What a boarding prep school should provide for overseas parents and pupils

Their name was Malik and they came from Pakistan. In the 30 years that have elapsed since they tumbled into my care as housemaster of St Wilfrid’s School in Seaford, Sussex, all other details have evaporated into the mists of time. I am rather ashamed, come to think of it, not that I have forgotten who their parents were or what their eventual destination was, but that I cannot recall their first names. I should do, because – thank goodness – we had recently moved away from the stilted Victorian, surname-only appellation.

But this I do remember. The Maliks were three brothers under the age of eleven, small for their age and they had never been away from home before. They smiled sweet smiles of joy and they cried big tears of homesickness. They were placed in three different dormitories dotted around a rambling, albeit purpose-built prep school building. On the first evening lights went out, 80 boy boarders were abed in an orderly fashion and the pervasive atmosphere was one of peace and calm. The next morning, however, the three little Maliks were all together curled up in the same bed - that of the youngest brother, aged six.

Matron, an energetic and efficient lady called Sheila, was dumbfounded. Were not the floorboards notoriously creaky; surely newcomers simply could not find their way around and was not our habit to be eternally vigilant? But find their way around they did. On the next night, also, and the next. We tried everything to discover how this was happening almost to the extent of sleeping in the corridor. But to no avail – and not much purpose either. Every night they went to bed a little mournful in their separate rooms, at seven o’clock every morning they were curled up with serene expressions on their faces. I suppose we had to educate them into our western prep school ways but it took several months, as they had always slept in the same bed before. By then quiet confidence and genuine happiness had taken over.

I hope I was conscientious enough in caring for the Malik boys but I am sure that at the same time – a time of reasonable pupil plenty – I did not spend enough time pondering on the motives of overseas parents when sending their children to a boarding prep school in coastal Sussex. Their reasons might be similar to parents from overseas today and they will share many of the aspirations of their homespun equivalents. They would be searching for a good work ethos, social and learning skills, a range of activities, to play a part in the broader development of their children (almost exclusively male then and still too few girls now) and they would want them to be happy and successful.

But the overseas parents – that is those of non-British children – would be putting something ahead of all these objectives – immersion into British culture and a real command of the English language. That culture is the “Best of British” which I have seen in ten independent prep schools in the past year rather than the “Worst of British”, which those beyond our shores see and read about all too much. Let us not be shy, particularly in the electronic medium available to us, to tell the world what we do and that we do it very well.

The British Council is an enduring example of the appetite elsewhere for Britishness. It testifies to the ability of independent education to achieve high standards and make more than a little difference here and there. The culture experience is both more effective and more appealing if it has values and principles at its core. Schools should not be afraid of them: home grown youngsters need to recognise and develop qualities no less than those from lands afar.

Overseas parents seeking a British education should check how a school treats its overseas pupils. Does it:

• Avoid labelling, even in unofficial conversations, all those of other nationalities with generic terms. “Foreigners” was thankfully dropped some time ago but even those such as “international” can be deceptive. Something linked to the geographical, such as “overseas”, is probably safest.
• Accept overseas pupils not just to prop up boarding, nor to boost numbers to keep the doors open for a few Anglo Saxons, but because they have a full and equal part to play in the life of the school.
• Have targets or limits on the numbers of specific nationalities. A predominance of one grouping dilutes the experience for them and can be a cause of tension.
• Keep a good level of boarders in the school at weekends. Local boarders going home every weekend and leaving only a rump of overseas pupils in the school can be very demoralising.
• Keep pupils busy even when - especially when - they are in a minority. If the devil makes work for idle hands, he plants a little poison in idle minds as well.
• Create an atmosphere where integration is facilitated by homegrown pupils learning about and appreciating the cultures of those from overseas just as the latter will want full immersion themselves. Schools should not be afraid to underline difference and variety as strengths in the community.
• Have a clear view of key cultural matters, for example, on what it provides in the way of diet and opportunities for religious observance.
• Appreciate the importance not only of knowing pupils from overseas as well as the locals, but also - and this is harder to achieve – the significance of ensuring that the overseas students know you even better.
• Have a clear approach to communication in terms of language and expression. There is little point in receiving a beautiful and meaningful end of term report in English if nobody in the family understands one word of the language.
• Schools have to remember that, while in its local clientele children and young people are making more of the choices about their future education and thus are, to an increasing extent, chief “customers”, overseas parents tend to determine the future in a much more traditional way.

Schools must look simultaneously at their responsibilities to those potential parents and their children. As schools are delighted to receive applications from Botswana or Bogotá, how are they to rein themselves in and make judgements on whether the children are suited to what they have to offer? Of course there is a preliminary stage when schools treat them in the same way as those from Brighton or Birmingham and require certain standards and skill levels, both academic and social.

Schools are also honour-bound to look a little further and ponder whether the experience will be too divorced from what is “natural” when it comes to those from other lands. Boarding can be intrinsically good, even if a child’s home life is enchantingly happy. Boarding school may be providing something in the way of challenge, fulfilment, preparation for life and enjoyment, which the home base cannot do. Good schools will accept only those children who are right for the school.

There is one final condition, all parties must consent to the relationship between school and home - this means head, pupil and both parents. Schools should never get involved in an overseas admission where mother and father are at loggerheads over the British boarding option.

Nearly 40 years ago I remember Jameel Ali whose father sent him to Stoke Brunswick Prep School, where I started my career.
Son and father were fine with this arrangement but mother set her face against it. She climbed onto the roof of the family home in Jeddah (this has an almost Biblical ring about it) and refused to come down until her son was returned to her. Mr Ali kept her up there for six days and six nights before eventually relenting and summoning his son back from Ashhurst Wood, by which time the young man had carved his name indelibly with deep incisions on three brand new desks. His name liveth – with me at any rate – for evermore.

From marital breakdown in the dizzy heights of Saudi Arabia to three in a bed in downtown Seaford, Sussex, those of us who have looked after junior boarders from overseas have seen it all and usually without the hint of a scandal. The eldest Malik boy must be in his early forties now. I hope he is a happy, successful and considerate citizen. I hope, even more, that, as he looks back over his life thus far, he will attribute a good part of his progress to the experience of, and his development in, boarding school. That is the acid test for all of us.

Mark Pyper is Principal of Gordonstoun Schools

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