THE great education revolution has thrown up targets, permanent exams and a computer in every classroom. Now the new miracle ingredient to create a learning curve steeper than K2 has been revealed: the seating arrangements of a well-run dinner party.

Every hostess knows that to get the best results one alternates boy, girl, boy, girl around the table — and then lets the boys withdraw to compete among themselves while the girls sort out the world. Which is just the arrangement presented for the future by the Minister for seating arrangements, sorry, for School Standards, yesterday.

David Miliband called on head teachers of mixed schools to “learn the lessons of single-sex education” as part of a drive to close the gender gap in achievement at GCSE and A-level examinations.

He suggested that schools introduce strict “boy-girl” seating in some classes to boost performance. Mr Miliband highlighted “startling” early findings from a four-year study by academics at Cambridge University into differences in achievement by boys and girls.

“They looked at a co-educational comprehensive school, where single-sex teaching was used in subjects where gender is sometimes seen as influencing underperformance, such as languages for boys and maths for girls,” he told a conference at Alton Towers in Staffordshire.

“The number of boys who got five good GCSEs went up from 68 per cent in 1997 to 81 per cent in 2004,” he said. “The number of girls went up from 68 per cent in 1997 to 82 per cent in 2004. Both boys and girls did better, and the gender gap usually common at GCSE was negligible.”

He added: “When interviewed, some of the reasons that pupils gave for the improvement were that they felt more confident to participate in the lessons. There were fewer distractions and they didn’t feel the need to show off.” The minister’s remarks to the annual meeting of the Girls’ Schools Association (GSA) underlined the Government’s increasing concern about the relative academic failure of boys.

Girls outperform boys virtually across the board at school and there is a gap of ten percentage points in their favour in the proportions gaining at least five good GCSEs. Girls now obtain more A grades at A level than boys and accounted for 54 per cent of this year’s entrants to university.

Mr Miliband told the GSA, which represents 200 fee-paying girls’ schools, that girls had been the primary beneficiaries of a revolution in educational achievement over the past 30 years.

His arguments in favour of single-sex teaching in certain classes amounted to a signal that the Government believes that schools should now seek to restore the balance by focusing on boys’ needs.

Mr Miliband described debate about the merits of single-sex or co-educational schools as “sterile”, saying that nobody seriously proposed abolishing either form. “Instead of debate on structure, we should learn the lessons of single-sex education and apply them in the co-education sector. These lessons are about recognising the differences between pupils, as well as the similarities,” he said. “First, we need to recognise that in mixed-sex schools girls and boys can prosper being taught separately for part of the time.”

Critics of mixed-sex schooling have usually argued that it is detrimental to girls’ achievement and that girls do better in single-sex environments. But Mr Miliband’s speech suggested that it would be effective in confronting the “lad culture” among boys that views learning as uncool.

The minister also suggested that schools consider introducing strict “boy-girl” seating plans in mixed classes to encourage the sexes to help each other without being distracted by their friends. An Essex school had adopted this seating arrangement and boosted boys’ performance.

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