January 2010

by Hilary Moriarty
National Director of the Boarding Schools’ Association, she writes here in a personal capacity.

All pupils at boarding schools are posh. Not true. Now more than ever, boarding schools are likely to have a thoroughly mixed population, ranging from the children of titled families or international entrepreneurs to children from the most modest of homes.

And possibly some from no homes at all, as the government’s initiative to encourage Local Authorities to help vulnerable children from difficult circumstances gathers to find places in boarding schools momentum.The Boarding Pathfinder Initiative was launched in November 2006. A prime mover at the time was Lord Andrew Adonis, himself a beneficiary of a boarding education when his father was widowed. Young Andrew won local authority or charitable support which sent him to Kingham Hill in Oxfordshire. From there, he went to Oxford, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Now devoting his attention to transport, in general and railways in particular, Lord Adonis has certainly travelled a long way from a London high-rise flat. He credits his school with playing a major role in helping him to where he is today, and he has returned the favour in kind by his interest in the Boarding Pathfinder programme. There is no doubt that his early influence was crucial in getting the programme off the ground. For that to happen, in a fairly hostile climate, someone in high places had to believe. Lord Adonis did.
In many ways, it’s a shame the initiative was necessary in the first place. If a good education is one of the basic building blocks of a successful life, how come the need for it appears to be so low on the list of priorities for Local Authorities charged with the welfare of children? The statistics for educational outcomes among children actually in care are dire, often because of lack of continuity of education while a child’s home or care circumstances change. So the child moves school, loses friends, takes time to settle in, loses the plot, loses interest, nose dives in vital public examinations. All too often, game over.
If there’s one thing boarding guarantees, it’s continuity of education. It offers comfort and fun and friends and loads of activities and opportunities as well, but let’s just stick with the big hitter for vulnerable children: a good, continuous and coherent education. And the kind of pastoral care that can supplement what’s available at home, complement the best and even stand in for the least.
Going to boarding school can not only change your life, it can save it.
Many, many boarding schools actually have their roots in the charitable intentions of their founders to help children who were destitute in very hard times indeed, far harder than would be the case for most children in Britain today, even those worst off.
The Red Maids School in Bristol was founded in accordance with the will of a sometime merchant, Mayor and MP for Bristol, John Whitson, specifically to rescue from the streets and doorways of the city ‘40 poor women of this parish, their parents being deceased or decayed.’
Officially, today, we have all kinds of safety nets for such children, whose homes or families fall apart through no fault of the child. Education outcome statistics suggest they may not always be effective.
Of course even the most charitable schools have moved with the times since their foundation. Red Maids’ was founded in 1634 and no longer has boarders at all. But it’s not so long since independent schools, not necessarily boarding, educated children who reached them, whatever their home or financial circumstances, via the Government Assisted Places scheme.
In 1998, the ISC census records that no fewer than 40,331 children were in independent schools with assistance from the Assisted Places Scheme. In the same year, a further 3,135 were in our schools with assistance from the Local Education Authority, as it then was.
In just 12 years, not only has the Assisted Places Scheme disappeared, one of the early casualties of the Labour Government, but Local Authorities appear to have lost their folk-memory of their sometime contact with independent schools and developed an aversion to the idea of boarding. It is almost a mantra that a child should be kept with parents, however dysfunctional that family might be – and we have seen some horrific cases in recent years of the consequences of a child being left with her family.
It has been tremendously hard in recent years trying to persuade Local Authorities to entertain the idea of adding boarding to their list of options for vulnerable children in difficult circumstances. No one is saying boarding is perfect for every child. But at least consider it in the list of possibilities.
The most persuasive people as far as Local Authorities are concerned are the Educational Charities like the Royal Wanstead Children’s Foundation, the Frank Buttle Trust and JET, the Joint Educational Trust which works with children up to 13. Their collective evidence from the young people who have been helped into boarding by the intervention of the charity working with appropriate schools indicates that boarding really can do what it says on the tin. In a 2009 Royal Wanstead survey of 30 young people assisted into boarding and about to leave, 69% declared that it had ‘transformed their lives and prospects.’
In the pages of this magazine, I realise we are preaching to the converted: more than a hundred schools have signed up to the Boarding Pathfinder Scheme (no longer an initiative, it is now considered to be well on its way to having more pupils in more schools, building their own bank of success stories). They are discovering that to declare themselves ready to consider youngsters if an LA sends them, is not enough. The schools are reaching out to the LAs to build the bridges across which the young people might pass.
Reaching the right people is not always easy – from an initial 10 the LAs have grown to 30, with more joining every time the DCSF runs an event which helps spread the word. One such event was held in Leeds in November. It was a useful reminder to interested LAs who came to hear more about the scheme that the government is now making £10,000 available as ‘start up’ money for LAs.
The money is not meant to pay for a child to go anywhere; it’s meant to allow the LA the scope to explore the possibilities further. One LA representative told me she had asked for the money just so she could afford to visit the schools nearest to her, so she knew what they were like and could ‘sell’ the idea of them to children for whom boarding might be a solution. She said she had already been to two, and admitted she had been shocked by how different they were from what she expected.
‘The best bit,’ she confided, ‘was talking to the kids. They give you the low-down – you expect the school and the Head to say good things, of course they will. But the kids tell you the truth. And it’s nice when it’s roughly what the Head told you to begin with!’
I wish I could report that hundreds of children were finding their way to boarding schools and thereafter to better lives right now. But it’s the start of a new year, and I do believe more will make it in 2010, than were lucky enough to do so in 2009.