Boarding Concern has been campaigning for several years about the psychosocial problems facing young children caused by early boarding. It has been an uphill struggle, because as George Monbiot points up (The British boarding school remains a bastion of cruelty, 16 January), the trauma of the privileged has little political purchase. We strongly welcome Monbiot's call for the issue to get the public policy attention it deserves.
With the publication of Professor Schaverien's paper in the British Journal of Psychotherapy last year, and subsequent wide media coverage, there is a growing consensus that "boarding school syndrome" is a real consequence for many of those sent away to board at a primary school age. Our members, and others, can give testimony to the developmental harm done by premature separation from the security and intimate relationships of family life, which no institution can emulate.
In his final comments Monbiot points out what Boarding Concern has long known: that there are no official guidelines on an appropriate age to be sent off to boarding school. It is high time an expert panel comprising educationalists, psychotherapists, developmental psychologists and other relevant professionals was convened by the education secretary to examine the developmental implications of boarding.
Allison Ujejski
Director, Boarding Concern
• Parents wanting to place a very young child into the institutional care of a boarding school should have to apply to social services and be subject to some kind of scrutinising process. How we remain blind to this emotional abuse, as George Monbiot points out, is a curious quirk of culture. Perhaps we tolerate it because the schools have become extremely adept at advertising themselves in the modern market. The picture they paint in their glossy brochures is so soft and fluffy – very different from the boarding school of old. However, duvets on beds, teddy bears on pillows and Harry Potter fantasies easily conceal the harsh truth – that love is absent. And for the young child, love is the oxygen that enables the natural development of their emotional, social and spiritual selves. As adults they may be successful in many ways, but with their unnatural degree of independence they will always struggle in the arena of love, commitment and relationships. Yes, this is abuse. Yes, social services must be involved.
Piers Partridge
Wraxall, Somerset
• Boarding schools have indeed changed in the past 40 years. Usually, and unless parents live overseas, younger boarders are not being "sent away" but go to a boarding school near their homes because both parents work longer hours than the school day and prefer their children to be with their friends having fun in the evenings rather than being looked after by a childminder or being ferried across town to an extracurricular activity until a parent gets home. Parents appreciate that boarding schools work closely with them to provide security for their children, green spaces, excellent pastoral care, plenty of contact with home, and the flexibility to allow them to spend as few or as many nights at school as they wish. That is why boarding numbers have risen in recent years. Parents do their best for their children dependent on their circumstances and the needs of their children. They don't need an inquiry, a committee, a board, an ethics council to reach these decisions. Parental choice matters.
Richard Harman
Head of Uppingham and chair of the Boarding Schools' Association
• George Monbiot isn't keen on boarding schools, and that's fine. But perhaps he'd like to come and talk to some of our choristers who board in our cathedral school from the age of seven or eight, working long hours as young musicians and absolutely loving it. I am sorry he wasn't here on Saturday: he could have warned the families of the 53 boys who came to try being a chorister for a day that the boarding to which they were drawn was, in fact, an unspeakable horror. Of course, one is aware of all the pastoral and educational implications of a lifestyle now considered rather odd, but a blanket dismissal of it, supported by no matter how much impressive-looking research, does not echo the reality experienced by real boys and their families.
Canon Wealands Bell
Lichfield Cathedral
• George Monbiot's campaign to highlight the damage done by sending young children to boarding school is so needed. I was sent to one aged five at the start of the second world war. I did not understand why I was suddenly sent from a secure home to complete strangers, bleak surroundings and complete misery. My main memory is of keeping my mother's photo near and praying to her to save me. I was mocked for working and, unsurprisingly, had an unhappy childhood and adulthood. I was in various boarding schools until aged 12, but the damage had been done. I could not keep friends, underachieved and later developed physical symptoms. Years later, after six years of four-times-weekly psychoanalysis, I was able to understand and manage most of the unsavoury sides of the legacy. Now, in old age and even with a warm family life, I still feel echoes of the pain of separation.
Alison Watson
London
• George Monbiot is right to deplore the sending of seven- and eight-year-olds to boarding schools. From my own experience I learned that the only way to succeed was to accept the domination of the outsiders by the conformists. I did not accept this, but our current cabinet apparently mastered the lesson. All that matters to them is to preserve the domination of the poor by the wealthy. The Making of Them, by Nick Duffell, gives more evidence of the damaging effect of early boarding. It was published in 2000 by Lone Arrow Press, and seems to have been conveniently ignored.
David Gribble
South Brent, Devon
• Mr Monbiot refers to the British boarding school remaining a "bastion of cruelty". I was sent, aged four and half, to a boarding school in the 1950s in India where my family lived. Terms were nine months long. The next year I was sent to a UK boarding school. I saw my parents for a couple of weeks over the next three years. The school regimes were physically harsh by current standards, but then life in general was. I adapted to the system but I do remember my years in boarding school as happy years.
The system does demand independence, resilience, resourcefulness and a degree of emotional toughness. However, with the exception of the convent in India, I was never in any way brutalised and in fact was generally respected and encouraged as an individual. I do concede that, potentially, the early separation from home must foster some anxiety towards intimacy and it is important to become aware of this. However, I think lasting psychological problems occur when a young person experiences a bullying parent.
Bullying can take many subtle, often socially acceptable, forms and it can cause feelings of rejection that blight and poison future relationships. Bullying occurs independently of any family lifestyles, separations and losses – and boarding school. It is this that is the real cause of emotional repression and anxiety problems in children and creates a "bastion of cruelty".
David Carnegie
Bath
• George Monbiot undermines his otherwise thoughtful article about the cruelty inflicted on children by a failure to examine the statistical evidence that is available abouton boarding numbers in this country. Boarding at the age of 7 has long ceased to be significant. The Independent Schools Council census for 1999 shows that out of 71,252 boarders only 378 or 0.5% were under 8. The 2011 census shows that out of 68,102 boarders only 198 or 0.3% were under the age of 8. These figures completely belie George Monbiot's description of boarding as a bastion of cruelty. Most of these children come from expatriate families seeking educational stability for their children. Boarding has changed immeasurably over the past few decades, and the outdated caricature that Monbiot seeks to perpetuate bears little or no relation to the current realities.
Philip Cottam
Headmaster, Halliford School, Shepperton, Middlesex
• We can only conclude that the boarding school system in the UK is the rich man's social care system. Given the backgrounds of so many MPs, it is most unlikely the system will ever be subjected to such regular and stringent checks and research as undertaken for those children in local authority care. They are not bothered about the potential psychological damage these young people may experience.
Keith Cox
Marston Moretaine, Bedfordshire
• George Monbiot deplores the impact on seven-year-old children of being sent to boarding school. But what is wrong with my "attachment patterns"? Sent to boarding school at seven myself in 1959, I have been attached to the Guardian all my life – although I do usually "shut myself off" from George Monbiot.
Anthony Lawton
Leicester
• The current members of the cabinet must have been early boarders.
Karen Fletcher
North Anston, South Yorkshire