in the micronarratives. My interpretation of affects has been capacious, allowing for a breadth of positive, negative and relatively neutral affects, including shame, anger, fear, disgust, interest, enjoyment, comfort, pride, relief, enjoyment and more. I have condensed and distilled the salient features of each person’s account, retaining ‘voice’ as far as possible in direct quotes. As affect ripples and moves between people in the focus group, so I hope that affects evoked in these students’ accounts will move the readers of this paper.

Many of the issues that are commonly raised by researchers of single-sex schooling come in and out of view. Removal from distraction for example is evident in accounts where students in neighbouring schools may interact in the peripheral times and spaces of the school day but only exceptionally inside classrooms (e.g. Syed, Ali, Mouna, Lily, Layla). This means that students are ill-prepared and unaccustomed to learning alongside other genders. These accounts do not suggest an expansion of curriculum offerings that extend students beyond dated stereotypes of subjects or careers that are most suited to girls or boys. Smaller schools do not have enough staff to offer the range of curriculum that might push students beyond the most obvious or popular options for their cohorts (e.g. Mouna, Rhada). Where companion boys’ and girls’ schools are located next door to one another but operate separately, both schools may be hampered by limitations of scale. Some of the curriculum gaps were viewed by students as deliberate efforts to minimise their learning around topics that are seen to be incompatible with the ethos of a religious school, but now seem to them to be essential for all people to flourish in contemporary society (e.g. Noah, Emily). Students reported how uniform regulations were deployed to homogenise and discipline, usually in line with gendered normativities, most often focused on the disruptive potential of female bodies such that body shaming becomes part of the everyday experience of secondary schooling (e.g. Liam, Mouna, Zoe, Emily). Though, it was notable that one student deployed uniform as an example of cultural and religious inclusion in a secular school (Maya). Intersections of gender with culture and class are clearly evident in these accounts, where government single-sex schools are seen by their students as more desirable than religious coeducational schools that they found to be more oppressive (e.g. Maya, Yasmin). Gender normativities were inculcated in all types of schools (e.g. Liam, Syed, Mouna, Ava, Emily). Oppressive hypermasculinity that was contingent on, and arose in the context of, sex-segregated secondary schools was reported by students across sectors and included teachers as well as students (e.g. Lily, Layla, Rhada, Yasmin). Interestingly, closeness amongst groups of girls seemed to sometimes be fostered and enhanced by a shared sense of subjugation, oppression, or fear of boys. Conversely, competition with boys also served to unite groups of girls (Chloe). Sexualised and gendered harassment were evident across sectors. Students across sectors felt that more expansive notions of sexualities and genders would have been advantageous in their schooling (e.g. Syed, Ava, Emily, Rhada). Broadly, the students who participated in our research were committed to gender justice, whether that was interpreted as equalities of opportunities and outcomes for women or whether it extended to LGBTQ + recognition and inclusion. School was seen by them as a place where all people should be able to flourish, yet are not able to in current conditions.

Beyond the official curriculum, schools are sites where an unofficial curriculum of the body, gender performance, and gendered and sexed relations are learned through interactions with others and through encounters with powerful regimes of normativity. Young people are social agents who are actively involved in negotiating their gendered and sexed identities. They do so within the constraints of the discourses available to them to make meaning of their experiences. Even the presence of a gender nonconforming teacher is a subtle expansion of ways of being in the world. Their accounts remind us that much of the learning of gender at schools takes place outside classrooms, on the oval or in the street outside the school, on the bus, at the school social, in interschool competitions, in the amorphous times and spaces where students make their selections about senior subjects according to criteria unknown to their teachers that may not align to their dispositions or potential careers. Learning happens inside classrooms too—or not—as suggested by students’ accounts of subjects they would like to have done but couldn't, or could only do under difficult conditions (crossing the oval to the boys’ school, sending a delegation to the principal), or evident gaps in curriculum delivery, filled in one case by a surreptitious lunchtime extra lesson. Students have much to say about school rules and mores around appropriate gender performance where affective intensities emerge around shame, and regulation of gender normativity, with openings through affection, friendship, and sociality. Bullying and other social interactions between students that may not be seen by teachers also feature in their accounts of their gendered experiences of secondary school. We cannot conclude from these accounts whether students’ self-concept was enhanced by the single-sex environment as only the student at an academically selective school addressed this directly. This also seemed to be the only school where teachers intentionally sought to disrupt gender stereotypes. Nor can we determine whether learning outcomes for these students improved because they were at single-sex schools. All these students successfully graduated from their schools with ATARs sufficient to enable them to enrol at university. However, as the research earlier in this paper shows, evidence is mixed at best about whether there are performance advantages for students in single-sex schools.

Conclusion

These glimpses into details, stories, and feelings that linger for recent graduates from non-elite single-sex schools do not inspire confidence. However, I do not mean to imply that there is any inherent advantage in coeducational schooling on any of the dimensions of single-sex schooling that have been touched upon in this paper. Sexual harassment, dubious teachers, bullying, narrowly prescribed ways of doing gender, constraints in school dress, limitations in curriculum, opportunity and ambition for change are also evident in coeducational secondary schools. They echo issues that persist in wider Australian society. My analytical approach of developing micronarratives and tracing affective intensities privileges the voices of young people and offers glimpses into how some problematic dimensions of single-sex schools linger and resonate. They point to the scale of work that is required in all schools if we are to build institutions that are committed to equity and a wider society where all people can flourish. Assumptions about gendered difference between boys and girls may not be the most effective foundation for organising schooling and may not offer the best preparation for the complex coeducational socialities of post-school life in communities, at work, and in higher education.