to think boarding schools are no longer ok...

[BaklavaRocks]

Inspired by another thread, and some old YouTube documentaries I've recently watched, I can't help but feel boarding schools for under 13's (i.e. boarding prep schools) have had their time.

Maybe they used to be an acceptable option, but with all the research we now have available, showing the damage done by separation of young children from their parents, do you think boarding for v young kids (8/9/10/11) will eventually be banned except in v exceptional circumstances?

And if our politicians including past PMs like Johnson and Cameron were not a product of boarding schools, do you think they'd have more compassion and be less cut off from emotion and feelings? and better able to relate to us common folk?

@BaklavaRocks I think you'll find many of us chose private school for SEN reasons. State system is often a shitshow for SEN.

Flexi boarding my SEN DD15 has grown her confidence massively too along with the lovely small class sizes.

I'm quickly concluding that as a lone parent who works full time I actually DGAF what other women (because it is definitely not then men that judge me on this) think about my child rearing or educational choices for my DD.

@ForRealTurtle apologies I missed the context

No one is criticising private schools. This is about boarding. And mo0st pupils who board, do full board.

Despite several MNs and others explaining to me how to do that link thing I can’t link
Apologies

If you google
ISC census and annual report 2023 it comes up as the top result

Or if you click on the image I sent you can then zoom in

Or when kids want to board
As mine did

But this is exactly what is being done to parents who choose boarding school - or indeed those of us whose parents chose to send us to board. The insinuation that we were unloved and our parents should have made different choices.

You feel uncomfortable with the suggestion that perhaps you should have sacrificed career, or moved to an area with cheap housing or made other choices to enable you to stay at home full-time in the early years.

Yet on this thread, I've been told that my parents should have moved house and job so that I could have not gone to the boarding school that I really wanted to attend. And where I did far more fun things than I would have done at home (and I was still at home for well over half of every year).

Some of us are just pointing out that one option gets totally demonised - generally by those who have no experience of boarding and wouldn't choose it for their children - and now to the point where people want to ban that choice for others.

There are very few true full boarding schools left anymore - most are flexi or weekly.

@OhCrumbsWhereNow 80 per cent of boarders are full boarding. I shared the stats on this thread.
I do wish you would not keep sharing incorrect info.

It's well for you. A lot of us aren't able to do that.

Mine loved nursery. I was happier with them there than with a childminder. I had two who should never have been minding children, and it took time for that to come to light.

It's not incorrect information.

True full boarding schools are the minority.

The 80% is also not correct as that is the figure for senior years and this thread is about younger kids
That figure stands at approx 35%

apreciate you couldn’t read my chart though

See the pie charts i posted for 2023

Only if your counting hours while the baby is asleep

For under 13s NO.

But for over 13s I would recommend it.

For girls anyway. I don't know what boys get up to at boarding school. But I personally had 2 terms at boarding school (all to do with my parents being abroad for a while). All girls and I LOVED IT. Mind you I am an extrovert and I know that some girls HATED it because they had hardly any time to themselves.

The ONS stats show that under 5s spend a median of 22 hours a week in formal childcare out of a total 168h a week. That includes children who are in reception at school (who will be spending 32.5 h at school) and children who are at a childminder but does not include those who are with grandparents. 22 hours a week is 4.5h a day for 5 days a week or a 10h day twice a week. Assuming all of their sleeping hours (96 a week for a 1-2yo including a daytime nap or two) are at home they are spending up to 48h awake at home so over double what they spend at nursery.

I can't see how a preschooler spending less than a third of their waking time each week away from their primary caregiver and seeing them every morning and night is in any way equivalent to a 7 year old being sent away from home for weeks on end.

You are actually admitting that your DC asked to leave home at an early age?
You think thats a good thing?

If you read my posts you’ll see mine boarded in their final Alevel years…….

just read back over my posts and I haven’t actually mentioned that hopping so it’s a fare assumption on your part
apologies.

Was it ok for me to do it? Single parent working as a teacher, so only term time. I wasn’t so much preserving my career as preserving the roof over our heads. It’s completely different from boarding school, there are other options for that. There aren’t enough childminders for everyone to do that, plus at my DD’s nursery she had the same caregiver every day so there wasn’t really a difference (this is often the case).
Once my DD went to university I worked in a boarding school (in boarding) so I’m not ignorant of how they work and of how few children genuinely benefit from them/love them.

See report/ study I posted earlier looking at a wide range of different boarding schools

I don’t want parents to do anything and I don’t mean to make people feel bad. I think government needs to change the culture of two full time working parents when kids are young. It’s hard. Really hard.

I'm an ex-boarder, from age 11-18. While I would never send my own child, because I enjoy them and don't want them growing inevitably away from me prematurely, I think from Year 9 onwards, most children would enjoy it. Pre Year 9, no. All too young, and in order to cope, the children build walls around themselves, which the parents either genuinely can't see (because they don't bother getting close enough anyway) or pretend they can't see in order not to admit to the irrevocable mistake they've made.

We fetishize childhood too much in this country and it has a negative effect on the adults that children grow up to be. Children are adults in training, nothing more, nothing less. People spend 60 or more years as adults compared to 18 (if that) as children.

That was at my DH's old school.

He says he loved it there - from 13-19 - but his mother cried every time he spoke to her on telephone or went home a few times a year.

WWYD if your DC had a talent that couldn’t be accommodated in a local school state or private? My child had the dream since the age of six to do something that they can’t do in our home county or the next county because of their gender.
Single parent who can’t afford to move so that they could follow their dream as a day pupil.
This was my reality a few years ago with my DC. It was all initiated by them and they demonstrated that they had the talent. They love the fact that they’re living their dream. Contact is pretty much daily via phone, text and or email.
Obviously, I’d much prefer them to be at home but until this country genuinely offers equality of access and opportunity in my DCs chosen field then some youngsters don’t have the option not to attend boarding schools.