A grammar school in Grantham and a question TED keeps raising
Grantham is perhaps best known for producing a Prime Minister, but it is also home to Kesteven and Grantham Girls' School — a selective grammar school founded in 1910, now educating more than 1,000 pupils aged 11 to 18. A few miles away, TEDx Grantham stages the kind of ideas-led conversations that TED has made a global format. The proximity is more than geographical: TED talks have returned, again and again, to a question that a school like KGGS sits squarely inside — why do capable girls still opt out of technical careers at rates that puzzle educators and employers alike?
TED speakers from Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code, to Sir Ken Robinson have argued that the answer lies not in girls' ability but in institutional culture: how schools structure risk, reward, curriculum, and identity. KGGS, as a single-sex, selective institution with its own sixth form, embodies exactly the kinds of structural choices those talks examine. Whether its admissions model, its all-female environment, and its sixth-form provision act as accelerants or obstacles for girls' STEM pathways is a concrete regional question — not an abstract national one.
This article takes that question seriously, using the evidence TED ideas point toward to examine what the research actually shows, and what it might mean for a school in South Kesteven that has been shaping girls' futures for more than a century.
The bravery gap that TED talks have put into words
Reshma Saujani put the problem plainly in her TED talk: girls are raised to avoid mistakes, boys are encouraged to attempt things anyway. The gap that opens between them is not a gap in talent — it is a gap in the permission each group feels to fail. Saujani, who founded Girls Who Code, argues that this socialisation is so deeply embedded in schooling that correcting it requires schools to act deliberately against the grain of their own reward structures.
That challenge is sharpened at a selective school. Entry by examination already selects for students who have learned to be careful, accurate, and self-critical — attributes that track closely with the perfectionism Saujani identifies as the barrier. A school in this position may find that the same discipline that produced examination success also produces risk-aversion in the lab, the design brief, or the engineering problem where productive failure is the point. Academic selectivity and the bravery gap may pull in the same direction unless the institution actively interrupts that logic.
The single-sex environment offers a plausible counterweight. Without the social dynamics of mixed classrooms — where, research suggests, girls' belonging in STEM is particularly sensitive to peer signals — an all-girls school may create space to reframe what trying and failing looks like. But that space does not fill itself. Whether it becomes a culture of calculated boldness or a more intense version of the same perfectionism is, ultimately, a leadership decision.
Curriculum choices that open or close technical doors
The most direct evidence on what actually moves girls' STEM motivation comes from a 12-week robotics and coding programme at an all-girls secondary school, where students who received the structured curriculum showed significantly greater gains in STEM career aspirations, attitudes, and motivation than the control group. Critically, socioeconomic variables — parental education, household income — showed no significant correlation with those gains. The implication is blunt: what is timetabled matters more than who the pupils are.
Sir Ken Robinson's argument, familiar to the 80 million people who have watched his TED talk, operates at the systemic level behind this finding. Curriculum hierarchies, he contends, penalise the divergent, exploratory thinking that STEM actually demands, in favour of the convergent, test-optimised responses that generate grades. That critique applies with particular force to selective schools, where examination success already defines the intake — and where institutional pressure to maintain academic reputation can make curricular experimentation feel risky in itself.
Christopher Emdin's pedagogical work adds a mechanism at classroom level. His TED talk argues that science teaching fails many students not because the content is wrong but because the delivery is culturally inert — disconnected from the ways students already engage, argue, and create meaning outside school. Techniques that make learning feel genuinely participatory can shift which students feel entitled to call themselves scientists.
For a sixth form like KGGS's, these findings converge on the same practical question: not whether to encourage STEM aspiration, but what specific choices about timetabling, teaching style, and curricular scope will determine whether that aspiration takes root.
Why role models explain more than personal motivation
Role models account for 49.8% of the variance in girls' STEM career choices — a figure from a mixed-methods study of 424 female tertiary students that outpaces both career counselling (41%) and parental involvement (38%) as explanatory factors. Parental educational attainment showed no significant effect at all. That single number reframes the debate: the gap in girls' technical career choices is not a motivation problem to be solved at home; it is an institutional design problem to be solved in school.
The 2024 systematic review of 165 studies reinforces this shift. Of those that identified primary barriers, 100 pointed to environmental factors — stereotypes embedded in subject culture, absence of visible role models, and peer dynamics that narrow who gets to feel at home in a lab — rather than personal deficits in the students themselves. The implication is directional: schools are the relevant site of intervention.
A single-sex girls' school carries a structural advantage here. Every scientist, engineer, or technologist on the staff is a same-sex role model by default — something mixed-sex institutions cannot guarantee. But as Linda Cliatt-Wayman argued in her TED talk on turning around underperforming schools, cultural improvement is a deliberate act, not an ambient outcome of favourable conditions. Whether the structural advantage is ever realised depends on whether leadership actively curates visible success stories, builds alumni pathways into technical careers, and brings in external mentors whose trajectories students can imagine following. Structure creates the possibility; deliberate institutional choice determines what fills it.
What the evidence on single-sex STEM education actually shows
The strongest quantitative signal in this area comes from a 2026 study using propensity score weighting across 15,725 US undergraduates. Girls who had attended single-sex STEM programmes in secondary school were nearly six times more likely to express STEM career intentions than matched peers who had not — an odds ratio of 5.92, statistically robust and large by any standard measure. The same study found that boys attending all-boys STEM programmes showed lower STEM affinity than boys in co-educational settings. The asymmetry is the point: structure that helps girls does not simply replicate its benefit in a mirror image for boys.
A separate study of 1,330 young people at STEM summer camps adds necessary nuance. For girls, feeling included — particularly by male peers — predicted stronger STEM intentions through a mediating sense of belonging. The implication is not that single-sex environments fail girls, but that belonging cannot be assumed even where girls form the majority; it still has to be actively built.
KGGS, as an all-girls school, sits within the structural category the 2026 study identifies as advantageous. But the research speaks to a type of environment, not to any individual school's record. Structure creates conditions, not outcomes. The evidence says single-sex STEM programmes work, on average, for girls — it cannot say they work automatically, or that every school sharing this structure produces equivalent results. Whether these conditions translate into measurable gains depends on specific choices about curriculum, mentorship, and peer culture: the structural advantage is real, but it is also one that has to be earned each year, in each classroom.
Beyond Grantham: what these choices signal for the wider region
KGGS represents one kind of answer to the structural questions TED talks have raised: a single-sex environment, a sixth form, more than a century of institution-building behind it. What the research says about that configuration is clear enough — the conditions are favourable. What it cannot say, from the outside, is whether those conditions are being used as deliberately as the evidence suggests they need to be. That is an honest reckoning, not a criticism: structure creates a possibility; what happens inside it is a separate question.
It matters most for the majority of girls in Lincolnshire who attend co-educational, non-selective schools across South Kesteven and beyond, where neither the single-sex advantage nor the selective intake applies. The arguments running through Saujani, Robinson, Emdin, and Cliatt-Wayman are not arguments for a particular admissions model. They are arguments for conscious institutional choice. Active curriculum design, visible role models, peer cultures that make belonging something to build rather than assume — none of these depend on how a school recruits its pupils.
The question TEDx Grantham is well-placed to put into the room is a practical one: across Lincolnshire's schools, which of those choices are being made deliberately, and which are simply being left to settle on their own?
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- [2] Girls' Schools Association. https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=4915719 https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=4915719
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