'No benefit for girls' in single-sex schools

Placing girls in single-sex schools makes no real difference to their educational achievements, an exhaustive study of half a century of research has found.

Professor Alan Smithers, a schools expert at Buckingham University, said it was a myth that same-sex schools benefited either girls or boys, The Observer reports today.

The main reason for the better performance was that they were generally fee-paying or grammar schools, with pupils drawn from more privileged backgrounds.

His conclusions - which confound the widespread assumption that girls need a single-sex environment to prosper - are based on a detailed review of research from across the world into same-sex education.

That research "has not shown any dramatic or consistent advantages for single-sex education" for either gender, he said. There are now just over 400 single-sex state schools, down from nearly 2,500 in the 1960s.