When I was a child there was never any doubt that I would go to a boarding school. My father, my uncle and my elder brother had all gone to Eton, and it was assumed that I would eventually go there, too; but I would first be expected to board at a preparatory school with a good record for getting its pupils into that famous establishment. And so it was that from the age of 8 to 18 I spent more than half of every year away from home, living in communities of other boys in the care not of parents but of schoolmasters. My two sisters went to boarding schools, too, just as our mother had before them, and it didn’t seem to matter whether or not we children were happy boarders; boarding school was our inevitable fate, and nobody questioned that it was the best thing for us.
Since then, however, that certainty has been steadily eroded. Boarding schools have been increasingly attacked on two fronts: first, of course, for being bastions of privilege and nepotism through which rich people can buy huge advantages for their children over those whose parents can’t afford the fees; and, second, by contrast, as symbols of old-fashioned parental detachment, relics of a time when the English upper classes preferred to see as little as possible of their children. So, as well as the political objection to public schools for being unfair and discriminatory in favour of the rich has been a feeling among many who can afford their fees that their children would be better off at home rather than being dispatched into institutional care.
This trend has been discernible in my own family. Among my three siblings and myself, only two sent all their children to boarding schools: my wife and I sent our two daughters to day schools, and my elder sister and her husband sent their two sons to Holland Park Comprehensive in London. But when it came to the next generation, my four grandchildren, my brother’s seven grandchildren, and my elder sister’s 12 grandchildren were all educated at day schools. Only my younger sister’s grandchildren went to boarding schools.
This was doubtless in many cases due to their unaffordability — in the 16 years from 1992 to 2008 private school fees rose by 83 per cent, and at most boarding schools they are now well over £30,000 a year — but I think that the factors mentioned above were the predominant ones. And so low is the standing of such schools in public esteem that paranoia has set in among them. We have had the resignation last year of Frances King, the head of Roedean, the girls’ school in Sussex where my mother once went, because, she said, ‘it is quite hard work to continue to be always on the wrong side of public opinion’. And before hers came the resignation of Vicky Tuck, the head of Cheltenham’s Ladies’ College, who said she would not ‘miss the problem of having to defend ourselves’. Then, most explicitly of all, came the recent declaration of Dr Anthony Seldon, master of Wellington College, that ‘jealously and hostility towards private schools’ amounted to ‘the hatred that dare not speak its name’.
Dr Seldon was complaining in particular of what he said was discrimination by Britain’s élite universities against privately educated applicants and in favour of those who had attended state schools. I don’t want to enter into that controversy, but rather to note the way in which the great public schools are fighting back against their critics. They have long been seeking to disarm them by arranging bursaries for bright children from poor families, and Dr Seldon has been in the forefront of such efforts. But although 20 per cent of Eton’s students are now on bursaries, this has not made much impression on the outside world. The emphasis now is on advocating the virtues of boarding as an educational system for everyone and promoting its extension within the state sector.
I hadn’t realised that there are already 34 state boarding schools in England, in which education is free (though other costs to parents may exceed £10,000 a year); but the idea, supported by the government, is now to create many more of them. Wellington College has already sponsored a state-funded academy with boarding houses, and Eton is about to do the same. Holyport College, a free school eight miles away from Eton, is due to open in the autumn; and Eton’s headmaster, Tony Little, hopes it will instil in its students the same self-confidence that Eton supposedly gives to its own. Meanwhile, a new charity, Springboard, supported by Eton and other famous schools, has been set up as a kind of dating agency to identify disadvantaged children all over the country who might benefit from boarding and find them a suitable school to go to.
Boarding, it seems, is in favour again; and though it’s hard to say how widespread it will become, Tony Little seems optimistic. ‘In Britain,’ he told the Sunday Times in an interview, ‘we have had this distinctive, internationally recognised approach to education through boarding. And it has only been in the last year or so in the state sector that there has been a growing realisation that this works very well for us with young people.’ If you can’t beat them, join them: that is the idea. Will we all be Old Etonians soon?
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