I want my Mummy........ (Boarding Schools)

Member Name: Gwenick

Product:	Boarding Schools
Date:	11/10/01 (402 review reads)
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At the tender age of 13 I was packed off to boarding school almost 400 miles from where I lived. Actually saying ‘packed off’ makes it sound a bit harsh – it wasn’t really at all. There were two reasons for me going to boarding school the first and ‘official’ reason was because I was having a make decisions every night as to whether I was going to practice my music, or do my school homework. Now, you might well say that of course the homework should come first – but the problem was that I had been blessed (or if you’re not religious born with) a musical gift. It wasn’t actually recognised until I was almost 10yrs old because my parents simply couldn’t afford to give me the organ lessons I wanted until then. Once they could afford the lessons the only organ teacher we could find lived no less than 35 miles away, the church I practised in was 6 miles away.

As I was approaching the end of Middle School my parents thought it would be a good idea to try and get me a Music Scholarship somewhere so that I could have music lessons and academic lessons in the same place. They bought a few magazines with adverts for schools in and started looking through them……what they didn’t realise at the time was that I found the magazines and also looked through them. When the time came for them to broach the subject with me and ask how I would feel about possibly having to board I told them that I had been looking at some magazines they had bought and had been wondering if I should ask them!!! Anyhow, after much discussion and research we chose 5 schools located in various areas of the UK to audition at. Two of the schools where ‘Specialist Music Schools’ the other ‘normal’ private schools.

After many months of preparation and lots of travelling for auditions I was given a place at St. Mary’s Music School in Edinburgh, some 400 miles from where we were living.
At this point, apart from brownie camps, I had never been away from home – however I wasn’t at all daunted by the prospect of being so far away from home. You see the second ‘unofficial’ reason for me auditioning for these schools (which my father still doesn’t know about today) was to give me some freedom to do what I wanted to do. Don’t get me wrong, I love my father very much, however he’d got it into his head that I had been given this gift of music and everything else, except my academic work, should come afterwards. This ideal of his meant that I had been forced to turn down the opportunity of being in my school hockey team (too dangerous) and was not allowed to join the Fencing club (would eat into my practice time). Thankfully, my mother saw all of this happening and so supported my father in his ideas to get me into a private school (she did agree with his reason but we also had our own hidden agenda).

So, aged 12yrs and 6 months, I was dropped off at my new school (after being taken in the car the first time almost every other trip was made on the train/bus on my own). I was nervous, but excited – here I would find people that understood my interests. I wouldn’t be mocked for liking classical music, my music lessons and practice would be time-tabled in amongst my school lessons and best of all I would be more free to do what I wanted. Our dorms weren’t really dorms at all, they were small rooms with a maximum of 4 people in each one. I was placed into a room with three other girls – 2 of them my own age and one a few years younger. I loved it. Less than two weeks into my ‘stay’ I was out shopping with a roommate and turned round and said ‘we should be getting home, it’s almost dinner time’! Needless to say my friend looked at me rather strangely and it was only when she told me what I’d said that I realised how easily I had settled in. I became so
settled there that I used to spend most of my school holidays with friends in Edinburgh instead of going home!

I wasn’t the only newcomer to settle in quickly there were others too (and I was bullied until I was 16). However, sadly it isn’t always the same for some people. I still remember one poor girl who arrived a year or two after me – she was about 10 or 11 and everyday she called her parents in tears – homesick. It wasn’t just once a day some days it would be as many as 8 or 9 times, if not more. I must confess that most of us were very cruel to her and made the situation worse by laughing at her. I knew I was being cruel, but because I was being bullied myself I thought (stupidly) that other people would start liking me if I joined in. Her homesickness lasted for a LONG time, but thankfully she got over it….and despite me having been nasty to her we actually became friends. It’s hard to say whether she simply ‘hardened’ herself, or whether she simply lost the homesickness as she grew older. Either way she eventually became from happy being away from home.
So did the school ‘make her’ or ‘make me’ – I don’t really think so. I don’t really think that being at boarding school ‘makes or breaks’ anyone. In my opinion it makes no difference at all to how a person turns out in the end. There are thousands of confident young people leaving state schools (and day pupils at private schools) and there are also thousands of pupils leaving the same schools with very low self-esteem. In the very same way there are pupils leaving boarding school with confidences at either end of the spectrum. I believe that it is what is inside a person that makes them who they are – not where they go to school. You could argue that girl who used to be terrible homesick ‘was made’ – I say that she simply matured.

One could argue that per
haps she was too young to send to boarding school yet or that she ‘wasn’t ready for it’. However, the young girl that was in the same room as me when I arrived at the school had lived away from home since the age of 6 and loved it. So age doesn’t really play that big a part in it. And what about ‘not being ready for it’ – well how can you possibly tell for certain that anyone is mentally prepared for anything in life? For example, you here people asking the question ‘are you ready to have children’ – I was asked it several times when I was pregnant. I couldn’t honestly answer. I believed that I was ready, and wanted to be ready – but I would never actually know for sure until the baby arrived. As it happened I was ready for children (or so I like to kid myself ;-) ). The same situation goes for a child when thinking about boarding school. You may think that they’re ready for it, and they may feel that they’re ready for it (even when they’re as young as 6) but only by trying it out will you find out if they really are prepared.

As it happened with boarding school I was prepared for it. I fitted perfectly into boarding life, I was already pretty carefree (except for my father being on my back about my music) and despite the ‘rule and regulations’ I was even happier having some freedom of my own. The simple fact is that children will either fit in to boarding life……or they’ll hate in and be miserable as anything. Although I don’t think that the latter can ‘make or break’ a child. With the right love and support a school will change no child for life. There well may be bullying (it happens at ALL schools whether private or state). Just because a child is not comfortable boarding it doesn’t mean that they will be affected for life (and I don’t care what Prince Charles had to say about it).

I don’t t
hink that there is a right or wrong age to send a child to boarding school. While I would like to send my son to a private school (if money allows) I think I would only send him to boarding school for a GOOD reason. Ideally I would like him to be educated near to where we live - but if he turns out to be particularly bright and gains an academic scholarship away from home I wouldn't deny him taking it up. I think the 'ideal' age in my mind to send my son to boarding school (if he was to go) would be at the age he starts senior school. Although it would really depend on him as a person - if at the age of 7 he decides that he wants to board, and we can afford it I would be happy to let him try it.

Some people are forced to due to their work (service men and women) to send their children away to school while others do it for ‘status’. Then there are those who send their child to boarding school for reasons such as my own parents used. Whatever you decide to do I don’t believe that anyone should judge anyone else for sending their child to boarding school, whether the child is 6 or 16.

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