Grammar Gazette- Issue 1, 2008

IN FOCUS

Girls Grammar to introduce Year 7

number of students per class in the junior school (Years 8–10) is set at 26 girls. In 2015 the Board has approved a reduction to a maximum of 24 girls. In senior classes numbers are already much smaller in many subjects. While the focus may appear to be on the introduction of Year 7 and developing curriculum, co-curriculum and student care programmes to specifically suit this cohort, the School is also thinking about the structure of Year 12. In 2020 most Year 12 girls will be eighteen—legally adults, able to vote and drive. It may be that the School provides an experience for them more akin to university than to traditional school models, with subject specific lectures and small group tutorials, timetabled to suit their needs. Already the café and refectory in the newly opened Cherrell Hirst Creative Learning Centre has an atmosphere similar to a university campus with staff and students sharing the same space, sitting, talking, eating together joined by visitors and parents—far different to the old-style school canteen or tuckshop. As planning for Year 7 continues the School will keep our community informed of progress on this exciting educational initiative in the history of Girls Grammar.

girls learn differently as they grow and can benefit from learning environments and teaching styles tailored to their gender. It is also well documented that teenaged girls’ self-esteem can diminish at puberty and with the average age for the onset of puberty dropping from approximately fourteen to eleven in the space of a generation, Girls Grammar, with its long history of specialising in educating adolescent girls is therefore well positioned to meet the needs of Year 7 girls in 2015 and beyond. It is interesting to note that in 1964 Brisbane Girls Grammar School undertook a similar initiative as a result of government imperatives and introduced Year 8. Then, as now, the School took a long-term planning view and the new cohort was absorbed seamlessly into the Grammar culture and educational environment. The addition of Year 7 in 2015 while adding another year level will not increase the total number of students in the School. In fact from 2011 the School will reduce numbers through natural attrition to accommodate the double intake of Years 7 and 8 which will uniquely occur in 2015 as the School transitions to six years of schooling. Currently the maximum

In February, the Chair of the Board, Ms Elizabeth Jameson, announced that Brisbane Girls Grammar School would introduce Year 7 in 2015 and since then our enrolments office has been overwhelmed by enquiries and applications from prospective families. Year 7 will provide girls with a transitional year prior to the traditional five years of secondary schooling. Schools in New South Wales and Victoria already follow this model with students completing six years of secondary education. The catalyst for the change was Education Queensland’s introduction of a preparatory year. The consequence of this for schools is that students will be older—by the time they reach Year 7 most girls will be turning thirteen and by Year 12 many will already have celebrated their eighteenth birthdays. This, coupled with the many requests received from enrolment families for the School to introduce lower (primary) year levels and Girls Grammar’s expertise and success in educating teenaged girls for the past 133 years, led to our planning initiative for Year 7. Support for single-sex education for primary school students has been growing with mounting neurological evidence suggesting that boys and

10 grammar gazette autumn 2008