Living with friends

State boarding schools are sought after by working parents who want their children looked after during the week. Grace McCann reports

When a boy brought a gun into her 11-year-old daughter's class, Maria Arpa decided to find a new school. She had been concerned about academic standards since Rosie started at her local comprehensive in north-west London, but the gun was the last straw. Mrs Arpa worried that she would not be able to change schools without moving house. She trawled the web and hit upon the answer - state boarding schools.

There are 33 state boarding schools in England and Wales. They take local day pupils but have unlimited catchment areas for boarders. "We can take children from anywhere in the world as long as they have a parent with a British passport," says Angela Daly, headteacher of Cranbrook School in Kent, and chairman of the State Boarding Schools' Association (SBSA). Cranbrook enrols children from Hong Kong, China and Nigeria - there has even been a pupil from Australia.

State boarding schools were a revelation to Arpa. "They've got to be the best kept secret in this country," she says. The schools' dwindling numbers explain why lots of people have never heard of them. "If you go back 50 years there were a couple of hundred of them," says Daly. They tended to be grammar schools with a boarding house for children from rural areas, but as transport improved there was less need for boarding places, she says. "Now, we tend to lose a school every couple of years."

Some of the schools are noticing an increase in demand for boarding, however. They have always catered for children whose parents are on the move - whether with the army or with international companies. But in recent years families based in Britain have begun to make use of weekly boarding because both parents work so hard. Then there are families like Arpa's, who are unhappy with state day school provision. Arpa is not well off but finds state boarding affordable. The schools charge for boarding only. Fees vary between £3,500 and £7,300 a year.

Rosie is bright, and studious, and boarding allows her to concentrate on her work. At her London comprehensive she felt peer pressure to behave badly, says Arpa. Many of the state boarding schools - which include comprehensive and grammar schools - score well academically. "If you came to Cranbrook you would think you were in an independent school," says Daly. "It just happens to be free." Boarding is conducive to good results, says Daly. "You're doing your prep at a set time each night, overseen by staff." It is not just the boarders who benefit from these close-knit communities, says Bob Guthrie, the head of Rosie Arpa's school, Hockerill Anglo-European College in Hertfordshire. "About a third of staff live on the site, so there are strong relationships between staff and students, which is bound to have an overall effect on the ethos and extent to which youngsters achieve," he says. "We work Saturday mornings and the whole environment is 24/7".

Hockerill is one of only 50 schools in the UK to offer the International Baccalaureate instead of A-levels. All pupils take at least two foreign languages at GCSE and have the option of taking history and geography in French or German. Later this year Rosie will go on an exchange to Belgium, and next summer she will take a "trilingual" trip to Switzerland.

But qualifications, in whatever language, are not what Hockerill is most concerned with, says Guthrie. "Results will give you choices for sure but we know that success in personal relationships and careers will be about how you interact with other people." There is a wide range of after school clubs, from which the boarders must pick three. Rosie joined the Italian lifestyle, chocolate making and internet clubs last year. Her younger brother Samuel started this term and went for rugby, tennis and the movie club. "We tend to offer a wider range of extra-curricular activities than day schools," says Daly. The idea is to promote social maturity and good health, which in turn enhance academic performance.

Many parents see boarding - particularly in the sixth form - as a stepping stone to university, says Daly. Like students, boarders in year 11 and the sixth form sleep in single or double rooms, although these are much nicer than most rooms in the older universities, says Daly. Young children tend to share larger rooms with four or five beds. Rosie shared with four others when she started and this year she is sharing with two friends.

Living with friends is what children enjoy most about boarding, says Val Bowers of the SBAS. She's co-ordinating an open fortnight, from October 5-19 (see sbsa.org.uk for details), which will let parents look around any state boarding school. It's a concerted effort to market these little known schools. Their heads feel they are often under-supported by local education authorities because the boarders do not come from those regions, says Daly. "The schools meet a real need and could have been nurtured more by the Government."