How do you justify seding your child to boarding school?

"By the time he was 15 he was organising junior House teams to be at the right place at the right time (30 mins a day?). When he was 17 he was organising speakers for a school society he belonged to, overseeing bed time in his House (with others) and studying for A levels."

Interestingly, apart from overseeing bedtime, my dd has done all of those things in the 6th form of her day school.

So the older ones never actually take part in any routine running of the household, as they would be expected to do at home. An older one never sorts a younger one's laundry or cleans the kitchen. You serve your time- then never have to do it again. That's just not how life works. And it's certainly not how a family works.

Hakluyt, older kids direct house plays, organise house games, run school societies etc. Younger kids do more basic stuff because they can't be expected to manage older kids. It's not demeaning. It's not fagging because it's for the whole community, not for some elite.

In his early years at school my DS helped with laundry, distributing mail etc (20 mins a day max). By the time he was 15 he was organising junior House teams to be at the right place at the right time (30 mins a day?). When he was 17 he was organising speakers for a school society he belonged to, overseeing bed time in his House (with others) and studying for A levels.

It's no different to the workplace.

He has recently graduated and is working.The donkey work in his (fantastic) workplace is done by the new graduates while they become competent. My DS seems to understand this better than some of his fellow starters who "didn't get a degree to photocopy".

So what do the older boys do for the younger ones?

The older children do things for the younger ones. No one waits on anyone. The definition fagging is bring a "personal servant" to a senior boy. I don't think collecting the mail for the whole house including staff fulfils this definition.
Many many years ago I worked one whole summer at a riding stables in the middle of no where, I was the youngest (14) by a long way and was given daily jobs to do including collecting eggs that we all ate for breakfast, putting the ducks to bed, collecting and distributing mail to the staff and those on the camp site, stocking up the tuck shop and feeding an ill horse before bed. I loved it and I took the responsibilities very seriously, especially the last one although Ive never liked ducks since, I felt valued and part of the team. The older staff who looked to my eyes ancient but were probably only 18-20 did other things in. Would you call this fagging?

It's fagging if it's younger ones doing it for themselves and older ones but never the other way round. That's where it differs from family life. I would never expect my younger ones to wait on my older ones- in a family it's reciprocal.

Not fagging IMO as they also benefit from the jobs, for example they clean their own yr group kitchen, collect their own mail as well as everyone else's and collect/distribute their own laundry as well as everyone else's. Jobs are allocated by an HM. This is a tight knit community who work together for each other's good. Older children have other responsibilities. You can label this fagging if you wish but in many homes children work together to help each other; do your children cook for each other? Mine do. Does your younger DC bring all the washing in off the line including his siblings? Mine did today. I doubt you'd call this fagging. Same thing just on a bigger scale. I doubt you'd call this fagging?
I've no idea if the cleaners are female, a mixture I suspect, but he head cook and many of the kitchen staff are male.

Lot of action on this thread since I last looked.
Random fact - I added up all the days at home for a full boarding school that one of my DCs is considering compared to the present Monday to Friday day school (days at home for day school included weekends). Being at the day school gave two more days at home than the full boarding school
Obviously that does n't count weekday early mornings and evenings for the day school (DC often out with activities) but nor does it count coming home Sundays. for some fulltime boarders.

I also have a cleaner. This does not absolve my children of household responsibilities. And I think the number of people with cooks is pretty limited. I've never gone for the idea of younger children fagging for older ones, either. Just wondering- in this all boys school- I presume the domestic staff are all female?

Word - I agree with you about attachment difficulties, in the technical sense. I do have some difficulties in that area but I think the way I responded to boarding (as a teenager) was in retrospect a symptom of those difficulties and not a cause or even really a contributory factor. I can see how boarding might contribute - both negatively and in some cases perhaps positively - to a range of pre existing problems, and like a lot of people on this thread I can't imagine considering primary age boarding (which strikes me intuitively as 'higher risk') whereas I can imagine circumstances in which I would contemplate it for an older child.

My worry would be that even for a child apparently well suited to boarding in terms of character, circumstances etc such an experience might have detrimental outcomes of some kind that would not be apparent until much later. As a previous poster has said, even if that's true of only a small proportion of previous boarders, that's not much use/comfort unless there is clear evidence about which children go on to be in that category - and we just don't have that kind of research as far as I can see. I do think it's naive to assume that children in that category will always be obviously unsuited/unhappy boarders at the time, since that is not what is suggested by all adults discussing the experience, or indeed the research that does exist - focused as we know on unhappy adults so obviously excluding the probably significant majority of successes, but nevertheless including a good number of people who either did not consider themselves unhappy boarders at the time, or did not feel able to think/speak in those terms, but do now believe that they were hurt by the experience.

I think for anyone trying to weigh up the pros and cons in a nuanced way this is a very interesting thread, but particularly for the wide range of thoughtful contributions from ex boarders (or in some cases partners/relatives of boarders).

Hakluyt many people us included have a cleaner at home so really this is no different from having a army of cleaners/cooks/bottle washers in a boarding house. The first and second years do have to perform duties for the whole house. This could be getting the post, the morning wake up alarm, cleaning their kitchen or collecting/distributing the laundry. The 6 th form also have jobs mainly supervising prep, putting younger children to bed etc. it's a community all working together.

I'm not using the term "brigade" in a derogatory way it's just a term I use generally to describe groups of people, no offence was intended. Apologies if it upset people.

Hakluyt it's clearly unrealistic to expect 700 boys spread out over an enormous campus to wash and dry their own clothes, he does his own washing at home by the way. The boys are very busy so don't have time to clean bathrooms he also gleams his own bedroom when at home.

I think it's a shame when people feel we have to divide ourselves into brigades Debate is just interesting.

Surely AIBU is the place to go for tribal warfare? Not the Secondary Education topic, where you might hope for some Critical Thinking.

Well that's another mark against boarding for me- I would certainly not want a teenager of mine living somewhere where staff did all his cleaning and washing.

DS's matron does the name tapes if they buy clothes whilst at school or I buy on line and send them straight to school. He certainly doesn't clean the bathroom, they have cleaners to do this, or do his laundry, they have a very efficient industrial laundry who do turn things round very quickly. But then you couldn't have 700 boys doing their own washing and hanging it up to dry all over the place.
I suspect most parents who send their DS's to my DS's school would say that doing their laundry and cleaning the bathroom would not come very high on their list of priorities.
At prep the matrons always sewed the name tapes on for me for free, gave me priority of 2nd hand uniform and even ironed all the clothes on the first day of term (I don't iron) because I was the only one who bought them biscuits on a regular basis and talked to them rather than at them. The gardeners used to give me free plants and even weed killer because a I always talked to them as well.

I'm sure this has been said but its such a long thread to check now, but surely it depends on the school as well.
We have only looked at the one for its obvious specialism, but I bet this one is so different to many of the others that other people are talking about.
We may laugh but there are differences in expectations of parents as we see with the washing clothes and cleaning rooms, ironing labels etc.
I heard at the one we are looking at you lose your Saturday afternoon out as a detention if your room isn't clean and tidy, this is for the younger ones as well.

Many were boarders quite a long time a go and boarding has changed considerably even in the 10 years we've been doing it" And to be fair to I also used the term "pro boarding brigade".