As debates over same-sex education continued across the globe for a long time now, a particular school in Dien Chau Town in Vietnam’s central province of Nghe An have been implementing the practice for half a decade now and takes pride in the positive results of the program. Claiming that putting boys and girls in separate classes have resulted to significantly high academic standards than those belonging in co-ed classes, the Ngo Tri Hoa Private High School strongly believe in the benefits of single-sex classrooms.

Founded in 1998, the school began just like regular schools holding classes with mixed genders. In 2003, they had four classes and 240 students when their then school principal Dau Xuan Mai decided to establish separate classes for boys and girls. The decision came about after noticing that students admitted in the school often had low learning capacities, with some badly behaved, while others are too pre-occupied with boy-girl relationships to focus in the class.

As under the Vietnamese education system, students with good marks automatically makes it to State schools, Mai became even more determined to aim for more effective learning among the school’s enrollees. Setting up single-sex classes for both boys and girls also helped ensure security and order at the school. He took inspiration from single-gender schools in Canada and several other countries and from Vietnam’s Dong Khanh and Trung Vuong female schools as well. With careful research, along with the favorable outcome of the approach in schools implementing it, Mai drafted a model to fit the size of his school’s attendants while at the same time properly setting a margin to observe for results.

In 2005, he started a pilot class with 50 girl participants. In the following year, he established pilot classes in all grades at his school. He found that with the new model, students are performing better in school and even allowed a more convenient set-up for sex education. Presently, all classes in Ngo Tri Hoa Private High School are run on single sex lines.

In the recent graduation exam, 62.11 per cent of his students passed indicating an increase by 17 per cent compared with 2004. With people noticing the upward direction in the children’s academic performance, more parents were encouraged to send their kids to the institution. The school now has 1,500 students – a remarkable eightfold increase compared to its population during the past three years.

Despite the seen success, the segregated school is still attracting a lot of attention, springing several points of argument on the approach. Those who favor the idea of separating boys and girls in classes claim that it helps children learn better. With boys and girls varying in pace when it comes to learning especially in certain subjects, it eliminates the need for educators to factor in gender-related learning differences when designing their lesson plans. Single-sex schools also provide students with a learning environment that encourages them to maintain their focus on instruction rather than on the opposite sex. Putting boys and girls in different classes also help to eliminate many of the social pressures and gender stereotypes that run rampant through their co-ed counterparts.

For those opposing this kind of approach, they believe that children are better prepared for it when they have lived and socialized with each other and that mixed classes better resemble the real world. However, while students are segregated on gender lines during classes, in break periods they are allowed to integrate to ensure their balanced development. Some of the students themselves, however, prefer the mixed classes. Though they admit the improvement in their learning capacity, they continue to show interest for belonging to regular classes, believing they will even be more competitive when they have more options to share their learning ideas with.

But from single-gender classes itself, there is also a noted difference between girls and boys. Educators noticed that when boys are placed together, they tend to be very disobedient. Girls, on the other hand, are more focused in their learning. Such created more mixed opinions on the approach, especially when some of the instructors claimed that violence and rudeness at schools declined if classes were mixed. For them, mixed classes help students establish good feelings and virtues and that the benefits of same-sex schools are only short-term. Until now, the argument on same-gender schools continues, but as long as Ngo Tri Hoa Private High School sees the favorable trend, they will focus on what brings the most benefits for Vietnam’s young learners.