Prior Park to go c o-e d' by 1986

by Peter Stanford PRIOR Park College, Bath, is to become the first fully coeducational Catholic public school in the country by 1986 it was announced this week.
The school, which was handed over by the Christian Brothers to lay management in September 1981, will admit eleven-plus day girls from September 1985, and thirteen-plus boarding girls from the following year.
It is anticipated that there will eventually be equal numbers of boys and girls at the school. To accommodate the new female boarders, the Christian Brothers, who have retained their national headquarters at the college, will give their house to the school, and plan to transfer their base to the north, where the majority of their activities are now located.
The headmaster, Mr P F Tobin, stressed this week that the plans to take girls was not a defensive move taken in light of falling numbers. There had been a substantial increase in pupils since 1981 he pointed out, and added that the school was aiming to provide "a different type of education".
Some reservations had been expressed among parents, particularly of older boys, who had initially sent their son to a single sex, Christian Brothers school, Mr Tobin admitted, but he emphasised that the trustees, who include old boys, Bishop Cormac Murphy-O'Connor of Arundel and Brighton, Archbishop Ward of Cardiff, and Bishop Mervyn Alexander of Clifton, had warmly approved the decision, as had the Christian Brothers themselves.
Several Catholic boys' public schools have experimented in the past with taking girls into the sixth form.
At their annual conference this week, the Girls' Schools Association raised their voice in protest at this practice. Miss Freda Kellett, President of GSA, said; "there is real anguish about this in the girls schools. Parents imagine that if their girls go to a big public school, then that is the best thing for them in the sixth form. But in fact they will be at a disadvantage!
Miss Kellett's views were echoed by Sr Mary Francis Wood CRSS, Headmistress of New Hall School, Chelmsford, and a member of GSA. Statistics proved, she said, that girls do less well academically in a mixed sixth form, than in a single sex school. Those boys' schools which offered girls a place at this stage were not truly coeducational, she went on, because they remained maleorientated and dominated, with only a small minority of girls.