Boarding or Day?

School stories tend to work best if they are set in boarding schools. The reason is simple, you've removed the parents and created a controlled, closed environment. Adam and Abagail Go to St Tom's is a bit grittier and more realistic than many other boarding school stories. But it's still essentially a fantasy, children shouldn't think that because they like St Tom's, they will like boarding school.

I didn't go to boarding school myself. Many of the scenes are actually ripped from my time at Keble, Oxford, which is a residential educational college, but not a school - undergraduates are older than schoolchildren and not subject to school discipline. Most of my close friends who have been to boarding school feel they have been damaged by it. On the other hand, plenty of people have also been damaged by attending sink state schools.

My view is that children need a certain amount of time away from home. But boarding school is too high a dose. The amount of money changing hands and the states are so high that there's bound to be inordinate pressure on children to succeed, and most children are not terribly academic. The American tradition of day schools and summer camps strikes me as a better balance.

Sometimes however there is no realistic choice, parents are separated or work in distant countries, and children cannot attend day school. So even if we admit that Adam and Abagail Go to St Tom's is fantasy, and real schools are not as nice as that, we still have to answer the question, how do we make boarding schools as good as possible.