JENNY LAM does not feel she missed out by going to an all-girls' school. Rather, she felt she had better all-round education and a chance to develop strength of character than she would have had if boys had been in the picture.
'I think single sex schools may help girls concentrate on their studies,' said the former Heep Yunn School student, now 24, who went on to study social sciences at the University of Hong Kong and now works for a charity.
'Girls' schools are really character building. Whenever there was a function we had to do all the planning and organising ourselves, not to mention moving the heavy stuff. We learned to be independent.'
St Paul's Convent School student Jermaine Wong Jan-man has a different view. 'About half of the girls at my school cannot cope with boys,' she said. 'They think only about relationships. They don't know how to see them as friends.'
She went to a co-educational primary school before joining the elite, all-girls' school in Causeway Bay. A mixed class, she said, was better because it was 'a small version of society'.
Relationships are very much on the minds of students in a co-educational English Schools Foundation secondary school too, as children discuss who is dating who in a fashion that would send shudders down the spines of any parent who has forgotten adolescence or led sheltered teen years.