When I cast my mind back to my schooldays, I can almost hear the rain. It always seemed to be raining back then. It rained when I walked past the old miner’s institute on my way to the bus stop, and it rained on the long country road to the school. It rained throughout the seven-hour day, and it rained on the way back home past the colliery, and down the hill into the village. Even in the summer, when the sun shone and the coal tip on the mountainside sparkled, the rain never seemed far away.
My mind’s eye conjures up a bleak image of those days: not because of some life-changing event, or traumatic experience, but purely for a total absence of girls. At the age of 12, I went off to Wales’ last state boys’ school, indeed one of the last of its kind in Britain. My budding teenage mind could not comprehend why on God’s green earth some lords of antiquity would continue this desolate, barren, practice of separating the sexes in secondary school.
Well, now it’s gone. Lewis Boys’ School in Pengam, South Wales, has cast this old-fashioned system to one side and merged with its female sister school. This has ended not only a deep educational tradition across Wales, but a way of life that shaped myself and thousands of other boys across hundreds of years. In doing so, though, this scholastic revolution has sparked altogether different questions over the place of such boys in contemporary British life — a space that, for the increasingly marginalised working-class, seems to shrink every year.
Many local people saw the merger as a coup. How, they asked, could young boys grow into decent young men without the presence of girls around them? Parents, for their part, shared their joy on social media. “The right decision,” said one, “has been made to merge the schools based on what’s best for the children — really it should have happened years ago.”
There is some truth to this. In recent years, the danger of boys’ schools has loomed large: in 2021, reports of a systemic “rape culture” emerged from several of Britain’s leading single-sex private schools. A “moment of reckoning” came when a website, launched for current and former school pupils to submit claims, received more than 8,000 testimonies of sexual violence and abuse perpetrated by other boys. The schools were quickly condemned as breeding grounds of toxicity.
I could well be mistaken, but there was never any sense of the sinister at Lewis Boys’. Why might this be? The answer, perhaps, lies in its history, and the space it occupied in an impoverished and neglected corner of Britain. The school was founded in the wig-filled 18th century, in the village of Gelligaer, not far from where it sits now. Sir Edward Lewis, a squire, landowner, and captain of the industry who revolutionised the Welsh Valleys, observed the poverty around him and pledged to change it. Dying in 1728, he left a substantial sum of money to educate poor boys in the parish, and provide them with clothes fit for any young man. Founded the following year, Lewis Boys’ was always meant to be a school for local people, by local people, with “fagging” and other brutal upper-class habits utterly alien.
Over the next century, the school would grow rapidly, with its catchment area expanding to cover much of the surrounding Rhymney Valley. It became a fee-paying establishment with the option for boarding, leaving sponsored spaces available for high-achievers from across Wales. Then, in 1848, it became a grammar school, and established itself as an elite centre of learning; by the Seventies, it had transitioned to a state-owned comprehensive school. Its alumni became influential figures in British life, from Zephania Williams, the Chartist responsible for the Newport Rising, to former Labour leader Neil Kinnock. Such was its celebrity that David Lloyd George once described Lewis Boys’ as “the Eton College of the Valleys”.
Lewis Boys isn’t unique here. Right across the country, clever working-class children as varied as Harold Wilson and Michael Caine benefited from similar educations. Yet by the time I arrived at Lewis Boys’, as a 12-year-old in 2009, the school’s grand history felt very far away. There I was, in a damp-smelling hall on a sodden September morning with hundreds of other boys. Fights broke out, and rucksacks were turned inside out while their unsuspecting owners went to the toilet.
The Valleys’ poverty had, by then, superseded any whiff of Eton. Yet even as a child, I could sense that the school held some sort of lost glory, clear in the gilded frames above the great foyer, listing the names of boys who had escaped off to Oxbridge, as well as the dead from both world wars. This history had been somewhat lost after 2002, when the school’s new site was unveiled — £11 million spent on dragging its shabby buildings into the 21st century, in the form of a series of sickly silver and orange blocks.
Most of the teachers looked out of place in this educational UFO. The majority, after all, had been at the school for decades, some having started there as students. They were graduates of a time when the cane was still used, and wore ill-fitting suits and corduroy slacks, and white shirts with the sleeves rolled up. One even kept a soft plimsoll in his desk drawer, ready to launch at any boy who disobeyed, as if Heath were still prime minister. Yet, for all their flaws, who we called the “Old Guard” carried deep within them the ethos of Lloyd George’s words.
“Now, boys,” Mr Butcher, the greying deputy head belted across the hallway in his resonant Valleys bass on that grim September morning. “You are today sat in a place of high learning, and high learners you will be. You will all one day be Old Ludovicans. And by then you will know: Ni Ddychwel Doe — Tomorrow Never Returns.”
“You are today sat in a place of high learning, and high learners you will be.”
Over the next five years, I experienced a form of learning unlike any other, one that proved, in retrospect, all the richer because the school remained single-sex. The relationships and bonds that came out of Lewis, the shared interests and lack of embarrassment that came from the absence of girls — all this would have been impossible in a mixed school. I am not alone in thinking this. One 2010 study, from the University of Virginia, found that the absence of girls allowed boys the chance to develop without pressure to conform to a masculine stereotype. Students in the study didn’t feel the need to conform to some “boy code” or hide their emotions to be a “real man”.
I experienced this first hand. Unlike most British schools, for example, Lewis Boys’ made drama a compulsory subject until GCSE. It may sound far-fetched, but I saw some of the toughest boys of the Valley get up on stage and rehearse lines, form dance routines, devour the chance to create imagined scenarios from short prompts. Yes, they’d get a ribbing from their classmates afterwards. But without any female peers to feel embarrassed by, they explored Macbeth and Bugsy Malone to their heart’s content. Some boys even managed to land roles in films, guided by former pupil and successful actor Craig Roberts.
The point, here, is that such opportunities would have been impossible beyond the school’s gates. As deindustrialisation started in the Seventies, the virus of mass unemployment worked its way through each Valley and infected communities almost to a man. It was at this point that the region began its slow march to becoming one of the most deprived regions in Northwest Europe. By 2025, the End Child Poverty Coalition (ECPC) reported that 36% of children in the Rhymney Valley, the heart of Lewis Boys’ catchment area, were living in poverty.
In truth, though, these numbers don’t do the destitution justice. Imagine, instead, boys coming into school dripping wet because their parents couldn’t afford a raincoat, or playing football with shoes hanging on by an invisible thread. These are sights that’ll never leave me. Or there are the smells: the damp from the boys whose parents couldn’t afford to put the heating on and dry their uniforms. It was a subtle squalor, this white working-class poverty, but one that would occasionally smack you in the face before disappearing.
It’s also a nation-wide trend. According to the ECPC report, just 53% of white British reception pupils eligible for free school meals met the developmental standards expected of them in 2018-9. Nor do things improve as they get older: only 16% of poor white British students start higher education at 19, the lowest rate of any ethnic group bar Romani Gypsies and Irish Travellers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, meanwhile, the ECPC was especially scathing of how Whitehall has ignored Britain’s former industrial heartlands, precisely those areas where most white working-class boys now live.
The economic status of these children is often tied up in their social condition. Though specific numbers aren’t available, a report by the Centre for Social Justice found that in the poorest fifth of white families, only 12% of parents were married, compared to 84% in the wealthiest fifth. This implies a higher likelihood of single-parent households — and certainly, many of the boys at Lewis Boys’ lacked father figures. It wasn’t much talked about, but whispers would make their way around the school about the boys who came from broken homes. No one would bat an eyelid when those same boys stumbled into meltdowns. Once, the police were called after a boy was caught roaming the rugby field with a corner flag pole, threatening anyone who approached. Elsewhere, a student smashed up a classroom after being asked to take off his jacket.
They weren’t bad boys, but a confused rage festered deep within them, one that they couldn’t quite explain. And so, they looked to their colleagues as outlets, for conversations and banter to ease the reality of home. When this failed — and it often did — they looked again to the dependable Old Guard. Above all, I remember one teacher, Mr Oliver, who was an expert at taking troubled boys under his wing. He was a tall, lean man, with salt-and-pepper hair worked into a pair of short curtains. Everyday, he’d pace the corridors in a way that made it seem he was about to fall forwards, forever having everywhere to be yet without time to get there. He was most famous for his much-loved response to boys’ requests to watch a film. “If you don’t ask,” he’d bellow, “you don’t get!” And so the trolley with the TV and VHS player would be rolled out.
Through all this, Mr Oliver made it his mission to be a role model to these troubled boys, taking them out on trips or encouraging them to pick up hobbies and sports. I once remember feeling hard done by when a foul-mouthed group was taken to see boxing. “So I’m doing all of this studying and don’t get rewarded for it?” I said to Mr Oliver, quite brashly. He came close and lowered his voice. “Listen,” he said, “these boys need this more than you. Have a bit of patience and understanding, and come back to me in 15 years. You’ll understand by then.”
Almost exactly 15 years on, I do. Many of Mr Oliver’s boys left Lewis Boys’ as focused young men — and the point, again, is that I’m just not sure they’d ever have received the same attention if they’d been surrounded by girls. Forget the psychological arguments: with more students, the resources to focus on those most in need simply aren’t there. Well, we’ll soon find out if I’m right. Lewis Boys’, now The Lewis School, has been operating as a mixed institution since September 2025. And, so far, it seems to be a success. Its social media posts show smiling girls and boys learning side-by-side for the first time. The new cohort will know no difference, of course, and within four years, the idea of single-sex learning to them will be as foreign as the idea of being taught alongside girls was to me.
And, to be fair, there is a reason why all-boys’ and girls’ schools, both state and private, are in decline. It’s an archaic system, one that looks out of place in an age where as much as 91% of people in the West believe men and women are equals. Mixed schools are helping this progression, and studies show that boys and girls who share a classroom are better prepared for real-world mixed-gender environments.
Perhaps I am being stubborn, then, and the past surely becomes warped with the passage of time. And yes, individual experiences differ. But when I cast my mind back to my schooldays, I still can’t help but smile. I try to picture how my teenage years might have looked in a school with girls, and I find a place without the drama stage, a place without the chance to explore art and language without fear. More than that, I find a place without a history, a place without the sense of its grand past.
I picture this imagined world, and things are not brighter. Something, rather, is lost — the camaraderie, the brotherhood, the years of reflection now that my friends and I near 30. I think of the angst my teenage self felt, yet realise how lucky he was to experience what has now gone forever. I look back, now, and wish I could tell him to savour those moments, to dwell less on the absence of girls and more on a world that was already starting to change. I wish I could tell him to listen more closely to the words he heard that sodden September morning: Ni Ddychwel Doe — Tomorrow Never Returns.
