It’s a blustery Saturday in June and Worcester Woman, that middle-Englander beloved of pollsters, is out in force. More than 500 middle-class, mostly middle-aged women, have packed Worcester Cathedral to say an emotional goodbye to a girls’ school that most of them have not visited in decades. After 124 years, the city’s leading girls’ independent school, Alice Ottley, is closing, and in September it will merge with the co-educational Royal Grammar School, next door.
The address by the Venerable Dr Joy Tetley, a member of the school’s governing council, talks about the excitement of a new beginning, but acknowledges the “anger and bewilderment” lurking below the surface of what’s been billed as a “service of thanksgiving and celebration”. It feels like being present at the uncomfortable family party to celebrate a shotgun marriage. This merger is one of economic necessity, as the Alice Ottley, with just 400 pupils, is not a viable long-term business. This outcome is the best one for the school - the site can be kept intact, and 300 of the girls and some of the teachers will transfer to the optimistically named Royal Grammar School and the Alice Ottley School (RGSAO).
The Alice Ottley is my old school, and I have travelled from London to say goodbye. In some ways it is odd that I feel strongly enough to come: I arrived here at 13, in 1980, and fought futile adolescent battles against its strict rules and high Anglican ethos. Everything was strictly controlled. The then-headmistress censored all books and magazines that came into the school - our library copies of Paris Match looked like sewing patterns, with holes cut out where she had removed all “unsuitable” material. We had to wear hats all year round - little blue caps in winter and blue boaters in summer. We had brown indoor sandals and black outdoor lace-up shoes, and until the age of 13, the girls wore blue Victorian smocks over their uniform at all times. “Coming out” of the smock, at the start of the upper fourth (year 9) caused huge excitement.
This strict atmosphere could be linked directly back to the school’s foundation in 1883 as Worcester Girls’ High School by a charismatic Anglo-Catholic called Alice Ottley (the school was renamed in 1914, after Ottley’s death). Her “first brood” was just 11 girls but within two years she had enrolled 125 girls in her school.
Alice Ottley commanded audiences with the rich and influential. Charles Dodgson was a family friend and visited the school, telling stories to the little ones under his nom de plume of Lewis Carroll. But as Gillian Avery recounts in her book The Best Type of Girl: A History of Girls’ Independent Schools, the Worcester school was always different from other 19th-century high schools, many of which were non-sectarian, and offered a forward-looking education. Ottley tried to shape “gracious young women” and put prayer at the heart of the school day.
Despite my battles with authority I had some marvellous teachers, got excellent exam results and made lifelong friends - among them the deputy head of a primary school, City and law professionals, and a successful artist. When news of the merger broke in December 2006, we all felt unexpectedly uncomfortable and sad. It feels odd to know that the largely unchanged world of this small universe is about to be disrupted, its rhythms and rituals and smells and memories cast aside.
So my friends and I have come to the cathedral, where we say the Tuesday prayer, “for those who have gone forth from this school”. I had forgotten that girls in Worcester had been praying for me every Tuesday for the past 22 years. But it feels good to remember this little detail of the quotidian life of the school.
As the service winds up, many women are close to tears as we belt out the Latin school song. “Candida Recta” is a surprisingly catchy number, describing the maidens of the school as lilies, pure and upright in the cornfields.
This song has had no place in the school for many years, but bringing it out for a last airing by the Old Girls is a potent reminder of the school’s heyday. In the 1980s this was a big school, some 700-strong. Most were day girls, like me, but there were four boarding houses, and the headmistress lived on the site, so the school always had a homely, permanent, feel. The school - which modernised dramatically in the 1990s - boomed until recent years, when competition from the Royal Grammar School and the King’s School, two former boys’ schools that had become mixed, sealed its fate. Another Worcestershire girls’ school, Malvern Girls’ College, last year merged with another girls’ school to become Malvern St James.
This is a local story, but it’s also part of a slow societal shift away from girls-only schools and colleges. Many former boys’ schools are now successful co-eds, and it’s starting to hit some girls’ schools, although the current Girls’ Schools Association still has a healthy membership of 200. In the past five years, three GSA schools have shut down and five more have had to opt for mergers. Two schools are also planning to enter the state sector as single-sex city academies.
Sitting in her spacious study, the AO’s smart, forthright Scottish headteacher, Morag Chapman, explains how her academically successful school was doomed by the changing pattern of family life: “I am a great believer in the benefits of single-sex education for girls. But the principle of single-sex schools is coming low down after convenience for many families - they want one carol service, the same term dates, and they want to drop their children off at the same place. More and more families have both parents working and they need that convenience.”
Chapman is leaving the school this summer - she is taking time off after a 20-year career in girls’ schools. She has been only the sixth headteacher at the school. Her portrait now hangs alongside those of the others in the school hall. “I fully expect it to stay there,” she says, wryly. There are plans to put plaques with names and dates under each portrait, so these doughty women are not forgotten.
Walking around the grounds on a normal school day a few weeks before it closed was an odd experience. Notices on the walls advertised cut-price uniform - school logo sweatshirts were down from £15 to £7. A delegation from the Royal Grammar School was wandering about with Alice Ottley staff, deciding how the space should be carved up in September. The lacrosse sticks still hanging up in the main corridor are a reminder of the school’s long association with this quintessential girls’ school sport. The existing RGS girls play hockey.
If many parents believe girls’ schools no longer fit in with modern life, why should we regret their disappearance? One of the less-discussed aspects of the demise of female-dedicated schools and colleges is the gap it leaves where a shared history and special atmosphere has been. Archives don’t tell the whole story, as the rituals and atmosphere of each place are fragile and living micro-climates.
The women’s colleges at Oxford and Cambridge were among the great triumphs of the education pioneers, but the last women’s college at Oxford, the Dorothea Beale-founded St Hilda’s, is to admit male undergraduates from 2008. Cambridge still offers a choice - it has three women’s colleges - New Hall, Lucy Cavendish and Newnham. Because its constitution differs from that at Oxford - with more autonomy for each college - it has proved easier for the women’s colleges to maintain their independence.
I went to see the distinguished historian Dr Gillian Sutherland at Newnham College, to talk about what makes women’s spaces special - and what we might lose if they all disappear. Sutherland has written about the founders of Newnham, Anne Jemima Clough and Henry Sidgwick, and their influential educational circle, and is also expert in the modern pressures on girls-only schools, as chair of governors at the independent Perse Girls’ School in Cambridge.
Unlike many women’s colleges, which are traditionally stuck on the margins of towns (often to keep the women away from the corrupting influence of young men), Newnham is at the heart of Cambridge student life. Walking with Sutherland in the college grounds, I was struck by how students and staff alike greeted each other warmly by their first names. Sutherland says this informality is one of the most important qualities of a predominantly female space. “We only get formal in meetings, whereas it is very common in mixed, erstwhile male colleges to have a sharper sense of hierarchy in social relations. Here there are no ‘gentlemen’s club rules’ about not talking about politics, and conversations can range all over the place.”
Sutherland admits that the women’s colleges would like to be able to admit more first-preference candidates - about a third of Newnham’s students initially applied for mixed colleges. But, Sutherland says, once they arrive at Newnham their attitude changes. “We take the view that a Cambridge place is a Cambridge place, and undergraduates enjoy being in this environment. They are part of a mixed university and just across the road are the main arts faculties.” Women’s colleges also offer the chance for female academics to hold senior positions. “The proportion of women in senior positions within the wider university is still tiny.”
Importantly, Newnham provides a friendly base that is also a springboard to the wider community. “I have had it said to me that the inward-lookingness of some of the mixed colleges, especially the smaller ones, can be claustrophobic. They assume they can supply their own social life for 300 students and that can be fine - but do you really want to confront at breakfast the person you had a blazing row with the night before?”
With maturity, I see the importance of this point. At 18 I was determined to enter a mixed college at Oxford, to leave the “stigma” of a secluded education behind me. Once there, I found myself out-talked by young men, left under-confident by my male tutors, and now have only one good (female) friend from that time. My social life was built around my college boyfriend, and the friends we shared. When we finished, it finished. My schoolfriends, on the other hand, are still part of my life.
Interestingly, Sutherland is taking the skills developed in girls’ schools into a mixed environment. At Perse Girls’ (ranked 14th in the country by the FT) the school for 11- to 16-year-olds will remain single-sex but a new mixed sixth form is being developed on a separate site. Sutherland contends that girls’ schools have a style that has much to offer in a successful mixed school. ”There are things that girls’ schools do well - they promote individual learning, they don’t regiment, they are good at listening.”
Even so, the Stephen Perse Sixth Form College is a bold venture: “Translating what is good about a girls’ school to a mixed environment is almost unheard of,” says Sutherland. She and her team have recruited an ex-deputy headmaster of a former boys’ school as a consultant because, “we didn’t know enough about a good mixed sixth form - although that’s not something boys’ schools ever worry about when they set themselves up as co-ed!”
But what’s happening at the Perse school is heartening - if co-education is on the increase, haven’t the women who run girls’ schools got just as much to offer as the men who run boys’ schools?
At the Alice Ottley School, I talk to a group of senior girls about the changes. Biddy Briggs, in year 10, says: “We have learnt about the history of the school, and I hope children are still taught that.” She’s glad that she’s made “strong friendships with girls” and we all agree that this is one of the huge pluses of the girls-only environment.
Brogan Simpson, the deputy head girl, adds: “I feel at home here. Girls’ education suits us, but I know it isn’t for everyone.” In fact, all the girls are keen on the principle of single-sex education and, while upbeat about the new mixed school, all insist they would choose girls’ schools for their own daughters. I suggest they might change their minds once they have their own children - after all, if all ex-pupils of girls’ schools thought like these young women do now, there wouldn’t be a problem keeping this school open.
Or they might grow up to feel (as I do) that it’s more important for children to feel part of their immediate community. We live in inner London and my world feels vastly different from the overwhelmingly white environs of Worcestershire. My daughter is at our local inner-London primary school, where the pupils come from many ethnic and social backgrounds.
The summer term has now finished at Alice Ottley. The school ended its independent days with formal prizegiving, followed by a big party for all the girls. With the summer holidays under way, a couple of gateways will be knocked through the wall that has separated boys and girls for more than a century. Generations of girls had dreamt about that miraculous development, as they threw notes over the high wall, or shouted to boys on the other side. Now the holes are about to become a reality, I can see why today’s pupils are hesitant.
Something precious - the informality, the friendliness, the calm - is lost every time the life of a dedicated women’s institution comes to an end. Perhaps the full importance of that loss, that silent void, will one day be fully recognised by the noisy, hierarchical, mixed world that rushes in to fill up the space.
