Where the boys aren't

EVA SALINAS

Sept. 03, 2008 03:36 PM EDT

It's day two of the fall open house at Branksome Hall in Toronto, and judging by the groups of enthusiastic parents surrounding school staff and parent ambassadors, all is well at this 104-year-old private school.

All-girls schools

A 16-year-old student sketches during art class at the Linden School in Toronto. The school is aiming to be an alternative to both the public system and the single-sex system based on the traditional British private school model.

All-girls schools

A 16-year-old student sketches during art class at the Linden School in Toronto. The school is aiming to be an alternative to both the public system and the single-sex system based on the traditional British private school model.

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Shalesh and Anuja Sharma, whose five-year-old daughter Lalana is already enrolled in a public school, are considering moving her into Branksome's all-girls program.

"We want our daughter to study in an environment where gender is taken out of the equation," Mr. Sharma explains. "[In co-ed schools] they limit themselves."

Sitting with a group of more than 40 parents, the Sharmas listen while school administrators espouse the virtues an all-girl environment can instill in their daughters.

At Branksome Hall, they say, the emphasis is on developing the three Cs: confidence, connectedness and competence.

These same characteristics easily define the state of the all-girl educational system in Canada. In contrast to some all-boys schools that have gone co-ed in the past, especially in their secondary component, all-girls private schools remain steadfastly popular, with no decline in sight.

Proof of the growing interest in female learning styles is in the success of the Linden School, a non-traditional, all-girls school that opened to 37 students in Toronto in 1993. Today the school has a population of 140 students, in grades 1 through 12, and boasts a student-teacher ratio of 10 to 1.

Learning at Linden differs from other schools, not only in its girl-centred philosophy but also in the close relationships between students and staff and even the physical setup of the school, says co-principal Dawn Chan.

For example, students call teachers by their first names, and hands-on science labs are set up in "pods," with the students facing each other.

Linden administrator Alana Bell says parents are actively seeking this kind of learning environment for their daughters.

"We're still living in a world where it's not a level playing field with girls and boys," she says. "Women have made all kinds of progress over the century but there's still progress to be made and I think parents are conscious of that."

Linden officials predict that unless their school expands, they will have to put potential students on a waiting list.

"We're in a position where we're going to have to keep expanding and change our physical space because we are just about to burst," says Ina Szekely, another co-principal.

Judging by its growth, and the enthusiasm of its students whether at play in a gym class or deep in concentration in an art class, the Linden School is meeting a demand for an alternative to both the public system and the single-sex system based on the British private school model.

"It's not based on centuries of tradition, it's a very different thing that we're building here," says Ms. Szekely. "It doesn't feel like that sort of old fusty thing of the past, it feels like a place of the future."

Jim Christopher, executive director of the Canadian Association of Independent Schools, says the demand for all-female education is strong across the country.

"For the most part, all of the major schools that have gone co-ed have been boys schools, primarily boys boarding schools, and the girls schools have continued to, especially in the urban areas, be very successful and very popular," he says.

"Girls schools have been flourishing in the last generation or 25 years, in a way I think 25 years ago no one would have imagined," agrees Ruth Ann Penny, director of admissions at Branksome Hall.

"We measure that by interest in enrolment, which has never flagged. It continues to grow and grow," she says.

Toronto alone is home to four traditional all-female private schools, all with a sizable day-school population and three offering boarding.

But with fears in both the public and private school systems of decreased enrolment as the overall school-age population is expected to shrink, Ms. Penny says Branksome Hall is taking careful steps to make sure it holds its ground.

"We have steadily increased the money allotted to marketing," she says. "The website's just gone kaboom, and we're spending more of our marketing dollar on face-to-face events, open houses, teas, luncheons."

Speaking about the four schools in Toronto, she adds: "All four of us, we're all building; we're all very alive and very vibrant. But with sliding demographics, you have to be really articulate in who you are."

Bishop Strachan School, the oldest girl's school in Toronto and now home to 900 students, will celebrate a milestone birthday at the end of the year and is already looking to the future. "We're 140 years old. How are we going to be here 140 years from now?" asks principal Kim Gordon.

She says the idea of going co-ed or ridding the school of its boarding facilities is not part of the strategic plan for Bishop Strachan. However, like all-boys Upper Canada College, which announced earlier this month that it would phase out its nearly 200-year-old boarding program while increasing financial aid in an effort to diversify its student population, Bishop Strachan is making diversity a priority.

In 1990, the school's boarding program had a population that was 52 per cent Canadian, Ms. Gordon says. Today that number is around 4 per cent, and the program is filled with students from 22 countries around the globe.

"Many of our girls come from large urban centres. They come from Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Kiev, Mexico City," Ms. Gordon says. "Parents want their daughters to be safe. And so single-sex girls' schools appeal to parents who are a long way away from their daughters."

In fact, even for parents of girls who come home each night, safety is often cited as a reason why parents enroll their daughters in private schools — and it's a reason that may differ from all-boy or co-ed schools.

"Parents want to have a safe and secure environment for their daughter, which I wouldn't think would be as big a factor for parents of a boy," Mr. Christopher observes.

Back at Branksome Hall, Ms. Penny agrees with the interest in safety but says the appeal in all-female learning has progressed, from being a trend to a conscious choice for tailored learning.

She attributes the change in approach to the accumulated body of research in all-female student learning.

Since American psychologist Carol Gilligan's pioneering research about girls' development was published in 1982 (In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development), literature on the subject has had an increasing influence on parents' decisions, Ms. Penny says.

"It's not just intuition, there's actually solid neurology. But the similar body of research on boys' schools is very young; no one's been doing that very long," she adds.

"Twenty-five years ago, girls' schools were not about the feminist agenda or building confidence and competence," Ms. Penny says. "And they were not so much about student women in leadership positions and promoting athletics among women and all of these things that they are now."

Special to The Globe and Mail

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