What’s the appeal of boarding school stories?

@ClariceQuiff Yes, the injustice! They'd have been forced to leave, if they hadn't lived so far away. The most touching part, I thought, was poor Rose ineffectually pleading their case.

I used to read them because I just wanted some friends. A group to belong to. That kind of thing.

@TheMerrickBoy, I always suspect Patrick is essentially a posher Jacob Rees-Mogg with ‘golden’ eyes — young fogey, trad Catholic who thinks Vatican II was a vulgarism, rebelling against his peer group with a short back and sides, bigwig dad, homes in London and the country etc. Perhaps the gorgeous blondes next door also fought over a young JRM.

My favourite boarding school book of all was probably What Katy Did at School. Definitely a romanticised view of boarding, but lovely all the same.

Remembering descriptions of Quaker Row, Shaker Row and Attic Row, the infamous Christmas boxes and exploits and fun with Rose Red.

I loved them as a child to the extent I wrote away for boarding school prospectuses so I could make up stories about the people in the photographs . I am sure my parents found me a very strange child at times . I started off with the Naughtiest girl books and ended up with Chalet School .

I'm here in the hope that I'll learn about a series I've not read yet.

private school was the only available option in the early and mid 20th century if you wanted your children educated post 14

Really? Yes the Education Act 1944 pushed it along, but the idea that only private schools were available post 14 is nonsense.

My Dad took the School Certificate aged 16 in 1942, he failed (or in his words he failed "Matriculation"), and started working in an aircraft factory.
His family certainly couldn't afford to pay for education, his dad was an invalid from the 1st WW, and his mum raised 6 kids (2 died) throughout the 20s and 30s as a cleaner, skivvy & taking in washing.

For me it was the elements of detailed ritual and repetition - variations on a reassuringly familiar theme over a long series.

And while the parental absence trope might have been true of the Enid Blyton books I realised as I matured that more than half the joy of the Chalet School was the total incorporation of parental figures and home life into the school story. It was a triumph of world building.

I liked them because I was quite lonely as a child. Boarding school books seemed like everyone had friends!!

I note your name, @TheMerrickBoy. Are you a fan of that golden-eyed sister-swapping cad, then?

I hear you on the orderliness being appealing. My school specialised in fighting and truancy, and staff were so dispirited they didn't even try to teach. I only lived to tell the tale because I was befriended by a deeply scary girl I sat next to in maths, of whom everyone was afraid. (Last heard of in jail.) Being concerned with wiping the blackboard so you wouldn't lose point for the Tidiness Picture, or a Guide Court of Honour felt like another universe.

I read them as an escape from a terrible life at home. I used to will myself to sleep by pretending that I was in a dormitory at Malory Towers. When I was woken to be abused then THAT was my dream.

Historically boarding school weren't as posh as they are now, private school was the only available option in the early and mid 20th century if you wanted your children educated post 14. DH and his siblings were at private school in the 80s, their mother didn't do paid work and their father was a university lecturer. Nowadays the fees for DH's old school would be more than the entire salary of a university lecturer.

This will make me sound like a very sad child, but I loved the descriptions of the uniforms - lots of detail in Antonia Forest, and Anne Digby, for example, really leant into that trope in Trebizon. I loved the idea of having to wear a smart and 'proper' uniform, with a special hat band if you had your colours! Also the idea of everything being ordered - breakfast, lessons, prep, bed - and perhaps more than anything, traditions and customs that mattered (speech day, school plays, mark reading), and things like being form captain actually mattering to anyone.

I think I'm outing myself not just as a saddo but as someone who went to a school which was very much the opposite of all that!

AND..... I think it's about the appeal of the posh, tbf. Like an infant version of Made In Chelsea.

I think, too, that a setting where the adults are not the children's parents allows the children to be more fully realised characters. If the children are presented within their families, then the family dynamic is part of the picture and the child a part of the family unit. Taking this away places the child as an individual firmly in the foreground.

This. I suspect children are boarding school who know the boring reality find them less interesting.

No - I loved them. I thought they made boarding schools sound like lots of fun and then I found out that this was actually the case. My boarding school was never boring.

Agree with PPs that it allows children to have adventures etc away from parents and adults, but I also suspect the authors are drawing on their own childhood, whether from attending a boarding school, or at least private education. I doubt they could write convincingly about about a group of children living in the slums of Manchester, Glasgow or London.

I think they carry all the appeal of being away from parents and having adventures without the loneliness and homesickness of real boarding school. They are also quite socially educative. Blyton reveals how bossy girls get to be leaders and quiet or fragile ones get mocked and overlooked and have to toughen up.