One-Gender School



A school that only admits male or female students. Very much a Truth in Television: Many (but not all) schools run by religious organizations are single-sex. At least, once the students are old enough for messing around to occur—many Roman Catholic and other private high schools are still single-sex. Likewise boarding schools tend to be single-sex. Many educators in such institutions defend the practice not just from the prudish attitude that one might expect, but some more practical concerns; female students, for example, can be shown to perform better without male students around as they're more likely to engage the subject material as they are less likely to be afraid of being perceived as too smart to attract sexual attention. There is, of course, a feeling in many quarters that hormonally driven teenagers will be unduly distracted by romantic concerns to really care at all about what the teacher in front of the class is talking about as well.

Single-sex colleges exist as well. Colleges for (usually) women only called Normal Schools go back to the 1600s,from the original École Normale founded by Saint Jean-Baptiste de La Salle in 1685, usually for the purpose of instructing graduates of the mainline (up through High School by current standards) in order to become teachers. These schools still exist, however they are generally gender integrated now and were more commonly called Teacher's Colleges by the mid-20th century (most have now expanded their undergraduate degree offerings to become community colleges if not full-fledged universities or campuses of a larger university). Male-only also used to be the default for universities, and will still crop up in most period pieces. They don't really exist anymore (leaving aside R.C. seminaries, Rabbinical colleges, etc. there are six men's colleges in the US), and women's colleges are a dying breed as well (about 60 in the U.S.), so it's usually not Truth in Television past high school.

Viewers can expect lots of Ho Yay or Les Yay, respectively, due to Situational Sexuality unless it's explicitly a Boys Love or Girls Love series (all-girls schools are particularly a staple in yuri). Another common plot is a Wholesome Crossdresser or a Sweet Polly Oliver infiltrating such school. Hilarity usually ensues.

Since this school more often than not is a private school, expect this trope to overlap with Elaborate University High and Elevator School.

See also One-Gender Race, whose schools are this by definition.

Anime and Manga

 * As noted, many Girls Love series are set primarily in all-girls schools:
 * Aoi Hana (which has two of them)
 * Blue Drop
 * Candy Boy
 * First Love Sisters
 * Girl Friends
 * Gokujou Drops
 * Hanjuku Joshi
 * Haru Natsu Aki Fuyu
 * Kisses, Sighs, and Cherry Blossoms Pink
 * The Last Uniform
 * Mariasama ga Miteru (The all male Hanadera Academy is also mentioned and interactions between the two become a major plot point in the third season of the anime)
 * Oniisama e...
 * Otome Kikan Gretel
 * The Rows of Cherry Trees
 * Saki (The main school is co-ed but every other school in the series is girls only)
 * Shiroi Heya no Futari
 * Shoujo Sect
 * Strawberry Panic (which has three schools, although they share the same campus)
 * A notable exception, perhaps, is Sasameki Koto, which is set in a mixed-gender school and actually addresses the problems faced by adolescent lesbians in modern (Japanese) society.
 * Otomeiro Stay Tune doesn't feature any Schoolgirl Lesbians per se, but the GL radio drama that the two protagonists collaborate on is set in an all-girls academy.
 * Otome wa Boku ni Koishiteru is set in an all-girls school with lots of yuri tension, except that the protagonist is actually a (very feminine) Wholesome Crossdresser.
 * The main characters of Sukisho go to an all-boys boarding school.
 * In Fruits Basket, Ayame, Shigure and Hatori all went to a single sex school.
 * Kagura and Isuzu attended the same all girls high school. Kisa's middle school appears to be all girls as well. Hiro might attend an all boys private academy. His uniform is very similar to the high school one Ayame, Shigure, and Hatori wore. It's implied that both sets of male and female private schools are just Distaff Counterparts of the other.
 * Yuki also mentions that the head of the family, Akito, heavily pressured him to attend an all-boys school (he refused). This all is justified in that the aforementioned characters were all cursed to transform into animals if they hugged people of the opposite gender, so a school with all students that are the same gender is safest.
 * In Nana, Nana K. went to an all girls' high school.
 * Ranma and Ryouga were mentioned to have gone to an all boy's school in Ranma ½ before the series started, while Ukyou and Tsubasa both attended a different boys' school. Kodachi goes to an all-girl's school, St. Hebereke.
 * Mahora Academy from Mahou Sensei Negima is otherwise your standard Elaborate University High Elevator School city, except that it appears to be divided to boys and girls' schools for every grade. Also, it's secretly filled with mages and miscellaneous other abnormals.
 * Princess Princess takes place at an all males' school.
 * The all male school in Gakuen Heaven.
 * The school in Kaichou wa Maid-sama used to be one of these and the male students generally act like it still is much to frustration of the female lead.
 * Kaze to Ki no Uta and The Heart of Thomas are set in these.
 * Hana Kimi combines this with a Sweet Polly Oliver
 * High School Girls
 * The shoujo manga Men's School is set in one of these.
 * Koko wa Greenwood
 * Lobelia in Ouran High School Host Club is a One Gender School
 * The eponymous Cromartie High School may be set in one
 * Maria Holic
 * K-On! is set at an all-girls high school.
 * In Sailor Moon, Rei attends a Catholic girls' school, which is the focus of two episodes.
 * Shinryuuji Academy of Eyeshield 21 is an all-boys school, much to the chagrin of the students.
 * Seitokai Yakuindomo centers around the misadventures of one of the first male students of a girls' school turned co-ed.
 * Kanenone Gakuen in Green Green before the girls arrive to make it a co-ed school.
 * The male protagonist of Ai Ore Love Me attends an all-boys school and the female protagonist attends an all-girls school.
 * One story arc of Onidere featured students plotting make sure no school in Japan would be co-ed ever again.
 * The Principal and the Vice-Principal in I My Me! Strawberry Eggs hated men to the point of refusing to hire males as teachers and trying to turn their school into an all-girls one.
 * Daily Lives of High School Boys subverted, if not deconstructed, many conventions of this trope as shown in anime. Most of the story is around junior-year students of Sanada North Perfectual High, which looks like any other public high schools in Japan and was established as late as 1989. Sanada East, a all-girls school, also came up in the story. Part of the conflict of this work are on the students' lack of knowledge of teens of the other gender, and the writer made it clear that the Daily Lives of Boys' School Boys are boring.
 * In the Distant Finale of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's, Nanoha, Fate, and Hayate attend an all-girls high school. As if the levels of yuri subtext weren't sufficient in this series already.
 * Bodacious Space Pirates is set (partially) in an all-girls school. However, it averts many related tropes as the other major setting is the Bentenmaru, a pirate ship with a mixed-gender crew.
 * Weston Academy in Black Butler only admits boys. We are talking about an English public school in the Victorian era, so there is nothing strange about that, though there is plenty of yaoi subtext. That also is Truth in Television.

Comic Books

 * Subverted in the first volume of Finder: It looks like an all-girls school, but that's just because all members of house Llaverac look like females.
 * The Medawar clan plays this trope straight, though. Although not stated explicitly, this is probably because Medawar girls are expected to go into medicine and Medawar boys into law enforcement or the military. This is a very big deal for the clan- Medawars have to go into these professions if they want to even have a chance at full clan status- and it is established that the girls at least start medical training quite young, so the boys' and girls' schools probably have different curricula with this in mind.
 * Greytowers in Winker Watson as well as their rival school, St. Cuthbert's, are both all-boys. Greytowers' sister school, Oak Ridge School for Girls, also appears on occasion.

Film

 * The Emperor's Club. At the end of the movie, it's opened up to girls as well.
 * School Ties
 * Dead Poets Society.
 * The St Trinian's franchise
 * Au Revoir, les Enfants
 * Flirting
 * In the Harry Potter films, Durmstrang and Beauxbatons are all-male and all-female, respectively. Both are co-ed in the books.
 * The Hairy Bird
 * Almost Angels is a fictional depiction of the Real Life Boarding School of the all-male Vienna Boys Choir.

Literature

 * The Macdonald Hall books by Gordon Korman are set in an all-boys school very close to an all-girls school.
 * In the Swedish novel and movie Ondskan (Evil), Erik attends a very strict all-boys Boarding School.
 * There are a couple in Stephen King's The Talisman: a Corrupt Church one run by Sunlight Gardner, and the one from which they help Richard escape.
 * The setting of A Little Princess is an all-female Boarding School.
 * Several are mentioned across the Discworld series. Mostly all male though Susan attended the Quirm College for Young Ladies in her first appearance.
 * As well as "conventional" boarding schools, the Fools' Guild School is all male, and the Assassins' Guild School was until recently (although interestingly, unlike the Fools, the Guild itself wasn't). And then there's Unseen University.
 * The Gemma Doyle series is set in an all-girls' school.
 * The Chocolate War takes place in a Catholic all-boys' school.
 * Lowood Academy in Jane Eyre is an all-girl boarding school, and Aunt Reed chooses it for Jane based on how strict the curriculum is - and she did not choose amiss. Fortunately it's headed at least by a Reasonable Authority Figure.
 * Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women
 * The boys from Lord of the Flies come from one, although obviously the book doesn't take place there. This was because the author believed that having girls on the island would facilitate civilisation, something that would be adverse to the story's symbolic meaning.
 * Rugby in Tom Brown's Schooldays and Flashman counts as a real life all-male school.

Live Action TV

 * Eastland in The Facts of Life was an all-girls school, and occasionally had mixers with a nearby all-boys school. In the Grand Finale, Blair purchases Eastland and plans to make it co-ed.
 * The WB Presents a Coca-Cola Summer Premiere: Young Americans took place in an all-boys school.
 * On Friends the fact that Chandler went to an all-boys high school is brought up a few times.
 * The original plot in the short-lived FOX dramedy Opposite Sex is the fact that three boys are somehow enrolled into an otherwise all-girls' private school.
 * The "somehow" being that it was a formerly all-girls school whose board decided to go co-ed, but only those three boys' parents signed them up.
 * Honey  attend on in Cutey Honey the Live
 * Pacific Coast Academy in Zoey 101 was all boys until the start of the show; the basis of many of the first season episodes was the clash of boys versus girls.
 * One episode had Zoey herself taking the fall for a mishap committed by a few girls that nearly led ALL girls to be expelled.
 * Dalton Academy, home school of the Warblers, a rival of Glee's New Directions
 * Jane Adams Academy and Dalton's sister school Crawford Country Day are both girls-only.
 * On Gossip Girl the girls went to all girls school Constance Billard and the boys went to all boys school St. Jude's. Though since the two schools shared a courtyard you never really noticed that it was two different schools.
 * On The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Bel-Air Prep, where Will and Carlton went was an all boys school until about season 3 when it went co-ed.

Video Games

 * Fighting game example: the Rival Schools games have Gedo High (all boys) and Seijyun High (all girls). Gedo is a reformatory school for Delinquent rejects of other schools, while Seijyun is a high-class private academy teaching traditional Japanese feminine values.
 * The school in Skool Daze on the ZX Spectrum is boys-only. The sequel introduces an adjacent girls' school.

Visual Novels

 * It's briefly mentioned that Shion attends one in Higurashi no Naku Koro ni.
 * She actually escaped from one one year before the main story, and whenever she's not in Hinamizawa's school she's presumably in one. One of the manga arcs actually center around her previous school.
 * Ange Ushiromiya also attends the same one in Umineko no Naku Koro ni. It's not fun for her.
 * More Girls Love examples:
 * Aoi Shiro
 * Shojokyuu ~Kurige no Shiofuki Shoujotachi~
 * Sono Hanabira ni Kuchizuke wo
 * The Infinity series has the Kyumeikan Women's High School and University, attended by You and Sara (from Ever 17) as well as Kokoro (from Remember 11)

Western Animation

 * As Told by Ginger has an all-female summer camp.
 * Scooby Doo and the Ghoul School took place at an all-female school (except for Shaggy, Scooby and Scrappy, who were the athletic directors), with an all-male military academy nearby.
 * There is a school in one of the episodes of Codename: Kids Next Door which is this, or at least it first appears to be. Until it was revealed that the reason for this was forced Gender Bender via transformation ray, and the person running said school was after world domination.
 * The Simpsons had Bart forced to go to an all male Military School, and Lisa electing to go as the first female student. She faces quite a bit of bullying for the the boys for upsetting the school dynamic. Especially from the boys who were ousted from the dorm bunker that became the girls dorm.
 * In Lisa's defense, the school should have been officially ready for this decades ago. They simply didn't expect it would ever happen.
 * One episode featured a girl named Samantha, whose father sent her to an all-girls school after he found out how close she was to Milhouse.
 * The Real Ghostbusters once infiltrated an all-girls school.