Long life: Will we all be Old Etonians soon?

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.