Boarding Education
The Dragon School, Oxford
In 2000, according to fi gures kept by
the Independent Association of Prep Schools (IAPS), there were 318 seven year-olds boarding at IAPS schools; by 2010, the number had fallen to just 191. The statistics for eight and nine year- olds show a similarly steep decline. But the trend is not necessarily irreversible. “I confi dently expect to see more young
children boarding at prep school in three or four years’ time,” says Hilary Moriarty, head of the Boarding Schools Association (BSA). “The reason is, quite simply, that in more and more families, both parents are doing demanding full-time jobs. They are dropping their children off at school at eight and picking them up again at six, or they are having to make elaborate and expensive child-care arrangements which are less than satisfactory. They can’t rely on Granny to help out because Granny is probably doing a full-time job herself.” Predictions that the prep school
boarder would become an extinct species in the child-centred world of the 21st century have proved wildly premature. There is even one state boarding school – the Royal Alexandra and Albert School in Reigate, Surrey – which now takes boarders of primary school age.
With busy parents setting the agenda, and schools having to adapt to new priorities, there is an increasing trend, particularly at prep schools within easy reach of London, for weekly rather than full-
time boarding. Children catch the train to school on Monday morning and return home by train on Friday, to be reunited with their parents, who have spent the week slaving in the City to earn the school fees. The same model would not work in the wilds of Herefordshire or the Highlands of Scotland, but weekly boarding is now so popular that even some traditional boarding schools no longer off er full-time boarding. Flexi-boarding is another viable
Parents cannot rely
on Granny to help
out anymore because Granny is probably doing a full-time job herself
option. Children stay overnight at the school for one or two nights a week, either by prior arrangement or on an ad hoc basis, when their parents have to take business trips abroad, for example. It would not suit all families. Children need structure in their lives: they do not like living out of a
The Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’ School, Hertfordshire
suitcase. But it is symptomatic of the way market forces are shaping the future of boarding prep schools. The kind of mothers who, 20 years ago, would have put their own careers on hold until the children were well into their teens, have rewritten the rule-book. Earlier this year, a report published in the British Journal of Psychotherapy by Professor Joy Schaverien, who has spent 30 years treating former boarders, claimed that “Boarding School Syndrome” could traumatise children as much as being put in the care of local authorities. You don’t have to go far to fi nd adults with bitter memories of cold, cheerless boarding schools. But if that is the case for the prosecution, how about the case for the defence? Ex-boarding school children of my generation – I started boarding at the age of ten in 1966, when my father was posted to West Africa – tend to trot out the same hoary old cliché: “It never did me any harm.” Cold showers, beatings, draughty dormitories… we dismiss them with a merry laugh. But are we guilty of understatement? Instead of saying it never did us any harm, should we actually say, that it did us GOOD – not simply because we survived the
toughening-up experience, but because the boarding school environment helped us develop emotionally?
I learned lessons from living week in, week out, in a community that I could never have learned in the more constricted setting of a nuclear family. I learned independence. I learned the importance of fi tting in, rubbing along with other boys, whether I liked them or not. I learned that I was not the
permanent centre of attention, but part of a larger whole.
www.fi rstelevenmagazine.co.uk Michaelmas 2011 FirstEleven 33
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