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As the Head of a large, mainly day school in London, but nevertheless one with a significant boarding element, I have been asked to set out my own views on the advantages and disadvantages of boarding as against day education.

It has been my observation over many years that most children are equally well suited to either day or boarding education, and the choice therefore mostly depends on parental circumstances and preferences. There are some children who are not well suited to boarding but these constitute a very small minority among those of secondary school age. Similarly, there are some children for whom boarding is essential for a variety of reasons: in the case of those with parents serving in the Her Majesty’s Forces, the itinerant nature of postings can, in itself, be disruptive to any form of day education. There are also those who come from very isolated areas where realistic day options may be limited or even nonexistent (many years ago I came in to this category myself).

Boarding has often been quoted as fostering independence. I am unconvinced that the good development of independence is especially promoted by boarding; rather I think it is something can be fostered in either a day or a boarding environment by encouragement and sensible relaxation of boundaries with age. I do agree, however, that boarding is particularly powerful in developing inter dependence and a ‘team’ culture. Most of today’s school population will go on to work in an environment where there is a need for team players with an awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of other members of the team. The necessary interpersonal skills to succeed in such environments are particularly well fostered in a boarding community.

In former times, boarders saw very little of their parents, but this is no longer the case. Unless parents are based overseas, they tend to play a much more active part in school life than was the norm even 20 years ago and the advent of mobile phones and emails has completely changed the nature and frequency of contacts between parents and their boarding offspring. Many schools offer flexible boarding programmes; these include weekly boarding, which is popular with many parents who have quality time to spend with their children at weekends but where both may be working very long hours during the week.

What then are the advantages of boarding? Undoubtedly boarding allows children to gain an understanding and a tolerance of others in their boarding community, many of whom are likely to come from very different backgrounds and different parts of the country and the world. Most of our students in independent schools will go on post-university to work for international organisations, and an early opportunity to understand different cultural, linguistic and religious backgrounds can put them at a life-long advantage. Boarders inevitably have more time to make full use of the wide range of co-curricular activities offered by all good schools. They also have the advantage of regulated prep times, which parents may find more difficult to supervise than boarding staff. In many day schools, including my own, travel times to and from school can be quite extensive and not especially productive. Boarding avoids this particular problem. Finally, as mentioned above, the boarding community is an excellent environment for learning the range of interpersonal skills that will be needed for most careers. If boarding per se does not automatically promote independence, this will be something that all good schools foster, and certainly boarders will be at no disadvantage in this respect.

The top disadvantage of boarding for most parents is the considerable added expense; this is an inevitable consequence of the high standards of pastoral care that all parents rightly expect of boarding schools. Where parents live abroad, boarding can take children away from the family for long periods and can result in them becoming too detached from family influences, although this has not generally been a major problem in my experience. Good modern communications make it much less of a hazard than would have been the case in the 1960s. Of course, if a boarding house is poorly run, boarding can allow the development of bad habits and allow young people to be more subject to the influences of unsatisfactory peer groups within their boarding community. Equally, in a well-run boarding establishment, boarding can protect young people from choosing the wrong friends out of school and developing bad habits in this way. Boarding houses reflect the ethos of a particular school and this may differ from the aspirations of the family; such situations can be avoided if parents looking for boarding places take care to match their aspirations and standards with those of the school they choose. Finally, boarding can interrupt the social side of family life in that this will be dictated by term times and weekends spent at home (the latter being more difficult the further the parents are from the school).

As with most choices in life, there are plusses and minuses of both boarding and day education. Each family needs to look at its own circumstances and how these will affect a child’s education, before coming to the best decision for that particular child in that particular family unit. All good schools will provide excellent support to both their boarders and their day students. Inevitably the school will tend to have a slightly greater influence on the development of boarders, especially in the middle teenage years, than it can hope to do with its day pupils where parental influence will tend to be proportionately greater.