Almost 60% of Cork city secondary schools are single-sex

A NEW survey by the ERSI has shown that students attending either all-boys or all-girls schools would rather be in a mixed school.

In Ireland, fewer than 20% of respondents in single-sex schools preferred their school’s gender mix, compared to almost 90% in co-educational schools.

This is despite one third of all Irish students attending a single- sex school, with this figure slightly above the national average in Cork, where 37.7% of all students attend an all-boys or all-girls school, compared to 62.3% who attend a mixed school.

The percentage of single-sex schools is particularly high in Cork city, where single-sex secondary schools outnumber mixed schools.

The city has five all-boys schools and 10 all-girls schools, representing 57% of all city secondary schools, along with 11 mixed schools.

In Cork county, there are 42 mixed schools, considerably more than single-sex schools, with eight all-girls and eight all-boy schools, a breakdown of 73% to 27%.

Students, regardless of attending single-sex or co-educational schools, favoured co-educational settings, while preferences varied among staff and parents, the ERSI report explained.

The report also found that girls tend to be more positive about coeducational schools’ influence on their social development, with 86% of girls believing co-educational schools are better compared to 77% of boys, though 44% of girls thought single-sex education was better for their academic development, compared to just 26% of boys.

Ireland has the second-highest proportion of single-sex schools in Europe, second only to Malta, with the ERSI report stating that the majority of the schools were founded by religious orders who drove the decision to enrol only one sex.

As the religious orders withdraw, both primary and secondary schools which previously accepted exclusively males or exclusively females have made the decision to accept both in recent years.

These include Presentation Secondary School, Ballyphehane, and St Patrick’s College on Gardiner’s Hill, both traditionally all-girls schools but set to become mixed from September 2024.

There are several schools in Cork which only recently became mixed schools, and still have a significantly higher population of the gender that traditionally attended.

In the current school year, there are 22 girls and 269 boys in North Monastery Secondary School in Our Lady’s Mount; 106 girls and 13 boys in Nano Nagle College, Farranree, and 424 boys and 10 girls in Coláiste na Toirbhirte in Bandon.

Coláiste Éamann Rís on the south side of the city, which began accepting girls as well as boys in 2019, changing its name from Deerpark CBS, now has 277 female students and 441 male students.

Principal Aaron Wolfe told The Echo: “We didn’t want to be a boys school that has girls, we wanted to be a mixed school, and part of that was changing our name. If we stayed Deerpark CBS it would always be a boys school that had girls now.

“So in September 2019 we started with a new uniform, new name, new logo, a new principal, so it reopened as a new school.”

In their first year they had just 12 female students, and they then had to close because of covid, “but we reopened with 120 new students, 60 boys and 60 girls, and we’ve been getting half-and-half since”, he said.