Comment
Gender engineering comes to schools policy
Evening Standard – March 9, 2007
I have just realised I live in an area almost entirely populated by teen and pre-teen girls.
This turns out to be because there’s a great state girls’ secondary school round the corner. So the new estate of pseudo-Victorian houses someone built on the corner a couple of years ago is filling up with hundreds of parents of female children, who’ve spotted an opportunity and want to be in the catchment area.Five minutes in Aldous Huxley Towers (not actually painted pink – yet) is enough to make you start feeling you’re between the pages of a sci-fi book in which boys have stopped being born and the world is about to be run by women.
A mile away, it’s the opposite story. Here, the secondary school, mixed in principle, has a bias towards boys in practice (to make up for the good girls’ schools elsewhere). Two-thirds of the pupils are boys. Ex-pupils spend afternoons lurking outside the gates too. So, for every pair of teenage girls who slink into the local café to whisper over coffee, there are half a dozen boys with jeans slung round their knees and yo-yoing voices, loitering outside doing whatever the first surges of testosterone and pack behaviour make boys do.
In this “blue” zone, you notice more graffiti and theft; there’s a tougher, leaner feel to the streets. Starting last Friday, police gave themselves extra powers to get rid of the area’s “gangs of nuisance youths” whose misdeeds include rampaging down Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger’s road in January, overturning cars.
We’re always hearing about the way rigidities in schools admissions policy make class divides worse: districts pulled apart into “sink” and “posh” zones as everyone who can afford to moves towards the best school, and everything goes to pot at the other end of town. That’s what Brighton schools will be fighting when, from next year, they stop picking the pupils who live nearest, and choose them by lottery instead.
But what about these gender imbalances? Is it a problem if every district gets pink and blue corners, or might it be a blessing in disguise? If my sons were girls, and we lived in the vaguely menacing blue zone, I’d be out like a shot. But it’s not so clear the other way round. I’ve been thinking about moving house for educational reasons anyway recently, either to somewhere near a great boys’ state school or (if that lottery idea catches on) to a cheaper house so we can spend today’s mortgage money on tomorrow’s fees.
But now I’m wondering if my sons might not thank me more if we stayed where we are, in the heart of the pink zone, right through their adolescence – and they became the last young males left in a ghetto of glamorous girls.
ENDS