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Boarding schools in the front lineChris Alcock, Headmaster, Queen’s College
Over the past nine years, Queen’s College, in common with many other UK boarding schools, has needed to adapt to the fact of having Forces pupils with a parent on active service in Iraq or Afghanistan. At the very least this means long separations, at the absolute worst it can mean dealing with family bereavement.
‘As a parent I needed the school to have its skills and drills in place for a scenario of injured dad, or even dead dad. It’s awful but these things happen,’ Col Jim Hutton, Royal Marines, told the audience at a recent seminar, Boarding Schools in the Front Line, organised by Queen’s. Fortunately such drastic events are few and far between in any school, but the daily realities of life for a child with a parent in the front line can be tough. As a school we’ve currently got four dads on operational deployment in Afghanistan and I know that, even when nothing goes wrong, a phone call from myself or a houseparent to a mum on her own is appreciated. Sometimes the child – and the school – can get used to regular text or email messages from a father, then a sudden silence. ‘You get to a FOB [forward operating base] and there’s almost nothing there, and what is there doesn’t work. In an operational theatre there’s nothing to think about but the job and you have to know that, back home, caring, competent people are supporting your family,’ said Col Hutton. Our senior Queen’s houseparent, Andrew Free, added his own day-to-day perspective: ‘Just last week I had an email from a dad in Afghanistan asking me for two things: get the boy to ring his mum and help him get to the rugby club for training. I try always to behave as a parent would in the same circumstances. I’ll go with them to hospital, for instance, after a sports injury because that’s what I’d want for my own son.’ For many Service families boarding school is not so much a choice as a necessity. For Pam Chapman, a former Army wife and mother, and now school secretary at Queen’s, it was against all her deepest instincts. ‘I was dragged kicking and screaming to a boarding school life. It was the one thing I was determined not to inflict on my children,’ she said. Her friend and colleague Cathy Carter had similar experiences when her Royal Engineer husband Mike was posted from Cyprus to the USA at short notice. ‘My eldest, Tom, was eight and had already been to four schools, so reluctantly we decided he had to board,’ she recalled. ‘I put him into Queen’s Junior one afternoon and flew off to America the next morning, which was horrible for a mummy.’ Unsurprisingly, to those with experience of these things, Tom – now a successful young actor – loved boarding and two siblings, Charlie and Freddie, have followed in his wake. Col Hutton made the point that with all the inevitable domestic upheaval and moves of Service life, school becomes a hugely important fixed point in the children’s lives. ‘They really do value the enduring friendships they make at boarding school,’ reflected Jim Hutton. ‘My youngest son is 24 and he’s still in daily contact via Facebook with kids he was at Queen’s with. I’m twice his age and no longer in touch with anyone I went to school with.’ I started my own teaching career at Stamford School in Lincolnshire almost 30 years ago, when the majority of the boys in my boarding house were from RAF families based in Germany at the height of the Cold War. Over that period I’ve seen the attitudes of Forces families to boarding change a good deal. For me it’s not remotely about separation toughening the kids up – we want to maximise their contact with their parents. In the old days teachers would say ‘Sunday morning chapel breaks the day up for boarders’! Well they don’t want their Sunday broken up, thank you very much. Let’s have chapel on Friday evening so that they can spend Sunday with mum and dad, if possible. You become a father figure to many of the boarders, and it’s a great privilege to help bring up someone else’s children. |
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