When single sex schools die, we will all be poorer

Telegraph

29-03-2025

I didn't go to boarding school, but some small part of me feels as if I did because my inner life was vividly informed by books that supplied the requisite details: tuck boxes, luggage labels, dormitories, matrons, sanitoriums and exeats.
Our family bookshelves heaved with Enid Blyton's Malory Towers, Anthony Buckeridge's Jennings series and, most blissful of all, Geoffrey Willans' Molesworth escapades and Ronald Searle's St Trinian's volumes.
Even when my reading wasn't directly concerned with the single-sex boarding experience, girls and boys in children's literature were inevitably travelling home, or to stay with a guardian (the staple rule in children's books dictating that parents must be removed to make adventure possible), with initialled metal trunks, ready to let off steam. So seductive were these books that, aged 10, I idly daydreamed about being banished to a remote, cliff-top ladies' college. Or, better still, toiling as the school's maid after my father died, having lost his fortune investing in a friend's diamond mine, like Sara in Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess.
But I can't help wondering how the shelves of children will look in 20 years after all the upheavals in the private education sector. Surely the subject of single-sex boarding schools will be firmly relegated to the realms of fantasy, if it informs literature at all.
This week The Telegraph revealed that Labour's imposition of VAT on school fees has had a particularly brutal effect on single-sex independent schools, which are closing or going co-ed at a rate of knots. Once boys public schools littered the land, including many ropey ones (think of Evelyn Waugh's Pennyfeather in Decline and Fall, teaching at Llanabba Castle School). Now there are only four all-boys boarding schools left in the UK: Eton, Harrow, Radley and Tonbridge. Meanwhile, all girls establishments are racing to take boys, despite studies showing girls do best when educated separately.
Not only will children's shelves be changed by the upheaval, adult literature will be transformed too. So many books I've loved unlock British history and our national temperament – in particular our stiff upper-lip and fortitude – by taking an unsentimental look at boarding school life. Jane Eyre wouldn't linger long in the imagination had she not triumphed over the hideous deprivations she endured at Lowood School. Logan Mountstuart in William Boyd's Any Human Heart has a life underpinned by the friendships and rivalries he establishes at public school.
More chilling, is Sebastian Faulks' fine novel Engleby, where the working-class anti-hero is at an 'ancient university', after winning a scholarship to Chatfield, a public school for the sons of naval officers. During his schooldays he was hideously bullied and called 'Toilet Engleby' for the heinous crime of not saying 'lavatory', like his posher classmates.
If you think that sounds off-putting, then I can only say that literary memoirs like Charles Spencer's A Very Private Education and Antonia White's Frost in May are darker still. But they're also beautifully-written, salutary reminders that a late 20th-century revolution in the field of child psychology served to revolutionise private education, introducing the previously alien concept of wellbeing.
Not all boarding-school lit is grim. Look at James Hilton's Goodbye Mr Chips, a tear-jerking love letter to the finest teachers, while many women would kill to take refuge from modern life at Angela Brazil's St Chad's. The sad fact is these time-honoured avenues of escapism will slowly disappear, along with the schools themselves. Future generations, schooled by AI, will never know the worlds of nuance summoned by the phrase 'chizz chizz'. It will all be another country.