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Boarding Schools For Girls. The modern institutions of ‘live-in’ education, i.e. boarding schools, are reported to be quite different nowadays to the over disciplined establishments of my youth. As one might expect, the impression created in glossy brochures sent to interested parents before enrolment was quite different to the reality experienced by the child.

Certain institutions exercised, in my opinion, over zealous precautions in security, discipline and routine. At 12 years old I was sent to a small boarding school for girls in South Devon, England. The building itself was adapted from the one time country home of a lady of the court of Henry VIII and was predictably rather grand.
Impressive weathered stone was topped by soot blackened chimneys looking out over rolling acres of lawn.

The driveway was edged with ancient horse chestnut trees and in the autumn, conkers littered the ground; we were not allowed to touch them. My first night at school in England was spent shivering under blankets far too thin to afford any comfort. The night was cold for September, and straight from the sunny climes of Singapore I felt miserably frozen, unwelcome and deeply unhappy.

Our tiny world consisted of the three square miles of ground which were the limits of the school boundaries. As my parents lived overseas, this was my prison for ten months of the year. Neither of my parents had ever set foot in New Zealand. (Uh – hello? I arrived in Auckland in the early hours of the morning, yawning from the long haul flight from Singapore. We arrived at something which looked to me like a wooden farm house compared with the hallowed, grey, stone-walled institution I had recently left. It turned out to be St Mary’s, my school and home for the next couple of years.

My heart in my stomach, I stepped into the hall, expecting the usual hostile stare. I felt I was a long lost friend who had suddenly and unexpectedly returned home. My homesickness faded away, disappeared as if by magic, never to return.
The girls who attended St Mary’s were, for the most part, daughters of sheep farmers and other trades linked with agriculture. New Zealand is essentially a farming community although some of the girls were daughters of town dwellers living in Wellington and Auckland.

My surroundings were strange but dramatically beautiful, at the foot of the incomparable Mount Egmont in Taranaki and I spent the school holidays for the rest of the year dividing my time between the homes of my friends, getting to know their way of life and their families.
We were never constrained by our surroundings, never refused freedom unless we misbehaved enough to warrant being gated. Punishments were invariably little more than extra household chores, such as cleaning the chapel windows. I left to finish my schooling in Hong Kong two years later but I have never forgotten the friends I left behind in New Zealand and thought of them often over the years I spent traveling the rest of the world.

Residential schools are sometimes selected by parents in too much of a hurry, for any number of reasons. For students with parents overseas it is all too often a choice made ‘sight unseen’ and occasionally the results are disastrous; instead of a lucky and happy experience similar to the one I had in New Zealand, the child is lumbered with a year long nightmare such as the one I endured in England.

Why should these children have to make the best of such a poor effort, struggling to cope in a sub standard institution with a thin veneer of traditionalism smeared on the surface, to persuade parents to subject their child to an establishment that should probably, in all conscience, have been shut down years since?

My two experiences were radically different but illustrate how children can be either crushed by a boarding school education, or enriched and healed by it, as I eventually was by my brief stay in New Zealand.
By all means send your children to a residential school, but have the sense to research thoroughly prior to deciding which school.
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