Text 9. Prepare to admit boarders

Rachel Johnson and Annabel Trusselle offer some timely advice for parents about to send their children away to school

ON the first day of my first term at Bryanston in Dorset, my grandfather drove me there in his Land Rover from the farm on Exmoor. Thereafter, I made my own way home for half-term and holidays by coach to Victoria station.

In the course of my three years there, my parents visited twice more: once was for Sports’ Day; the second and final time was when my housemaster invited my mother to travel all the way from London to Blandford Forum for an emergency parent-teacher conference about my spike-heeled ankle boots. (She came, and I left soon afterwards).

In the 1980s, boarding school meant just that. Parents sent their children “away” to school, and there, apart from perhaps a couple of exeats and half-term, they stayed. My husband remembers being allowed out of his school just twice a term in the 1960s. He was not allowed to leave until after chapel on Sunday, and had to be back by tea-time. It was exactly as Nigel Molesworth said: “It is just another stretch same as any other and no remission for good conduct”.

Now I realize that life moves on and schools change with the times. But has anyone else noticed that you no longer hand over your child along with the fees and receive, in exchange, a well-rounded teenager with exam passes, a Duke of Edinburgh award, and above-average competency in metalwork?

The latest edition of the invaluable Good Schools Guide now carries a warning about boarding schools aimed at parents abroad. It says: “Ask what arrangements are made at the end of public exam terms. There is an increasing tendency to send pupils home early once they have finished their exams – sometimes weeks and weeks early”.

Call me old-fashioned, but I do seem to remember that one used to stay at school until the end of term, even in exam terms. Now the summer term at senior school is abbreviated to whenever exams finish, a foreshortening that can be applied by boarding as well as day schools. And nota bene, Good Schools Guide: plenty of boarding schools also send pupils home to revise during term-time.

My half-brother is at Eton, where he sat GCSEs earlier this summer. He returned to school for the end of term after three weeks (including half-term) in London. The somewhat protracted presence of my father’s youngest son in the middle of term was (utterly delightful though he is) a cause for some surprise as well as celebration in the Johnson household in Primrose Hill.

“In the old days, when one sent one's children to these admirable schools, preferably somewhere deep in the countryside like Dorset,” my father says, “there was little risk of them turning up during term-time. At Eton, not only do they come home at weekends, but they spend study leave at home, too”.

As there are now AS levels on top of GCSEs and A levels, it is quite possible for your sixth-former to spend the larger part of four summer terms either revising or prematurely home after the end of exams. And time spent revising – either at home or at school – means time spent not playing sport, doing drama, or making use of the lavish facilities many boarding schools offer.

John Arkell, headmaster of Greshams in Norfolk, thinks this is a waste. “I have written to Estelle Morris [the Secretary of State for Education and Skills] pointing out that we used to have seven house plays every summer. Last year, we had just one house entertainment. And we’ve had to drop university visits this year. I think parents should be up in arms about the fact that another set of exams in the summer term means a huge chunk of wasted teaching time. In former years, they would be taught during this three-week period. Now three-tenths of the term is being wasted on revising and exams”. Well, are parents up in arms?

“In most years, we get calls from parents who are incensed or puzzled because they have paid full fees and the pupils leave after exams,” says Dick Davidson of the Independent Schools Information Service. “We are not getting any calls though complaining about home study leave, which, from what I gather from talking to a number of headmasters, appears to be a matter of negotiation between the school, the pupil and the parents”. (This is exactly how it is arranged at Eton).

Davidson says the stock answer for parents who complain that, if their children are sent home for long stretches of term time, they are not getting value is that a school is costed on an annual basis, which is divided into three equal parts. When you send your child to a school, you buy into the whole infrastructure, and you are under contract to support it.

My father has no complaints on this score. It is merely that home study leave, plus the trio of exams, has left him feeling that his youngest son has been denied the long, idle summers of loafing and cricket that his first three Etonian sons had.

“When on earth can they play cricket matches if they’re at home? It’s as if someone is trying to weaken the sporting ethos of public schools,” he says. “What was the summer term about, if not shadows on the grass?”

None the less, not all parents are discontent about having to resume full parental duties while also paying the full whack of boarding fees. “With boys, the old-fashioned parent gets het up because he thinks his son should be playing cricket for hours on end,” one mother of five tells me.

“I think it’s better to have study leave than keep to the usual timetable, like they do at Westminster, because at least it gives children time to revise. My daughter’s just decided to stay at Sherborne for her study leave. She prefers it there because of the boys”.

I suppose it boils down to this. Some schools have now worked out that it is a lot easier if they are not in loco parentis for the difficult bits of a teenager’s school career, namely stressful public exams, and the animal high spirits that accompany their conclusion. And the upside of all this is, as Molesworth would doubtless point out, that mothers no longer blub when they kiss their babies goodbye at the school train, because these days they are bound to be reunited all too soon.

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