Notre Dame as it stands must go down in flames if it is to have any future at all

Michelle Watt, chair of Glasgow’s Notre Dame High School parent council defends the school’s indefensible “girls-only at public expense” policy in a manner which would make even today’s politicians blush.

The only reason Notre Dame’s “many girls hold shared beliefs” (as Watt claims) is because the more “traditional” parents of other religions send their daughters to it in order to segregate them from boys without having to go private. Half of Notre Dame’s pupils are Muslim in this supposed Catholic school.

When your plate of councilchampioned chauvinism is looking annually more empty as more parents eschew faith schools as regressive, a little misogyny on the public purse helps justify one’s existence, doesn’t it?

Twenty-three years ago, headmistress Dianne Gardner said bluntly that her own girls-only Wellington School at Ayr, must “adapt or die!” Like any good historian, she’d read the signs, and despite the spluttered G&TS of outraged parents, time proved her right: the Carleton Turrets cadre went coed and flourished whilst many others – private and state alike – vanished.

Eighty-five per cent of single-sex schools have closed in the last 40 years, according to educational book publisher Bibliotech. In Glasgow alone, Westbourne, Park and Laurel Bank schools all bit the dust in just ten years – 1991, 1996 and 2001. Watt’s “important values upheld by an all-girls’ school ethos” are absurd in the year girls-only Craigholme has been forced to merge with Kelvinside (once boys only) and Fernhill School scrapped the ludicrous policy only a few years ago after coming within a whisker of bankruptcy.

In all three cases they tried having their cake and eating it by being coed only at primary level – it failed. Regression on the rates makes mockery of our political classes’ platitudes of a gender and culture blind society of equal opportunity. I’ve a hunch the bells are tolling for Notre Dame’s “more equal than others” status.

MARK BOYLE Linn Park Gardens, Johnstone, Renfrewshire