Co-Education vs Single-Gender Schools in Pakistan: Questions Parents Should Ask

For many Pakistani families, choosing between a co-educational school and a boys' or girls' school is not an abstract debate. It is tied up with family and religious values, with how far a daughter will have to travel once she finishes primary school, with whether a brother and sister can share one school and one van, and with what is actually available in the neighbourhood. This guide does not tell you which kind of school to prefer. It sets out what the research can and cannot tell you, how Pakistan's school system shapes the choice, and the questions that will tell you more about a particular school than its boys, girls or co-ed label.

The most comprehensive review we found is a meta-analysis by Erin Pahlke, Janet Shibley Hyde and Carlie Allison, published in Psychological Bulletin in 2014. It pooled 184 studies covering 1.6 million students from kindergarten to Grade 12 in 21 countries, and looked at outcomes including mathematics, science and verbal performance, educational aspirations, self-concept and gender stereotyping. The authors sorted the studies by quality. Studies that simply compared students in the two kinds of school, with no random assignment and no control for which families choose which schools, showed some modest advantages for single-sex schooling. The 57 studies that did control for this, 12 of them with actual random assignment, showed only trivial differences: effect sizes of 0.10 for girls and 0.06 for boys in mathematics, and 0.06 and 0.04 in science. In the authors' judgement, the most rigorous evidence does not back the idea that single-sex schooling outperforms co-education.

The review does not point only one way. Among the well-controlled studies, girls in single-sex schools showed a small advantage in general school achievement, based on seven effect sizes. On girls' educational aspirations, the authors' summary notes a small difference in favour of co-education, but it rests on only five effect sizes and the sample-weighted estimate was close to zero, so it is best read as no clear difference. For relationships with classmates, the authors did not have enough well-controlled studies to compare the two. The fair summary is that, in the strongest studies, whether a school was single-sex or co-educational made little difference to the outcomes measured, and where differences appeared they were mostly small in either direction.

Why, then, do many families and some studies see a clear advantage? The meta-analysis points to selection: the substantial advantages for single-sex schooling appeared in studies that did not account for differences between the children who attend each kind of school. One of the strongest studies in the review, by the economist C. Kirabo Jackson, used Trinidad and Tobago's rule-based assignment of students to secondary schools to get around this. He found that, for most students, a single-sex school did not raise performance, although students who had strongly preferred single-sex schools, girls in particular, did gain. Girls in single-sex schools also chose fewer science courses and more of the subjects traditionally taken by girls. The first finding suggests your own child's preference is worth weighing; the second is a reason to ask any girls' school which science subjects it actually offers.

Pakistan-specific research is thin. A 2014 study by Raana Malik and Munawar Mirza of the University of the Punjab, published in the Bulletin of Education and Research, compared the 2006 Grade 5 examination scores of 4,448 students in 128 primary schools, co-educational and single-sex, across eight randomly selected Punjab districts: Bahawalpur, Faisalabad, Gujranwala, Lahore, Mianwali, Multan, Rawalpindi and Sargodha. It found better scores in the separate-sex schools for both boys and girls, and concluded that girls' achievement was more adversely affected in co-educational schools. The authors note that research on this question in Pakistan is scarce, and recommend future comparisons that control for socio-economic background, students' ability and parents' education. Those are exactly the kinds of differences the 2014 meta-analysis found can make single-sex schools look better than they are, so this study is best read as one useful Pakistani data point rather than a settled answer.

In practice, the research debate often matters less than what exists near your home. Malik and Mirza describe separate schools for boys and girls as the traditional pattern in Pakistan's public sector, and point to Sindh as the province where public co-educational primary schools are most common. Human Rights Watch, in its 2018 report on barriers to girls' education, found that the older children get, the more likely their school is to be boys-only or girls-only, and that girls have fewer schools to choose from than boys. Citing 2016 government figures, it reported equal numbers of middle schools for boys and girls, but 66,000 girls' schools out of 165,900 primary schools and 13,400 out of 32,100 secondary schools. The same report describes girls having to travel further as they move up, and sexual harassment on the way to school. UNICEF Pakistan estimates that 25.1 million children aged 5 to 16 are out of school, and says out-of-school girls outnumber boys in Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. For a family whose daughter is finishing Class 5, the real question is often whether a suitable school exists within a safe journey, and how she will get there.

Rules can shift too. In December 2025 ProPakistani reported, citing the City42 news channel, that the Punjab Education Foundation had told its partner schools that only female teachers may teach girls in high and higher secondary classes, and to remove male teachers from girls' sections. We did not find the notice itself, so treat this as reported rather than confirmed, but it shows that who teaches girls' classes is a live policy question, and one worth putting to any school you are considering.

SchoolNama's own data needs a caveat, and we would rather state it than bury it. Of the 6,687 campus listings across our 15 launch cities, only 14 are detailed profiles. For the other 6,673, drawn from OpenStreetMap, Google Places, official registration records (Islamabad's PEIRA list and a small number of Punjab school-education records) and school networks' own directories, the boys, girls or co-ed tag is inferred from the school's name: a listing is tagged girls when its name contains the word girls (some imports also accept women or ladies), boys when it contains boys, and co-ed otherwise, including when the name mentions both. So the 5,718 listings shown as co-ed include every school whose name simply does not say. We found at least 40 whose names do signal a boys' or girls' school in a way the tagging missed, for example abbreviations such as GGHS or GBPS, or the spelling Girl's. On a basic SchoolNama listing, a Girls or Boys tag reflects the school's own name; a Co-ed tag means only that the name is silent, so confirm with the school.

The names still show a pattern. Among the 1,316 listings whose names, map tags or registration records identify them as government schools, 683, about 52 percent, have boys or girls in the name. Among the other 5,371 listings, private and trust schools, 286, about 5 percent, do. That is consistent with the research describing single-sex schooling as the traditional public-sector pattern, but it is a count of names, not a verified count of single-sex schools, and the 40 missed names alone show the true figures are higher. The table below gives the same name-based counts for each city.

Use this with care on SchoolNama. The Girls and Boys filters on the schools page will find listings named as single-sex in your city, whether that is Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar or Quetta; treat the Co-ed filter as broad. Detailed profiles such as Islamabad Model College for Girls F-6/2 and OPF Boys College H-8 in Islamabad show what a full listing looks like. Put up to four shortlisted schools side by side on the compare page, then ask each one the questions in the checklist below.

What are families actually weighing? Some prefer single-sex schools for reasons of faith, modesty and family custom, especially for daughters as they grow older, and those are legitimate reasons that no study can overrule. Some believe their child will concentrate better without the other sex in the room; the best-controlled research does not show that as an average effect on results, though an individual child may feel it. Others prefer co-education because they want their children used to mixed classrooms before university or work, or simply because it lets brothers and sisters attend one school. Here the controlled research is too thin to promise a benefit either way. What the evidence does support is narrower: the type of school alone did not reliably change results in the strongest studies, so teaching quality, your child's comfort and the practicalities of each option deserve at least as much weight as the label.

The practicalities are often decisive. Two children in two single-sex schools can mean two school runs, two sets of timings and two transport arrangements; one co-educational school can mean one. If a daughter will travel further to reach a girls' school after primary, the journey becomes part of the choice. SchoolNama's pick-and-drop page lists transport providers in the cities where we have them, and our van safety checklist covers what to ask any driver; you can also ask specifically whether a female attendant rides along. Our guides to English-medium versus Urdu-medium schools and to rote versus conceptual learning cover other questions that tell you more about a school than its signboard does.