After 135 years of being a single-sex school for boys, St Joseph’s secondary school in Fairview made a historic shift in 2023, opening its doors to girls for the first time.
Now, two years on, the first mixed cohort in the school is preparing to sit their Junior Certificate.
Of the 310 junior cycle students (first to third year) at St Joseph’s, 117 are boys and 71 are girls.
Carly Nolan was among the first group of girls to join the school in 2023. Now in third year, she enjoyed being one of a few girls within her year group.
“I felt special, because there was only like, 13 girls,” she says.
[ Girls and boys cross decades-long gender divides as single-sex schools go mixedOpens in new window ]
She feels that being in a mixed school means there’s “not as much drama as there would be in an all-girls school”.
Her classmate, Sean McInerney Radford, agrees. “I suppose it could be more drama in an all-girls school. In all-boys schools there might be more fights.”
Both students went to single-sex schools for primary school, but were relatively unfazed by the transition to a mixed school.
“It was a bit different [from primary school], but I didn’t mind it,” says Carly.
Second-year student Shreedha Akula, who also went to a single-sex primary school, shares a similar view.
“I didn’t really care. It was just the same, it wasn’t that crazy,” she says.
Meanwhile, first-year student Alex Halal, who has just started first year in the school, says being in a co-ed school felt “weird” at first.
“Just seeing boys [in school] was normal,” he says. However, since settling into secondary school, he has made friends with both boys and girls.
St Joseph’s, founded as a Christian Brothers school in 1888, has seen a series of transformations in recent years. Now under the trusteeship of the Edmund Rice Schools Trust, it is part of the P-Tech programme, an industry-led initiative that integrates academic learning with real-world skills in technology and coding. Students at the school have been able to complete internships in companies such as IBM, Cisco and Irish Water.
“It’s actually really exciting,” says principal Alexandra Duane. “If you do P-Tech all the way to sixth year, you’re getting a QQI level six, which is obviously higher than your Leaving Cert.”
Deputry principal Ciara Dowling, right, with students Alex Halal, Darci Hynes and Carly Nolan, at St Joseph’s, Fairview, Dublin
Deputy principal Ciara Dowling says opportunities to engage with Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) was “one of our big selling points” for prospective students.
“The whole purpose really is to bridge the gap for disadvantaged students that wouldn’t have access to these work placements,” she says.
Technology has proven to be a particularly popular subject across the board.
“The girls love technology,” says Dowling. “The stereotype isn’t right.”
Duane says when she was a student in a single-sex secondary school, subject choices were more limited.
“Where I went, we had home ec[onomics], and music and arts and whatever, but I would have loved to do something like technical graphics, which was in the boys school down the road, and same with technology,” she says. “The whole model is inclusivity.”
The school has been able to offer spots in special classes to autistic girls in the area.
“There’s not many places around here that would have a special class that’s a co-ed school or a girls’ school,” says Duane.
Both boys and girls in the school have been enjoying extracurricular activities such as a drama club, a craft club, coding club and Lego club.
Sports is “kind of an awkward area” for mixed schools, says Dowling. “A lot of the sports don’t offer mixed teams.”
“There are some mixed sports, so we do mixed tag rugby, and then we have separate girls’ and boys’ teams … but in an ideal world we would like to have them playing mixed sports.”
Many parents in the area have welcomed the shift to coeducation.
Sean McInerney Radford and Shreedha Akula
Although Ireland has a high proportion of all-boys and all-girls schools compared with other European countries, a 2024 study by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) found that a large majority of secondary school students want to attend mixed schools, and only a small minority in single-sex schools prefer it that way.
Fewer than 20 per cent of students in single-sex schools said they preferred their school’s gender composition, compared with almost 90 per cent in coeducational schools.
When asked whether they would prefer mostly single-sex schools or mostly coeducational schools across the education system as a whole, a preference for coeducational schools emerged, with 61 per cent of students favouring mostly or all coeducational schools.
Just 5 per cent preferred mostly single-sex schools, while about a third stated a preference for an equal number of each type.