Everything you can relate to if you went to an all-girls grammar school

What are boys?


Britain’s new Prime Minister plans to lift the ban on creating new grammar schools. While the majority weren’t best pleased, as an all-girls grammar school graduate, I couldn’t be more impressed.

When most of us think of grammar schools, we imagine stuck up high flyers who think they’re the best of the best. Particularly in an all-girls environment, the bitchy and arrogant assumption tends to put people off. While this may not be too far from the truth for some, we’re actually not as bad as you think. Coming from a lonely South-West seaside city, attending an all-girl grammar school is what got me here at King’s today, and was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

Grammar schools give everybody a fair shot, regardless of their different backgrounds. Within one friendship group, you’d have one girl who had a swimming pool in her back garden; one who lived on a council estate, giving the rest of us a chance to see some boys – which was a very rare occurrence. Although you may have had your occasional bitch fights and disagreements, you were part of a close family who always stood up for each other. It didn’t matter where you came from, because we all earned our place to be there, and we wouldn’t have traded our friends for anything.

There is another assumption that grammar school girls, who went to a single-sex institution, are all raving lesbians. You know it’s getting worse when your chance of gaining a boyfriend is getting slimmer and slimmer, because the boys grammar school just likes to assume you’re getting it on in class all the time.

The various sleepovers, accidental underwear viewings and sex talks probably didn’t help our case much either, however it never stopped us from fantasising about One Direction and Justin Bieber all of lunch time, and fuelled our obsession over boys and sex.

This brings us on nicely to the limited male experience most of us encountered while at an all-girls school. Whilst you probably had that group of girls who would meet the boys at the bus stop every day, and miraculously managed to find a boy to go out with, the rest of us were left with only our dreams. You know it’s desperation when you start giggling about and admiring the old and less attractive male teachers, because they were all you had to work with.

There was always the famous ‘man wall’ located in the sixth form centre. An array of obscenely beautiful men cluttered onto a wall just to make A-Levels slightly more bearable.

The dreaded brown uniform was probably the worst aspect of my school. With the combination of a knee length brown skirt, brown tights, a brown jumper with the yellow crest which was either a hand-me-down from your older sister that was completely battered and bruised, or oversized because your mum didn’t want to have to buy another one throughout the entire seven years. The whole school had officially morphed into what can only be described as ‘walking turds’. As awful as it may sound, as the years went by it was something you learnt to love, and you couldn’t wait to style it again at your Year 13 Leavers’ day.

The girly shenanigans that occur are no surprise to anyone who’s experienced it, but for those mixed school pupils, it’s a bit of a shock. From attractively pulling up your tights in public and rolling up your skirt to an inch of its life, to throwing tampons across the room, and discussing all sorts of bodily functions, there is that age old question of “what didn’t we do?”

This is probably the reason most of us were lacking in any sort of social etiquette when it came to boys, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world.