Although it would be difficult to accuse schools of being the sole merchants of sex stereotyping, it is still reasonable to argue that they facilitate the formation of attitudes through conscious and unconscious decisions and attitudes of the school and of the teachers themselves. As the school is where young people spend most of their important formative years, it is imperative that schools take responsibility for their own environments in or to ensure a gender balance, even though they can be faced with contradicting attitudes from means beyond their control, such as the mass media, parental and societal constraints. As Mac an Ghaill states, schools do not merely reflect the dominant sexual ideology of the wider society, but actively produces gender divisions . What is essential is to look at the make-up of the school to determine from what and from where these influences come, and to ultimately suggest strategies to ensure equality in all branches of these factors.
Subject take-up.
Delamont states that at the infant and primary stages, girls are more successful than boys in every subject except mathematics and this has been said to be because of the nature of toys that young children play with. Lisa Serbin makes the observation that the development of visual-spatial skills is quickly augmented in young boys due to different rates of play with sex-typed toys such as blocks and models, whereas girls, who played with dolls and housekeeping materials, would not have the same levels of exposure, but would instead develop fine motor skills . This early development can have major repercussions in later schooling, when we see girls" achievements and abilities in mathematics wane and abilities in humanities progress, while boys advance in mathematics and lose headway in linguistic capacities. In single-sex schools, girls can make better headway, as problems can be tackled at their own pace and interpretation, and suggestions have been made to incorporate single-sex classes into co-educational settings.