SEVEN YEARS AGO to the week I went through one of those life-changing events that one never forgets. The first sexual encounter, the first day in the new job, the day you get married, the first time you buy a property — these are all memorable, but none so much as sending away your eight-year-old child to boarding school.
That evening, before I went to bed, I wrote it all down — the anxiety, the tears. I will never forget the tears. They were, I hasten to add, all mine; the child was fine, if somewhat embarrassed by his weeping parent.
Why did we do it? Like many parents in the Armed Forces and the Foreign Office, we had careers that took us to live overseas regularly. We were concerned to provide a stable place of education, rather than constantly uproot them and require them to settle into new lesson plans, new friends, new teachers.
But now that we live permanently in the UK, we have still chosen to repeat the experience. Last September a second McGregor son, aged 8, was deposited at boarding school. I still cried, and he was as embarrassed as his brother had been, but this time I knew that there were many good reasons for sending him.
I am not alone in making this decision. Earlier this week The Times reported on a survey of 550 parents who send their children to prep schools. Of this sample, almost a third are now opting for boarding school, particularly weekly boarding. Working parents have totted up both the high cost of childcare, and the hours that their children spend travelling to and from school, and looked towards boarding.
So why should you consider sending your child to boarding school? Let’s assume that you can survive the haemorrhage of cash that it requires. This is quite an assumption: if you stood by the lavatory and flushed £20 notes down it continuously you couldn’t offload so much money so quickly. Senior school for boys aged 13-plus, is now around £7,000 a term, while prep school is not that much cheaper at around £5,000 per term. Music lessons, school trips and the like are extra. Over the next year we will write cheques for over £13,000 three times. Let us also assume that you have conquered any aversion to private education in principle, and that you have not been too scarred by experiences such as that of Robert Graves: “From my first moment at Charterhouse,” he wrote in Goodbye To All That, “I suffered an oppression of spirit that I hesitate to recall in its full intensity . . . half-way through my second year I wrote to tell my parents that they must take me away, because I could not stand life at Charterhouse any longer.”
If such things are not impediments, you will end up with stronger, more independent minded and well mannered children. Why?
1. Boarding school, especially prep school (age 8-13), levels, rather than accentuates, the social divide between the haves and the have-not-quite-as-muches. I put two of my sons through the local state primary; they came home with almost daily demands for the latest toy (remember bay blades?) and the latest trainers (do you know how much you can spend on a pair of shoes for a 7-year-old?), and regularly went in and out of other people’s houses (why haven’t we got a PlayStation 2/TVs in our bedrooms/a swimming pool?). It has been such a relief to have had no such requests or complaints for a year from Lachlan, now aged 9. Why? Because personal possessions are not allowed at his school; school uniform is worn almost all the time; he spends so much time with his friends at school, and they live scattered over such an extensive area, that he has visited only a couple of their homes.
2. More than anything else, boarding school, where access to television and computer games is necessarily restricted, has turned my children into great readers and lovers of books in a way that as a working mother I doubt that I would ever have managed.
3. I have never had an argument about doing homework with any of my children. When homework is done by everyone at the same time, in silence and supervised by a prefect or a teacher, no one thinks to question if it should be done, or whether a favourite TV programme or a telephone call to a friend should delay it. When my children come home, their time is theirs and mine. I contrast this with the heated debates my friends with day-school children get into with their teenagers, many of whom are taller and larger than they are.
4. As a London mother, I spared my children the rigours of the eight-plus. One in seven children in London is now educated privately, as opposed to one in 20 for the country as a whole. The concentration of high earners and scarce supply of private schools in the capital have led to places being rationed not so much by who can pay, but who can get through the battery of exams/tests/interviews that start as young as three!
5. Boarding schools, being situated for the most part in the country, have more facilities than city-located private day schools will ever be able to possess, all on one site. Thus your child will enjoy sport, learn a musical instrument, have time with friends, take part in competitions, all without you (or the nanny) having to spend hours of each day in a car.
6. If I can’t be at home being a full-time mother, then boarding school is the next best thing. We both have to work to afford even day-school fees, so taking them out of boarding school would not permit me to stay at home. Nannies can be wonderful, but will they ever really put in the time to read them stories, help with their table manners, answer their questions on science (does the sperm or the egg determine hair colour?) and politics (why do we still have troops in Iraq?) and lay down moral boundaries? Plus, is that not a lot of responsibility to hand over to one person, however much you pay them? And then they leave and you have to find another one. Co-parenting with a good boarding school is more stable, more honest, less risky. Your child is a project that you both care passionately about.
