A well-kept secret no longer

"The tide has turned for state boarding schools," says Melvyn Roffe, headmaster of Old Swinford Hospital, who in September 2007 becomes principal of Britain’s largest state boarding school, Wymondham College, Norfolk.

At the end of my first term as head of Old Swinford Hospital, I attended a Christmas drinks party at the offices of one of our business partners. As the evening wore on I fell into conversation with a lady who, after some minutes detailing the precise role she had in one of the larger firms of Birmingham solicitors, asked me what I did for a living.

I told her that I was the head of a state boarding school. She looked surprised and after a moment’s hesitation said “Well, I hope you make them wear helmets and knee pads.” Before I could compute the meaning of what she had said she had gravitated away towards a table of canapés. On the way home, however, I resolved never again to be mistaken as the head of a skateboarding school.

Ignorance of or confusion about the role of the state boarding schools remain widespread even if it is not usually as extreme as that of my fellow partygoer.

Much good work has been done in promoting the state boarding sector over the last few years, not least by the Boarding Schools’ Association and State Boarding Schools’ Association. But for too many the words “boarding school” remain synonymous with the words “independent school”.

It was not always the case. When the Boarding Schools Association was established in the 1960s, the majority of its members were state boarding schools and a large number of local education authorities maintained at least one boarding school.

But as the tide turned against boarding in general, it ran particularly swiftly against the state boarding schools. A powerful combination of factors: cuts in public sector finance, the reduction of the armed forces, the ideological antipathy of the political left, fear of child abuse, the wider availability of private transport, to name but some, led to the inexorable decline of the sector to a point today where only just over 30 of the 3000 maintained secondary schools in England have boarders.

So are the remaining state boarding schools merely flotsam abandoned by an ebbing tide? Not so.

That tide has turned. The melancholy, long, withdrawing roar has been replaced by a more optimistic sound: the sound of a group of highly successful schools articulating their unique contribution to the education of the country’s children.
And just as boarding schools in general have modernised both their practice and their profile, so the state boarding sector is finding new relevance and new success. Demand for boarding places at our schools is buoyant to the extent that schools often have many times more applicants than places available. Many busy families have come to realise that a place as a weekly boarder at a state boarding school is an affordable way to meet a child’s educational, social and extracurricular needs. Other parents who had assumed that full boarding was way beyond their family’s budget have discovered that state boarding schools can offer much of what the independent sector can offer but at a fraction of the cost.

And now, along with colleagues in the independent sector, many state boarding schools are enthusiastic participants in the long awaited DfES Boarding Pathfinder which seeks to extend the invaluable work of the charitable trusts in providing boarding education for vulnerable children who would benefit from it.

But popularity brings its own problems. Until recently, it was impossible for state schools to increase boarding capacity to meet demand as they had virtually no access to capital funds. Unable to generate large surpluses from fee income or borrow money from the market, our only option was to seek grant aid from the local authorities. It’s hardly surprising that none was willing to prioritise boarding places for the children of parents who, frequently, are not even local council tax payers. The result was an impasse that was broken only by the personal intervention of David Miliband who, as Minister of State for Schools (at that time), ensured that a dedicated capital fund for the state boarding sector in England was established in the current public sector funding round. Two years later, five state boarding schools have benefited from a total of £25 million of capital funding which, when all projects are completed, will have created an additional 250 boarding places in state schools.

That increase is still small in the greater scheme of things, and the reality is that the vast majority of boarding places in the UK will always be provided by the independent sector, which can use its autonomy to meet market demands more swiftly than the state sector. However, the state boarding sector has moved from decline through stability and now on to growth in just a few years. And for parents who prefer to use a state boarding school – or who need to do so – and of course for their children, that can only be good news.

If my social contacts are anything to go by, the general public has even started to notice us. Earlier this year, I was chatting over pre-dinner drinks to a stranger who, not knowing my background and having exhausted the conversational possibilities of the situation in Iraq and the deficiencies of the rail service to Victoria, launched into a new subject.

“Do you know,” he said, “that there are well over thirty state boarding schools in this country? They’re all very good - and ever so cheap.”

Fortunately for us both, perhaps, at that moment we were called into dinner.

Melvyn Roffe
Headmaster: Old Swinford Hospital
Principal-Designate: Wymondham College