Comprehensive Re-Organisation: Debating Single‐Sex and Mixed Education in Wiltshire 1967–1985.

Comprehensive re-organisation largely swept away single-sex secondary education in the state maintained sector in England and Wales. Literature suggests this occurred with little discussion. Single-sex versus mixed education was debated as part of Wiltshire education committee's re-organisation of the Trowbridge and Salisbury girls' high schools as mixed comprehensive schools. At Trowbridge, the headmistress raised questions that led the local authority to poll parents' views on single-sex versus mixed education. In Salisbury, two families appealed to the European Commission on Human Rights on the grounds that they had been denied freedom of choice to send their children to the city's single-sex grammar schools. In both cases, power relations of policy-making located debate about single-sex education secondary to other considerations and worked to erase the issue from the historical record. At Trowbridge, this was to the detriment of single-sex education, whereas at Salisbury it supported the retention of single-sex education.