The Making of Her: Why School Matters

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?’

‘The boys are so, like, confident! They just come out with stuff.’

‘Actually I thought what Ben said was pretty rubbish …’

‘Didn’t you speak up and say you disagreed with him?’

‘Oh, Angus was already saying something else …’

‘True, he was talking a lot, but then when Sophie said that thing about the symbolism in the second text he obviously hadn’t actually read it …’

The girls in this group could work on their proactivity and risk-taking in debate which would serve them well at a university interview, and the boys could consider doing the reading thoroughly in advance rather than winging it. The best of both worlds, perhaps, but there was a tacit understanding that neither they nor we would want to compromise and lose our prized independence.

Passionate though I am about girls’ schools, necessary though I absolutely believe they are with the exhilarating experience they can give young women, it would be narrow-minded to say that all really good schools are single sex: excellence comes in many forms. When I look back at my time at Sha Tin College in Hong Kong, for example, where I taught English and Drama and had huge fun directing plays and setting up the first sixth form, Sha Tin was mixed, like most international schools, and I can’t say that the education of the girls was weakened by the presence of the boys. The students there were mostly resilient, well-travelled children used to their parents moving around the world and having to adapt to new schools and make new friends quickly. It was a school typical of its type: students and teachers on first-name terms, no uniform, with a breezy, energetic and entrepreneurial approach to life, much of which was lived outdoors. I remember the students there as open, confident and well balanced. Perhaps the more mature girls occasionally became frustrated with the horsing around some of the boys did in play rehearsals, and how, maddeningly, they didn’t learn their lines until the last minute, but there was much give and take. Since leaving headship and working now in the international schools world, I have seen many more examples of an empowering culture within mixed schools.

These schools thrive because, on the whole, they are populated by modern, mobile families with wide horizons, amongst whom it is not difficult to create pools of liberal and enlightened thinking. A number have been founded by talented and bold female entrepreneurs, which in my post-headship life as an adviser, it has been a wonderful privilege to get to know. But co-educational schools at large are not changing the game in society for the next generation of women. In order to do that, and to ensure that young women go out into the world ready and confident to take on the challenges and inequities they still face, the case for girls having the opportunity to be educated separately remains strong. Paulinas, in those same formative years, are laying down foundations of confidence about their intrinsic worth and ability which are not being modulated or diluted, however unconsciously, by marginalising or stereotyped attitudes to women and girls, by being photographed next to a boy who looks ahead as she looks at him, by attitudes so deep-seated and long-standing that they soundlessly permeate the very walls of the institution.

Taking a step back as an educator and looking at provision both nationally and internationally, I think the most important things of all are that there should be consistency of quality and diversity of choice for parents. No school deserves to continue just because it’s a girls’ school, if what it offers is not providing the best for the children. Schools that know what they are and what they do well, that are distinctive and coherent in their ethos and values, allow parents and children to make informed decisions for the future. That choice requires the schools to help by being very clear about what they are as well as what they are not, helping parents cut through any hearsay and mythology and see the school as clearly and truthfully as possible. As the October trees blew about on Brook Green, and with the elegant facade of the French school opposite becoming more visible as the brown leaves curled and fell, I would find myself looking out of the study window thinking through all this afresh, as I prepared to describe the culture of St Paul’s to prospective parents. It was autumn and therefore the season when parents would be spending their Saturdays doing the rounds of the London schools: the first stage of the eleven-plus entry process that would take their children to new senior schools the following September.

Open days were very important to us, not simply because we needed to set out our stall and make sure there were going to be sufficient applicants of the right calibre for the hundred-plus places we would offer after the entrance exam in January (contrary to popular myth, St Paul’s is by no means the most heavily oversubscribed school in London, perhaps partly as a result of its forbidding academic reputation) but also because with so much misinformation out there, we were on a mission to get the school properly understood.

Looking back, and perhaps ironically, I never felt it necessary to make a particular point about St Paul’s being a girls’ school. You surely felt the special power of confident but unparaded female capability the minute you stepped through the doors: the school in all its distinctive individuality largely spoke for itself, as all schools must do. At the same time I would try to explode some of the myths: we were not a hothouse where we were boiling up the girls to the highest temperature to pass exams – we were providing an exciting environment for learning, with teachers who were leaders in their field, still learning themselves; we were not negligent about the girls’ happiness and well-being but put that at the heart of their education by getting to know them as individuals, encouraging independence while at the same time building a sense of community and mutual responsibility. Whatever your prejudices, I told them, leave those at the door and look at the school with fresh eyes so that you can make up your own mind.

Naturally enough, the school spoke most powerfully not through messages delivered by me, or by the senior staff, however carefully composed and genuinely meant, but simply through the personalities of the girls themselves: articulate, enthusiastic, confident, authentic and bubbling over with pride to show the visitors their school. Being a girls’ school is simply one facet – albeit an important one – of the unique character of St Paul’s and that is expressed most tellingly and persuasively through the individuals that shape and are shaped by it. I believe in parents and their children having choice and here, for the right girl, was one distinctive and compelling one, spread out to be looked at, to taste and wonder at, and if the affinity was really there, of which to become a part.

So, when parents asked me, as they often did, to help them weigh up the pros and cons of single-sex versus co-ed for their daughter, as if there was a right answer, I would encourage them to think not in binary terms but about the particular ethos of each of the schools they were considering. For any parent, choosing a school for your child feels a momentous decision. And although there will be many aspects which can be rationally assessed – academic standards, provision for sport or the creative arts, location, single sex or co-ed, size of school – the most important consideration of all is what I would call alignment of values. To put it simply, will you feel comfortable leaving your child in the care of those people all day (or all term, or for five to seven years?). Are their values your values? Does it feel right? Better sometimes to set aside the rational considerations, stop overthinking it and just listen to that simple gut instinct about whether you and the school to which you are thinking of entrusting your child see the world in the same way.

All that said, and while I believe that excellent education comes in many forms, there is still a vital, contemporary role for girls’ schools. Caricaturing them in a sentimental way because they represent a certain tradition or because they evoke a kind of Daisy Pulls It Off nostalgia may be amusing but it obscures what they are there to achieve in today’s world. They are important because they anticipate what we hope and believe will be the future for women: breathing the clear blue air of their capability without a thought to any limitation born of gender. So while the society into which young people emerge remains as unequal in its attitudes and opportunities as it still – sadly, shockingly – is, there will continue to be a role for girls’ schools to concentrate on developing resilient, clever, capable young women to take on the pressure and change it. So far from their being an anachronism, in fact, it turns out that girls’ schools are ahead of their time – the problem is that society isn’t quite ready for the young women educated in them. There is an argument about adapting to the realities, and I am thoughtful when people say that girls need to get used to the ‘real world’ that is out there. But how long are we going to wait before the gender pay gap is closed, or the excellent work of the 30% Club is replaced by the achievements of the 50% Club? Schools are not there merely to prepare young people to conform to society: they are about the future. The role of schools is to shape change. I don’t believe that learning to ‘adapt’ earlier – which all too often means learning how to play nicely, avoid appearing too clever, succeed by flirting and conform to male expectations of what you will be good at – is, in the long term, what girls should be doing.

Emerging from a culture as empowering for girls as St Paul’s may be a shock. But I like it that Paulinas are shocked at what they find. They should be. If they are not being accorded equal treatment, taken advantage of as ‘diligent’ rather than brilliant by being given the dull but necessary work on which their male colleagues build their success (as one young alumna described her life at a well-known investment bank), balancing on their heels at the edge of the pub conversation about rugby and cars while the boys network their way to promotion, then I want them to be shocked. I want them not to be ready for that and I don’t want them to adapt. I want their secure sense of self and their deep confidence in their own capability, developed brick-by-rose-coloured brick at school, to give them the courage and clarity to drive change.

But it’s time to talk about the other 50 per cent of humanity – the men. I want to reassure the men reading this book (I hope you’re out there still and haven’t rushed off to do the online shop or finish the vacuuming) that the answer is certainly not to demonise the male sex and hold them generally responsible for all the inequalities that women face. I admit we indulged in some affectionate teasing behind closed doors at St Paul’s – as I’m sure happened too at our expense across the river – but seriously, we have to guard against slipping into lazy caricature here. In our zeal to make society more equal, we women would do well to keep in mind that alienating men is not going to help us. There is a particular problem for the many enlightened men in the world who actually get all of this completely, because perhaps unavoidably they end up having to share responsibility for the legacy of prejudice and unfairness that women have faced for so long. But the result is that many of them, great modern sons, husbands and fathers who support and respect the women in their lives totally, need to feel they have a role and a voice. Why shut them out? They can’t help us if they are castigated for just being men. Driving the important changes must come through cooperation, with men and women acknowledging the issues and working together, not in opposition.

Which brings me to Dads4Daughters and why we launched an initiative at St Paul’s to harness historic male advantage and make it work for us, and why the dads loved it.

A few years ago I became aware of the United Nation’s campaign HeForShe through a powerful speech given by actress Emma Watson. HeForShe is a call to action for men and women and challenges one half of humanity – men – to get behind the inequalities of opportunity faced by women in society and unite with women to bring about change. This simple but crucial idea of unity rather than opposition struck me as having a very particular application in a girls’ school where, often, young women are being endorsed and supported in their education by their fathers who have been part of the decision to send them there. Putting it simply, if you are the father of a clever daughter, you are certainly not going to choose St Paul’s unless you believe in female empowerment. So snatching the term almost out of the air I chose my valedictory address to the leavers and their parents to launch our own version of the UN campaign, calling it Dads4Daughters.

We started by inviting fathers to write guest articles for our fortnightly newsletter about their view from the workplace and this produced an enthusiastic response. Through it we learned not just about the problems but about various very effective practices – for example reverse mentoring, where an older man is mentored by a less experienced, younger woman who is able to help him look critically at his behaviour towards female colleagues and call him out for evidence of bias that may be so ingrained that it’s unconscious. She will check his use of language (grown-up women don’t like being referred to as girls or being described as ‘feisty’), his assumptions about gender roles (women are not automatically better at making tea or taking notes) and will help him see the world more clearly from the female perspective. The father who described this process called it ‘the best professional development I have ever had’. Not because he was rampantly prejudiced – far from it – but because it made him so much more aware of his own behaviour.

The survey of our alumnae in the 25–35 age group produced the shocking finding that well over 75 per cent had encountered or been aware of workplace prejudice. At our launch event in school, we looked at the findings and heard the personal experiences of some of them as well as some fathers. It was wonderful to see how many fathers wanted to come into school for this event, with their daughters, and spend time talking about a matter of such importance to them both. This was a new alignment; fathers loved having a reason to spend time with their daughters, we found – we were tapping into something they really cared about.

Further, it was surprising to discover that many men who had become fathers had never been asked about it in their workplace and this cataclysmic event in a couple’s life was seen as solely the experience – and the responsibility – of the mother. No one wondered if they had had enough sleep or needed some flexibility to assist with childcare. Becoming a dad just wasn’t a thing. Dads4Daughters was morphing into Daughters4Dads – a new awareness of the role of the father in his daughter’s life. By now we were also thinking much more broadly about parenthood and its value. It was listening to a talk by St Paul’s alumna Annie Auerbach of the company Starling, who ‘solve business problems through cultural insight’, that I began to see how being a parent, far from undermining your ability to be a professional, could actually enhance it. Parents, Annie explained to the audience, leaning forward in her even, modern, graciously unassailable way, are not just resilient and adaptable; they have stamina, they are problem-solvers, they have patience, they are lateral-thinkers and they are expert in seeing things from someone else’s point of view. Who wouldn’t want these qualities in their boss or their subordinate? It’s time we saw being a parent – whether father or mother – as something to be proud of, adding to our humanity and capability, adding to our professional value too, rather than something to apologise for or be silent about as if it had nothing to do with the people we are when we go to work.

The power of the intergenerational blood tie that Dads4Daughters unlocked is of course nothing new. I’ve since read a number of studies underlining the powerful effect that having daughters has on a man’s decision-making at work. For example, Iris Bohnet in her book What Works: Gender Equality by Design cites a study showing that male CEOs with daughters are much more likely to promote women into higher levels of management. So there may still be a long way to go, but regardless of any formal initiative, fathers of daughters can lead the way in encouraging greater workplace equality. And what better place to start than the fathers of daughters at girls’ schools? The answer has to be for men and women to work together on this: for men to use their influence to effect change and to make equality normal. It isn’t a women’s issue any more, it’s an issue for society as a whole, and I feel very optimistic that the rising generation will get over the adversarial attitudes of the past and bring about real change.

Nothing stands still and the advent of new thinking about gender has made the debate more complex still: what about the future of girls’ schools in a world where your gender is a matter of choice? Over a period of several months during 2017, as more and more articles appeared in the press telling the personal stories of individuals who had transitioned and giving accounts of students confronting nonplussed authorities about perceptions of gender, their right to adopt gender-neutral pronouns and their demand for gender-neutral bathrooms, it became clear that we had our own gender conversation emerging within the school. Although at that time the issue did not yet seem to be exercising schools all over the country (at the national conference for deputy head teachers the question was greeted with bewilderment by some colleagues), the London schools were seeing their own first cases of individuals either transitioning or requesting non-binary identities to be respected. This was an entirely new minefield for a school to navigate. Exploration of sexuality was one thing, and in a thoughtful, tolerant and liberal school, something which had long been acknowledged as a life issue and did not normally cause great difficulty if it needed to be discussed. The St Paul’s students had their own (then) LGBT society whose meetings were advertised in morning assembly. But the concept of gender identity was something quite new. How to harness the natural appetite of bright students to discuss and debate the issue, to care for the needs of individuals with a genuine personal quest or dilemma and all that went with that in terms of family attitudes, how to steer a steady course within the realism of the law as it affected our status as a gender-specific school and how not to be derailed by a potential ‘trans-trender’ element who might see this as a new and exciting way to create turbulence and challenge the conservatism of an older generation? It was an interesting management challenge.

As with any emerging issue the most important thing was to get onto the front foot by initiating discussion with the students myself before the topic was brought to me. In consultation with the senior leadership team, we therefore identified a small group of senior students for whom this was a personal issue and with whom I was confident I could have a conversation that would not just be about them as individuals, but also about how we might shape wider policy on gender identity within the school. Staff too were beginning to express the need for guidance about how they should manage students who were asking to use a different name or pronoun, and nobody wanted to get this wrong. We needed a strategy. As so often, I was impressed at once by the thoughtfulness and maturity of this group of seventeen-year-olds and with the help of some legal advice to give clarity, over two or three meetings we drew up a gender identity protocol. The aim was to provide a framework for discussion where an individual expressed a desire to adopt a different gender identity, setting out the responsibilities of the school to respect the welfare and needs of the individual, while managing expectations in terms of what was formally possible: exam entries, for example, would be made in the registered name of the student rather than the adopted name. The key provision, however, was that a student over sixteen who was deemed to have sufficient self-knowledge and maturity and for whom the request could be shown to have some endurance could, after consultation (including with parents, though the students were initially reluctant about this), be recognised as having a different or non-binary gender within the school.

I was aware at the time that we were dealing with a topic of public significance where policy would move quickly as case law developed, and we would need to revisit our protocol before long to keep in step. This was only a starting point. It was also apparent that this issue had the potential to give rise to another beautiful and unique St Paul’s fudge: just as we had a secular foundation while much enjoying singing hymns, so we would be a girls’ school while accommodating some senior students who would never dream of changing school (perish the thought!) but who no longer wanted to be thought of as girls. At the time our protocol was published, we were hailed as having done something revolutionary in bringing gender identity to the surface and allowing gender choice. But it was much simpler than that: we had just enlisted the support of the students to tackle a new issue on which they were well informed and thus, with the contemporary perspective and longer experience combined, created a policy. There is no knowing what my own headmistress would have thought about gender identity, though I remembered how over a much less significant issue some forty years earlier, she had taught me the importance of listening to your students, taking them seriously and giving real value to their opinions. Of course, the possibility of this highly personal and sensitive subject being raised and discussed in a mature way depended on trust and respect. I firmly believe that it was our particular character of openness as a girls’ school that made this potentially difficult conversation possible.