PALIN MITENK BLOG

By Barbara Davies

Brave face: A tearful April Ross tells her mother, 'I miss you so much. I love school but hate boarding'

April Ross is still young enough to pretend that the rocking horse in her bedroom is not just a wooden toy.

'There is a real horse inside this,' says the eight-year-old earnestly. 'There's wood covering it.'

Her absolute innocence and guile make her parents' decision to pack her off to boarding school at such a tender age all the more agonising.

Away from home for the first time, April initially tries to put on a brave face. It takes just a week, though, for the façade to crumble, leaving her sobbing for her mother and inconsolable in her bed at night.

'She's my soul mate,' says her mother, Sandra. 'But I feel I'm making a sacrifice here, and I'm hoping that, in the future, it will prove to be for April's benefit.'

There are currently around 71,000 children in boarding schools across the UK. Sixty per cent of them are full-time boarders. But how young is too young for children to be educated away from home?

A new Channel 4 Cutting Edge documentary, Leaving Home At 8, sets out to answer this question by following four girls through their first term at Highfield School in Liphook, Hampshire - which costs £17,000 a year - and observing how they cope with being cut off from their parents.

Lottie Bagshawe's father, Jeremy, was sent to boarding school by his parents at the age of 13 and, like generations of wealthy Brits, who have been sending their girls to such institutions since the 19th century, he wants his own daughter to experience a similar educational experience.

However, Lottie's mother, Sarah, admits that she was opposed to sending her daughter to boarding school at first.

'I swore from the day she was born, that no child of mine would be sent away to school. Jeremy wanted Lottie to board and I said no, and now he's won,' she says.

During their first few weeks at Highfield, away from their parents for the first time, each girl is affected in a very different way. And the emotional trauma they suffer makes painful viewing, from the moment the parents drop off their daughters at the school, whispering 'I love you', until they must finally leave them there.

The girls are left in the capable hands of jovial but firm junior housemaster Mr Hesselman, who is the last adult face they see before they go to bed and the first they see in the morning when he wakes them up at 7am.

'Remember,' he tells them, as he ushers them down to breakfast, 'we have all gained a really big family. We're watching out for each other now.'

At first, it is twins Caitlin and Simone Hardy who suffer. One of them breaks down in tears during breakfast and is led from the dining hall to be comforted in private.

'There's no magic cure for homesickness,' says no-nonsense senior housemistress Mrs Grey.

'There's no magic wand we can wave to make it go away. There's no medicine we can give them. They just have to learn to cope with it. All the children have to learn to develop coping strategies.'

Practical advice, formulated through years of experience, no doubt, but to the uninitiated it might seem rather harsh to expect a child so young to simply get on with it.

The trick, says another member of staff, is to keep the children as busy as possible at all times. It is the solitary, quieter moments of the day when the younger ones start longing for home and yearning for their mothers.

In addition to daytime lessons, the children must take part in an after-school activity every day of the week. After they've eaten their dinner, further activities carry them through to bedtime, when it is hoped that exhaustion will prevent them from succumbing to their emotions.

At the same time, their mothers are also putting on brave faces. 'I've only had her for eight years. I don't want to let go yet,' says Sarah.

'Most mums find it hard when their children are 18. I do everything for her. Now Mr Hesselman does that now. It's weird, her not being part of my life any more. She's much too young.'

While the anxious mothers hover near the phone, desperate to call and check that their daughters are all right, Mrs Grey, the senior housemistress, knows it is better if they have no contact during their daughters' first week.

'They play up to parents on the telephone,' she says. 'That contact always makes them far more emotional. We do try to advise parents that they have to sit back and trust us


Home-from-home: At Highfield School in Hampshire, children board from eight


'You have to explain to them that they might know their children better than I do, but I know the environment and the situation they are in better than they do.'

But the parents don't find it easy to stay out of contact with their children. The twins' mother, Linda Hardy, says, 'My husband and I sit around each night wondering what the girls are doing. We also worry that it hasn't been explained to them why we are not ringing.'

If it has, the twins are still homesick. During that first week, the school nurse, Mrs Dunn, is summoned to deal with one of the twins, later reporting back that the little girl is 'utterly miserable'.

'We had a little chat about how it's really, really normal to feel like that, and how it will get easier - the trick is to keep yourself as busy as possible, and make yourself very tired. It takes about a week. Once they've cracked that, they're in.'

April soon shows signs of missing her mother. While Lottie receives a letter signed: 'We love you lots, Mummy and Daddy', April's first letter has not yet arrived, and she is naturally upset. But, believing she has her daughter's best interests at heart, Sandra agrees, on advice from the school, to suspend contact with her daughter to allow her time to settle.

And, while initially April is rather nonchalant about her parents, insisting that she doesn't miss them because 'sometimes they are really annoying' and 'I haven't cried once and I don't think I will', it seems that the separation from her mother, in particular, is rather more painful that she anticipates.

In a more reflective moment she says, 'The saddest bit is going to bed, because you open your eyes and you try to imagine that you're in your own bed, but you think, "I'm not in my home."'

A trip home for the weekend at the end of the first full week of boarding only makes matters worse. 'April had such a good week last week,' explains her mother. 'She was on such a high, and then on Saturday morning she woke up and came into
my bed, and she just broke into floods of tears saying, "I just miss you so much. I love Highfield but I hate boarding."

'My head says it is best that she stays where she is. But then my heart kicks in and says, "How long do you kid yourself that it's going to be okay before you draw the line?"

'You never want to see your child upset about anything, but when it's something you've inflicted on them yourself, it makes you feel really bad.'

It's unlikely she would be reassured by the sight of April crying in the middle of the night, telling the nurse, 'I feel sick. I just want my mum.' And the nurse telling her, 'Try not to think about her. I know it's difficult, but you have to try. It's really difficult for your Mum and Dad when they see you so upset. They want to help you and they hate to hear you like this.'

It seems strange to see children so young being told that they mustn't upset their parents by being upset themselves. The question is, of course, why put your children through it in the first place? The mothers would no doubt answer that it is for their daughters' own good.

Sandra says, 'April doesn't rely on me so much. It's selfish for me to say it's hard. What I don't know is the long-term effect. I don't want April to turn around and say, "You sent me off to school when I was too young".'

She questions what impact it will have on herself. 'I really think I'm going to feel like a redundant mum,' says Sandra. 'It creates a void in your life that you have to fill. I am going to be nobody.'

Lottie's mother, Sarah, says, 'We appreciate each other when she's home, and I'm not having to shout at her to get ready in the morning and to do her homework. We're just having a lovely time together.'

And, by the end of term, of course, the girls have adapted to their new existence. According to Caitlin and Simone, 'We will always miss our mum, but sometimes you forget about them and you feel OK.'

Lottie, it seems, has never batted an eyelid at boarding school life. Even April concludes, 'Actually, it's not that bad. The only time you get really bad is on the phone, bedtime and saying goodbye to your mum.'

The tears have gone but it's hard not to feel that April, like her friends, has been forced to grow up too soon. Certainly, it seems unlikely that she still believes in her magical wooden rocking horse.

Leaving Home At 8 is on Channel 4 on Thursday at 9pm.


source: dailymail