Table of Contents
What is Boarding School?
Boarding schools are schools where students live in the school day and night rather than going home at the end of the educational hours. Students are given living accommodations, usually having one or more roommates. Students are also provided with meals and after school activities to keep them healthy and entertained.
Boarding schools also have staff, sometimes called “house parents”, who ensure students are safe, have a structured schedule, and are following rules. Sometimes house parents are teachers, while other times house parents are separately hired staff. House parents also spend time having fun with their assigned students during after school activities and help to mediate disputes between students when arguments arise.
Boarding schools exist around the world, but they are most popular in the UK, India, China, and South Africa. Some boarding schools keep students all 7 days of the week, while others work on a 5 day basis and have students return to their parents’ home for the weekend.
Benefits of Boarding School
- Structure
One of the benefits of a boarding school is that students have a structured schedule that helps them to organize their time, stay out of trouble, and ensure they have a balanced and healthy daily life. While “free time” is often scheduled each day, students in boarding schools learn how to manage their time better than students without this level of organization.
This high level of structure also ensures that students do healthy activities like exercise, socialization, and cleaning on a regular basis. When at home, parents often struggle to organize their own time while simultaneously keeping watch over their children all the time. Boarding school ensures that no student wastes too much time because their guardian is too busy to manage their day for them due to their own busy schedule.
- High Quality Education
While each school is different, boarding schools often have a high standard of education beyond many other schools. These types of institutions usually have high standards for students and are not constrained by the small budgets many schools suffer from.
- Academic Environment
One of the benefits of being in a boarding school is that students are always surrounded by people who know what is going on in school and encourage students to do their best. House parents have a close relationship with the teachers and know what projects and work students are doing better than most parents who only get snippets of what is going on at school. Because of this close relationship between house parents and teachers, students are less likely to fall behind or miss work.
House parents are less likely to be fooled by students who say their homework is done when it is not. Because each house parent has a set of students who are all doing the same work, they will have multiple examples of each assignment and be able to help students based on how they have helped other students in their cohort.
- Smaller Class Sizes
Boarding schools also tend to have smaller class sizes. These small class sizes allow for teachers to have closer relationships with their students. Because teachers have small class sizes, they can spend more time helping students, grade more thoroughly, and spend more time differentiating for students who are struggling.
- Close Social Relationships
Because students live with their classmates, boarding schools often foster very close relationships that are not always possible in a traditional school setting. Rather than going home and having to schedule time to see friends when time allows, living in a boarding school means that students will always have their friends nearby, doing afterschool activities, spending free time together, and sharing meals with one another.
Negatives of Boarding School
- Lack of Parental Interaction
One of the largest drawbacks to going to a boarding school is the reduced time with parents. While this can make students feel independent, it can distance children from the ones who care most about them. While parents are always welcome to visit, even a daily visit can not compare with spending each evening together, sharing meals, and just having daily interactions.
- No Clear Separation of School and Daily Life
Another con of living in a boarding school is that there is little to no separation between school and free time. Because students are constantly surrounded with school, teachers, and other faculty, they can feel suffocated by schooling. Work life balance is so important to adults, and the same is true for children and their work.
- Less Freedom
While the structure of boarding schools can definitely help students to become more organized, the lack of freedom can be frustrating for students. Because students are constantly watched and supervised, they do not learn to manage boundaries very well. This can often lead to students who leave the highly managed boarding school environment at graduation to get into serious trouble later in life when they are no longer in the bubble of safety provided by the school.
Some research also shows that having lots of free time actually helps students to learn much more than a rigid schedule. While students need to learn to manage their time, boarding schools often micromanage too much and students do not get the free time to explore and learn at their own pace. This can lead them to becoming reliant on others to make progress rather than being self motivated.
- Some Boarding Schools Still Segregate Genders
While not true of all boarding schools, some boarding schools are known to completely segregate boys and girls, drastically limiting their interactions. This prevents boys and girls from learning how to interact with one another in healthy ways. It is important to be careful when choosing a boarding school to ensure that students are exposed to all types of people, including multiple genders, ethnicities, and backgrounds so that prejudices are not formed.
- Cost
Another major drawback to boarding schools is the high cost. While there are many benefits, these benefits come at a steep cost. This can be bad, not only because of the costs themselves, but also because these high costs limit the types of students that the child will be exposed to. While some boarding schools do offer financial aid, boarding schools are often seen as institutions that can lead to elitism due to only a select few being able to afford them.
How Much Do Boarding Schools Cost?
According to Educationdata.org, the average cost for students to attend a 7-day boarding school program in the United States is $37,590. This is a prohibitive price for many, and only allows well-to-do families to consider boarding schools as an option unless there are financial aid programs available.
With the average tuition at a regular private school being only $12,350, there is quite a gap between private schools and boarding schools. If parents are seeking better educational opportunities for their students, it may be more financially sound to simply put them into private school rather than paying for the food and place to sleep in the evenings. This is beneficial because private schools offer many of the educational benefits such as higher standards and smaller class sizes, while also not having the negatives of students not seeing their parents nearly as often.
Is Boarding School Better Than Traditional School?
There is no clear answer to this question as often the more important thing to consider is the quality of the teachers and education at a school rather than whether it offers a boarding program. However, there are several benefits based on research that show boarding school does have its benefits over day school, especially for those that come from a rural background.
Recent research shows that in boarding schools, “there are typically well-organized and well-planned study times and routines that students work to. These activities are also overseen and supported by teachers or other boarding house staff.
Over time and relative to day students, these factors may have the effect of promoting a general disposition to better task management, persistence, etc.” (Martin et al.) While this difference was not large, it is encouraging to see that the efforts of boarding schools to remain organized is often successful in helping their students to keep organized and hopefully take that skill into their lives after graduation.
Another study out of The Chinese University of Hong Kong found that there are also some educational benefits experienced by boarding students that differed from those attending day schools. The researchers reported that they “found that boarding at school is beneficial for students’ academics in both word recognition and numerical skills.” (Shu, and Tong)
More concerningly though, the study also found that boarding students were more likely to get sick and experience depression. The researchers suggested that “the positive outcome of boarding on students’ academic skill is caused by their increased exposure to the learning environment as rural parents have little knowledge or time to supervise their children’s learning at home. In contrast, detachment from the home environment and dormitory conditions might be the causes of more frequent sickness and higher levels of depression.”
So while there may be some benefits to students’ organizational skills and even their educational achievement in school when surrounded by the academic environment provided by a boarding school, it is important to keep a watchful eye for the serious negative possibilities as well. It is important that if a child is enrolled in a boarding program, that they still keep in regular contact with their family and not be sent so far that it strains their relationships with family members.
It is also important to ensure close relationships between house parents, teachers and other boarding staff with their students. Because boarding school students have a significant lack of interaction with their families, they need a similar form of family closeness from those that work with them in the evenings.
Boarding schools often use the term “In Loco Parentis” which is a Latin phrase which means “in the place of parents”. House parents try to create close relationships of trust and care with the students in their caseload so that students don’t have to experience the negative effects of isolation in boarding schools.
Students who are sent to boarding school do not always have problems at home or a distant relationship with their families, but this stereotype exists for a reason. Many especially wealthy boarding schools are known for taking care of wealthy children while their parents are too busy with business to take care of them.
This is one reason why working at a boarding school can be such an important job. Oftentimes, staff and teachers take an even more critical role in the development of their students than those who teach in a traditional teaching role without the need to be “In Loco Parentis”. Whether the children were sent for behavioral reasons, because their parents were too busy for them, or were sent by loving parents to gain independence, staff at a boarding school have more of a chance to make a deep and lasting impact on the students they care for with the absence of their traditional primary caregivers.
Conclusion
In conclusion, boarding schools can be a great option for students to learn organizational skills and be surrounded by an academically structured environment. However, if students do not keep in regular contact with their families, there is a significant risk to their mental health and even likelihood of getting physically ill.
It is important that parents who choose to put their children in a boarding school for the academic benefits remember that their presence is also a huge benefit to their child. While boarding school may be a good option to teach a child some organizational skills and help them develop some independence outside of the home, boarding school might be better as a short term option for a year or two rather than the place a child should spend their entire middle and/or high school years.
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References
Martin, Andrew J. et al. “Boarding And Day School Students: A Large-Scale Multilevel Investigation Of Academic Outcomes Among Students And Classrooms”. Frontiers In Psychology, vol 11, 2021. Frontiers Media SA, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.608949.
Shu, Binbin, and Yuying Tong. “Boarding At School And Students’ Well-Being: The Case Of Rural China”. Department Of Sociology, 2010, https://paa2015.princeton.edu/papers/151181. Accessed 27 May 2022.
