Sports Calendar

The increase in boarding attendance is part of a wider trend. Shifting work patterns have gone hand in hand with the Government's championing of breakfast clubs, after-school clubs and of 12-hour school days. "The Government wants couples in the workforce," says Hilary Moriarty, national director of the Boarding Schools Association. "If both parents are working and lots of childcare before and after school is the norm, then what's wrong with boarding?" Working parents prefer, she says, to work late and clear the decks during the week, have their children home on a Friday night "and enjoy the weekend together". You can see why it's tempting.

Boarding schools are often sought out by parents who want to get away from competitive London schools. Some also offer an academic flexibility not available elsewhere, and for children who "don't fit in", boarding schools can offer more. Former education secretary Ruth Kelly's decision to send her dyslexic and dyspraxic nine-year-old son to board at a small, specialist prep school in Oxfordshire is one such example, albeit an extreme one.

It is interesting to note that in 2005 Kelly said she wanted to increase the number of state boarding schools (according to the Boarding School Association, demand for such places has increased by 50 per cent). It was reported that she believed such schools would be welcomed by parents who travel a lot for work, and who want stability for their children. She was also said to be keen to send children with family difficulties or behavioural problems.

Hilary Moriarty was the headmistress of a day and boarding school in Kent when she sent her eldest son to Worth, a boys' boarding school in Sussex, when he was 14, her younger son when he was ten, and her two daughters to day school. She considers herself part of the new demographic of boarding-school parents.

"I used to get home from work at seven, eat, then do the paperwork. Somewhere along the line I'd ask my son: how's the homework? He'd answer fine, fine. Great, I thought, 'Thank God for that'. My husband and I couldn't be at home between three and seven. My son didn't want a nanny. 'I'm 14, Mum,' is how he put it. So he was at home, playing computer games, doing his homework or watching TV. When I looked at the impoverished life I was offering him..."

So, at the age "when mates almost matter more to them than you do", she and her husband decided to send him away. It was clearly a hard choice, but it was either that, she says, or her giving up her job and "becoming dependent on my husband to feed me".

When he left, her son said boarding "was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me". Did he miss his mother? "To begin with, but at 14 he was able to rationalise it: "I'm not here because they don't love me, because they do. It's not a rejection, it's a privilege.'" And indeed it invariably is. Everything's on offer at boarding schools now ­ from tree-climbing to stabling your own pony, golf to sailing to film-making. The facilities can be staggering.

But what of a child's emotional life? Older children typically start to board between the ages of 11 and 13, a key developmental stage, says educational psychologist Dr Jeremy Swinson, where they are "beginning to develop their own unique character". They may not be very good company in the process; many parents feel their rebellious teenager is deliberately testing the limits of their love. Not so, says Swinson, principal psychologist of the Witherslack Group, which runs a series of specialist independent day and boarding schools in the North West of England. "They are redefining themselves as an individual; what they need to know is that their parents love them unconditionally." So what if they are away at school?

"Then that's difficult. The parents are giving one message, a message that we love you a lot but we are sending you away. It's a mixed message." The parents, says Swinson, "are missing out on an important stage of their child's development and on the beginnings of what I would call the adult relationship: that point at which you begin to know your children as adults.

Parents say, 'He came back in the Easter holidays and he was a different boy.' And they are. It changes the relationship you eventually have adult to adult, father to daughter, mother to son. As for the kids, they miss out, but they survive, don't they? Though they may be slightly different people as a result."

Parents choose boarding for myriad reasons, from family tradition to bereavement and divorce. If home is a battlefield ­ or an intellectual desert, for that matter ­ boarding can be a refuge. For the overseas parents at Moira House, head teacher Lesley Watson says that "when it comes to the crunch, an English education is best".

Watson markets Moira House "all over the world, from Vietnam to Dubai". Some of the parents haven't visited the school before sending their children, so meeting Watson, an immaculately groomed, personable mother of two, is reassuring for them, she says.

Times recommends

• What took place in 2010...
• Can you really cure a hangover?
• Video: How to do glamorous smoky eyes