20 ★ FT Weekend 26 October/27 October 2019Singling out Sevenoaks, Oundle, Gor-
donstoun and Malvern College as exam-
ples of successful brands, Steinbeis says:
“The schools are all trying to find their
identity and some do that better than
others. For the second- and third-tier
schools, I think it’s a case of survival for
them over the next 10 years.”
There are already plenty of casualties.
Abbots Bromley, a day and boarding
school in Staffordshire, shut its doors
this summer amid a funding crisis trig-
gered by declining pupil numbers, with
a last-minute bid from Chinese inves-
tors to buy the school falling through.
Local news outlets said it was the third
private school in the region to close in as
many years.
St Bees School, a 16th-century board-
ing school on the isolated coast of Cum-
bria, closed its doors in 2015 butreo-
pened in 2018 fter investment froma
Shenzhen-based Full Circle Education.
One of Britain’s oldest schools at
more than 400 years old, with a stun-
ning location on the sea cliffs and an
imposing building , St Bees now
describes itself as “Where West meets
East”, hasa twin campus in China nda
instructs all students in Mandarin as a
first foreign language.
Hamlyn says that buying UK private
schools is currently “big business”, with
Chinese companies Wanda Group and
Bright Scholar alsoacquiring British
schools n recent years.i
He adds that theLabour party’s
recent proposal o remove the charita-t
ble status from private schools would
undoubtedly lead to closures, with
many schools “already operating on
pretty small margins”.
However, not all strategies for the
survival of the British boarding school
rely on an international element. One
potential answer is to make it more
possible for local students to become
boarders again.
Boarding schools have long offered
generous bursaries to pupils from low-
income families. But they are now try-
ing to focus more on how to get the mid-
dle classes, who are not struggling finan-
cially on any objective measure, back to
the market.
Robin Fletcher, chief executive of the
Boarding Schools Association, says that,
in addition to bursaries for those from
very low-income families, governors
and heads are increasingly looking for
ways to support students who “wouldn’t
be counted poor as such”.
Price at Benenden says they recently
stopped giving financial awards with
scholarships that might go to wealthier
pupils who don’t need them. Instead,
they will offer partial bursaries — with
20 to 30 per cent off — to “more tradi-
tional Benenden parents” from middle-
class backgrounds as well as families on
lower incomes.The international focus of modern
boarding schools is held up by the schools
themselves as a way of helping to break
down assumptions that people from
other cultures make about each other.
Sabine Richards, head of admissions
at Gordonstoun in Scotland — Prince
Charles’s alma mater — says the school
has a strict policy of taking a third of its
students from Scotland, a third from
England and Wales, and a third from
overseas, with a cap of 10 per cent on
any one nationality.
Yet she points to the school’s founding
in 1934 by a German refugee, whose
ethos was that understanding other cul-
tures would help overcome fascism.
Given its rise as an international power,
she says, “China is the most exciting,
dynamic country to be in and students
from all over the world need to embrace
Chinese students. What we need is com-
mon understanding.”
Consultants from across the globe say
that, regardless of the international
mix, British boarding schools are still a
unique concept with international
appeal. Laurent Pasquet, head of La
Route des Langues, a consultancy in
France, says that French children tend
to be taken aback by the culture of
boarding schools.
“They are very surprised that the
master knows them by name, that the
school cares about them and their well-
being. As a matter of fact, they don’t
want to come back to France: I often
have kids that are supposed to go for a
month or a term and they stay for the
whole school year.”
It is a far cry fromthe horror stories of
boarding school bullying and hierarchi-
cal fagging (younger pupils forced to act
as personal servants for older ones) sys-
tems. But pastoral care, encouraging
independence and, above all, not focus-
ing too heavily on league tables tend to
be among the best boarding schools’
selling points, consultants say.
“Boarding schools are great for stu-
dents who would be lost in their own
system,” says another European con-
sultant. “England is brilliant at that —
there is a school for everybody. Well,
everybody with the money.”Alice Ross is the editor of the daily
newsletter FT Trade SecretsI
t is not uncommon for children at
boarding school to call their par-
ents and ask to come home in the
first few weeks. But the German 14-
year-old sent to a quiet school in the
English countryside had a specific com-
plaint. He was there to experience the
famed British boarding school educa-
tion, which — despite a tarnished repu-
tation in recent years — is still seen
around the world as a defining feature of
British culture.
Instead, the boy told his parents, he
couldn’t make friends because he
couldn’t understand what his room-
mates were saying. Not because his Eng-
lish wasn’t good enough. But because
they were all speaking Mandarin. His
parents withdrew him after one term.
British boarding schools are facing an
identity crisis. With an average place
now costingnearly £35,000 a year(up
from £23,000 10 years ago), many of
the pupils that made up their traditional
bread and butter — the middle- or
upper-middle-class children of doctors,
lawyers or other professionals — can no
longer afford to board full time. Not
only that but, as attitudes to children
and education change, boarding is no
longer considered an option for many,
even if they can afford it.
By contrast, the creation of wealth in
Asia and other emerging markets, com-
bined with concerns about the quality of
local education, has caused demand
from overseas students to rocket.
Though the number of boarders at
British boarding schools has remained
steady since the turn of the century,at
just below 70,000according to the Inde-
pendent Schools Council (ISC), the per-
centage of overseas boarders has
increased significantly. A decade ago,
non-British pupils with parents over-
seas made up fewer than a third of total
boarders: now the ISC puts the figure at
more than 40 per cent.
The majority of these overseas board-
ers have come from mainland China and
Hong Kong, which together make up 44
per cent of the total 28,910 pupils at
independent schools who have parents
overseas (making them highly likely to
be boarders). Germans are a distant
third, at less than 7 per cent of the total.
“The demand far outstrips the
supply,” says Ferdinand Steinbeis,
director of German boarding-school
consultancy von Bülow Education.
“Because you have a waning local mar-
ket due to higher fees and changing per-
sonal needs, you have to somehow com-
pensate. Any British boarding school
could fill its beds tenfold with Chinese
students.”
These forces show no signs of abating.
Private schools warned last month that
fees were likely to increase further due
to steep rises in pension contributions
for teachers, but consultants such as
Henry Jiang at Grandville International,
which helps to place mainland Chinese
and Hong Kongese students in British
boarding schools, say more families are
looking at UK schools instead of Ameri-
can ones.
This follows reports last year that
Donald Trump had describedChinese
students in the USas “spies”.
Flora Yung, director at British United
Education Services in Hong Kong, adds
that after recent riots in the territory,
she received an unprecedented number
of calls from parents looking to send
their children abroad immediately.
But as the shift to overseas students
increases, there are fears in the sector
that some have gone too far. Schools
such as Eton and Harrow, Sevenoaks
and Malvern College remain so popular
with both traditional British and inter-
national families that they can balance
students as they see fit.
ut according toB a number of board-
ing school consultants, many of the
“mid- and lower-” tier schools (not a
categorisation recognised by the official
Boarding Schools’ Association) are sim-
ply “filling their beds” withstudents
from overseas.
More multicultural schools are widely
viewed as a positive, for both the schools
and students. But some institutions,
fearful of otherwise being forced to close
their doors, may pay the price for their
relentless pursuit of wealthy interna-
tional students.
Parents paying for a classic British
education are starting to question
what they are getting for their money.
Particularly overseas parents, it seems.
“One of the main questions we get is
how many German, Russian and
Chinese students there are at the
school,” says Steinbeis. “With German
families, there’s this chronic paranoia
that the international mix of pupils
won’t be right.”The question for British boarding
schools now is not only how to survive
and thrive but how to retain their iden-
tity in the 21st century.Sevenoaks School in Kent has been
taking in students from around the
world since the 1950s. Walking around
the campus on a chilly day in Septem-
ber, I noticed plenty of change since I
was there for sixth form in the 1990s.
A huge design and technology centre
has been built, containing room after
room of spacious offices for teachers, a
cavernous sixth-form common room
and high-tech equipment.
“You can take technology as a subject
now,” remarks one of the polite students
showing me around, referring to the
International Baccalaureate that all stu-
dents there take. “Can you? I didn’t
know that. I would have taken it,” says
the other. “Only three people do it,”
shrugs the first.
Though the pace has slowed recently,
the arms race between modernising
boarding schools has been a contribut-
ing factor in annual fees rising faster
than inflation. Since 2010, fee increases
have averaged 3.9 per cent a year at pri-
vate schools. Between 2000 and 2010
they averaged 6.6 per cent.
The upgrade in facilities and corre-
sponding rise in fees is not to everyone’s
taste. One father, whose son attendsMarlborough College in Wiltshire, says:
“I think schools have got a bit ahead of
themselves in thinking they have to be
all-singing, all-dancing in every facet.
There are many, many families out
there that would prefer that, rather than
a new design and technology building,
they kept the fees a bit lower.”
Indeed, while schools such as Eton
have long tended to cater to the super-
rich, many other older institutions had a
tradition of austerity that is now being
eschewed to meet the demands of the
modern boarder.
In particular, consultants say that
some schools are now firmly targeting
an international crowd of new wealth.
“The bad ones are terrible — they are
like a theme park,” says one.
One school singled out by consultants
as particularly representative of the new
wealth in boarding schools is Queen
Ethelburga’s Collegiate, near York. Sev-
eral said they would never recommend
the school to their families, calling it
“bling” — students have en-suite bath-
rooms — with “too many international
students”.
They pointed to the fact that there
had been a helicopter landing pad at the
school as indicative of the clientele. “In
the long run, what they’re doing will
damage the UK traditional independ-
ent-school reputation,” said one con-
sultant to Chinese families.
The school confirmed that there was
no longer a helicopter pad on the cam-
pus, and said that half the students were
international. Steven Jandrell, princi-
pal, said that the international mix was
“fully representative of the world
today”, adding: “The independent
school sector has a huge variety of great
schools with very different physical,
social and cultural environments.”
Certain schools “appeared to have
made it part of their business plan”
to get students from Asia a few years
ago, says Francis Hamlyn ofThe Good
Schools Guide.
Roedean at one point had Chinese stu-
dents approaching 40 per cent of the
pupil population, he says, although that
percentage has since fallen. Roedean
declined to comment.
Chinese students represent both a
good academic and financial bet for
schools. Brought up in an exam-focused
education system, they can help the
institution rise up the league tables, an
important measure of success for most.
British United Education Services’
Flora Yung says: “If the school has a lot
of Chinese, they can get their ranking
right up within one or two years as their
maths is just so good.” Sometimes she
warns the parents she advises that the
international mix is not balanced — and
they will later complain to her that their
child’s English didn’t improve at board-
ing school but their Mandarin did.
Some top schools will test for fluent
English as part of their admissions proc-
ess, while others have whole depart-nerve and making sure you keep in
the back of your mind that diversity
of nationalities is what the school is
really about.”
Sevenoaks has 46 nationalities in the
school, with a rough cap of no more than
two to three students out of 10-12 from
one nationality joining a boarding
house. She adds: “There are people
chasing their place in the league tables
at the exclusion of everything else; we
are not doing that. I feel that it’s a short-
term policy.”
Eric Liang, the director of Hong Kong
Education Web, says that up to 20 per
cent in a certain year from one national-
ity is “OK”, but “once you get close to
half it becomes an issue”.
He says Chinese parents share the
concern that there may be too many
students from their own country at a
school. “Sometimes because of the pres-
sure of recruitment, schools do recruit
too many students from a certain coun-
try.” Schools are not always transparent
about this, he says.
Indeed, with schools not obliged to
provide a breakdown of their interna-
tional ratios, any suggestion of skewed
balance may be a matter of perception.
Samantha Price, headmistress of
Benenden, another school named by
consultants as having “too many” stu-
dents from Asia, says she is surprised by
that view, given that only 12 per cent of
the girls there are from outside the EU.
“We could probably double our intake
from overseas if we wanted to, but we
don’t feel it’s in the best interests of the
international students. They come for a
British education,” she says.
The discussion about whether some
have leaned “too much” towards certain
nationalities can be a fraught one. One
housemistress at a top boarding school
near London recalls a father bursting
into her office brandishing a photo he
had just taken of his son with his new
classmates.
“Look at this!” he shouted, clearly
angry. “How many white people do you
see? I haven’t spent £45,000 to send my
boy to a school which isn’t a properly
British school.” She adds that the boy
had made friends all over the world by
the time he left.
Anna (not her real name) sent her
daughter to Sevenoaks School and says
that she loved its international mindset:
her daughter, too, now has friends all
around the world.
Sevenoaks, Anna believes, has been
extremely careful about getting the
international mix right: “From a social
point of view, that’s very important,”
she says. Indeed, for most connected
with boarding schools, having a multi-
cultural mix of students helps these
often ancient institutions better reflect
the modern world outside.The British tradition of boarding
schools began with the foundation of
Winchester College, which opened itsFewer British families are sending their children
to boarding schools but demand from overseas
is rocketing.Alice Ross oks at the implicationslo
‘Demand far outstrips
supply. Any British
boarding school couldfill its beds tenfold with
Chinese students’Spectrum
doors in 1382 and was intended to train
boys — often from poorer families — to
go to New College, Oxford to join the
priesthood.
Yet David Turner, a former FT educa-
tion correspondent, writes in his 2015
bookThe Old Boys: The Decline and Rise of
the Public School, that “from the start,
the college attracted boys far above the
‘poor and needy’” — Winchester repre-
sented, in effect, the beginning of a tra-
dition of educating the children of the
elite to prepare them for university.
Eton College, founded in 1440, was
modelled on Winchester.
The wealth generated by the indus-
trial revolution in the 19th century saw a
boom in boarding schools — for both
girls and boys — as well as reforms in the
sector. Sports such as rugby, named
after Rugby School in Warwickshire,were introduced as part of attempts to
reduce systematic abuses and cruelty.
By the end of the 20th century, how-
ever, the idea of boarding was in decline
amid changing attitudes among par-
ents. By 1992, the number of boarders
fell below 100,000 for the first time
since ISC records began in 1974.
At Sevenoaks, as we walk from a pro-
fessional-level concert hall towards a
gym that looks to have been built on an
Olympic scale, I ask my two guides what
they think about the British Labour
party’s plans, announced at its recent
conference, to abolish private schools.
“I don’t follow politics,” says one
swiftly. “It seems to me that the govern-
ment has enough problems providing
education,” muses the other. “If private
schools are happy to pay for themselves,
why interfere with that?”
One parent, Jo Killick, has sent all
four of her children to boarding
schools. “Some people are very judg-
mental about sending the kids off; I see
it as letting them grow wings,” she says.
But even she accepts some boarding
schools carry a stigma now. “I don’t
want that label for my children: ‘I went
to Eton.’ It’s a bit antagonistic these
days,” she says.
For most modern boarding schools,
the really pressing issue is differentiat-
ing themselves from the competition.‘China is the most exciting
country... students from
all over the world need toembrace Chinese students’
The UK’s boarding school identity crisis
ments dedicated to teaching English as a
second language. These include Roe-
dean, Queen Ethelburga’s, Sherborne
School, Oswestry, Queen Anne’s and
Warminster — all of which were singled
out by more than one consultant as
having “too high” numbers of students
from Asia.
As Sevenoaks’ head of admissions
Arabella Stuart admits: “The pressure
coming from the Far East has really
increased. It’s [about] holding your44%
The percentage of
overseas boarders
at UK independent
schools who come
from China or
Hong Kong3.9%
The average
annual increase in
fees charged by
UK independent
schools since 2010From top: pupils and staff at
Benenden School, Kent, in 1963; girls
at Christ’s Hospital in Hertford being
given a history lesson, 1953; boys
dining at Winchester — a model for
Eton — c1951 —Topical Press Agency/Getty Images; the
Life Picture Collection/Getty ImagesKatie CareyOCTOBER 26 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 25/10/2019- 15:47 User:adrian.justins Page Name:WIN20, Part,Page,Edition:WIN, 20, 1