Belated International Women’s Day wishes!
On International Women’s Day (Thursday 8 March) communities around the world were encouraged to #PressForProgress in pursuit of gender equality and, as the UK also celebrated the centenary of women gaining the right to vote in February, we invited local Classworks Theatre group in to school to perform a special re-enactment – to students from Year 6 to the Upper Sixth – of a speech given by Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst in Cambridge in 1912.
The performance exposed some of the social injustices women faced in the early 1900s when compared with men at that time. After the performance, Mrs Kate Latham, Director of Teaching and Learning, reflected: “It’s always fascinating to see young people learning about how different life has been throughout history and especially important for them to understand and celebrate how much has been achieved. But we also take this time to remember that equality is not yet guaranteed – for many women and girls, globally as well as closer to home.”
So what is still to be done?
I wrote an article for Independent Education Today in which I considered some of the causes for the continuing gender pay gap, as well as urging readers to ‘take gender pay gap reporting with a pinch of salt‘. But even more fundamental than the pursuit of equal pay for women, should be the pursuit of equal access to education.
1. All girls must have equal access to an education
Boris Johnson is planning to announce a campaign in which he will call on 53 foreign ministers at the Commonwealth Summit to urge governments to prioritise education for girls by 2030 and, during a visit to a school coinciding with International Women’s Day last week, he highlighted that the 130 million girls globally not in school was the “biggest problem in the world” and needed to be solved to combat poverty and civil wars. He also said: “Teaching girls is a key thing … and in conflict zones girls are two and a half times more likely to be out of school than boys. Archaic groups like Boko Haram act with impunity kidnapping girls just because they want to learn.”
As the UN explains: “Education is the key that will allow many other Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be achieved. When people are able to get quality education they can break from the cycle of poverty. Education therefore helps to reduce inequalities and to reach gender equality. It also empowers people everywhere to live more healthy and sustainable lives. Education is also crucial to fostering tolerance between people and contributes to more peaceful societies.”
We are familiar with Malala Yousafzai’s remarkable story – as a child she was shot in the head for attending school in her home town but, thankfully, she has since been able to escape from Afghanistan to safety and schooling in Birmingham. Now reading PPE at Oxford University she is still finding the time to campaign in earnest for the rights of girls around the world to education and is working on a partnership with Apple to allow her Malala Fund to extend grants for secondary education to more than 100,000 girls. She is certainly an example of how education is the key that enables individuals to grow up and have an enormous positive impact on the achievement of the other SDGs!
But not all young people come through such attacks or overcome such hurdles to flourish in the same way as Malala has been able to, and neither is it only extremism and conflict that prevent girls from going to school. It may be a family’s need to have daughters using their time in other ways than attending school – perhaps working or supporting the family’s home life in some way; it may be that a family can’t afford to send all of their children to school and educating sons takes precedence over educating daughters; it may be that girls are simply missing school for a few days every month as a result of either a cultural belief about or lack of supplies or facilities to manage menstruation; or it may be that in some countries the education sector simply can’t keep up with the pace of population growth.
In countries such as the UK, where all children should be receiving a state-funded education at the very least, we still can’t boast a 100 percent success rate. There are children in this country for whom there is not the right sort of school place available. Think of children who self-exclude because of severe bullying and who are then reliant on charitable education providers to deliver an education within a context in which they can cope. Or think of children who, not enrolled in school, are supposed to be educated at home but may, in fact, suffer neglect. Or think of children who attend unregulated schools where dangerous doctrines are taught. There’s certainly much more to do until we can be confident that all children, at home and abroad, are able to access education.
That said, we are in a much better position in the UK and globally than we were many years ago. Our own school dates back more than 400 years and was founded by Mary Ward, who dedicated her life to providing educational opportunities for girls at a time when this went against the grain. She was the prototype early feminist, believing that “by God's grace, women in time to come will do much” and now we are a thriving school dedicated to serving the educational needs of young women.
2. All girls must have equal access to a high quality education
Once we can truly claim that equal access to education has been achieved, there will still be much more to do! We will still need to consider whether girls and boys are equally benefitting from the education they are receiving and, if not, what more can be done.
I wrote earlier this week for the Cambridge Independent responding to a Guardian blog about the reasons for the shortfall of women pursuing STEM subjects and careers (click here to read online on our website). The Guardian blog emphasised the differences between boys’ and girls’ attitudes to “social belongingness” – with teenagers prioritising pursuit of subjects that will be taken by more of their own gender; and “self-efficacy” – an individual’s belief in their own potential for success. As part of outlining what can be done to address the imbalance, including exposing young people to role models from different careers who go against traditional stereotypes, I highlighted how the learning environment of single-sex schools plays an important part in eliminating gender-based stereotypes about careers.
‘Social belongingness’ isn’t such a determining factor for girls considering which subjects to take at A Level in a single-sex school: they simply pursue any subject that interests them and don’t find themselves outnumbered by the opposite sex. We are also able to counter girls’ tendencies to lower their ‘self-efficacy’. Because implicit biases, which traditionally suggest that boys are more naturally ‘brilliant’ or capable than girls, form from the age of just six, we are able to focus on preventing self-doubt from being established and helping our students to recognise their capacity for excellence.
In fact we are passionate about doing so at St Mary’s School, Cambridge! Readers familiar with our school will know that this academic year we have embraced High Performance Learning (HPL) – a Teaching & Learning philosophy that is based on evidence of the brain being more plastic and malleable than traditionally thought. This philosophy fits integrally with our school ethos in terms of promoting the view that there is ‘room at the top’ for all, but it is also a very practical approach which equips students, teachers and parents with a toolkit to support progress. The philosophy identifies a group of Values, Attitudes and Attributes (VAAs) which can be thought of as learning behaviours, and Advanced Cognitive Performance characteristics (ACPs) which can be thought of as thinking skills, all of which are required for learners to achieve high performance – or ‘excellence’.
HPL Founder Professor Deborah Eyre has explained how delighted she is to be working with our school, particularly because she is interested in how beneficial the HPL philosophy will be in a single-sex environment. She is especially keen on the impact of HPL on girls and young women and, in the forthcoming issue of Accolade (our termly magazine), explains:
“Of great importance is the school’s role in leading thinking regarding girls and high performance, and leading a group of Girls’ Schools Association schools which are also adopting the philosophy. We know that the self-perception of girls is different from boys, and that these perceptions lead to both positive and negative issues. We are confident that HPL will assist girls!”
So we look forward to continuing to #PressForProgress as we support campaigns for all girls to have equal access to an education – but also, over the next 100 years, for all girls to have equal access to an excellent education.