Boarding schools offer a richer quality of life. You can tailor the school to the child, sending your active child somewhere with excellent sports facilities, your clever child somewhere with great academic credentials, and so on. The activities and camaraderie available to children living with their peers offers a much richer experience than a family home can often give.

When my second son went off to school, my husband and I were both working long hours. Instead of sitting alone at home in the evenings, our son was given a good meal, and supervised prep in a wonderful library with teachers on hand if he was stuck. He could play football with his mates, or join the debating society or Young Enterprise, crash out in the common room with a great big television set and still get to bed about ten o’clock.

Boarding schools are not the Dickensian institutions they used to be. There is a trend towards weekly boarding, and, although they still encourage a certain (in my view, desirable) independence, pupils can contact their parents at the drop of a hat via mobile phone. Eighty per cent of boarding parents now live within an hour’s drive of school, which, psychologically, makes a huge difference to the child’s wellbeing. They know if they need their mum she can be there quickly.

Those who do go farther afield normally want to. London children going up to Millfield in Somerset, with its reputation for sport, or Gordonstoun in Morayshire, often feel that the outdoorsy education they receive is worth it. The match of school to child is terribly important. If children feel they’re at the right school they are less likely to be distraught by homesickness.

Boarding schools have transformed in the past 20 years. Much more care is taken of pupils, particularly younger boarders. There is a rigorous inspection regime, which has stopped the kind of bullying people used to associate with boarding. The Ofsted inspections (the Independent Schools Inspectorate inspects the education side but Ofsted does the boarding) have 52 separate standards to check.

So vulnerable boarders are protected. But most enjoy it. In a 2004 survey by the Children’s Rights Director Dr Roger Morgan entitled Being a Boarder, 916 pupils and 932 parents from 64 boarding schools returned questionnaires directly to the group, so there was no opportunity for schools to tinker with the results. They were asked “What’s the worst thing about boarding?” and only 12 per cent of the boarders said “being away from home”, compared with 23 per cent of the parents. It’s parents who worrying about separation, not the kids.

Parents are much more vocal than they used to be. When our first son went to school we asked about him coming home for weekends and the headmaster said: “Oh no, I’m not having boys going to parties and coming back on Sunday night too tired for anything.” And I just said, “Yes sir, no sir”. But by the time it came to our second son, I was a different parent. People challenge the system much more.

If boarding is such an archaic and redundant institution, why are there 35 state boarding schools in Britain? Last year the Government gave £25 million for refurbishing state boarding schools. This year, one of them, Hockerill Anglo-European College, got the top A-level results in the country (in state schools). I get lots of calls from parents desperate to find a place for their child in a state boarding school.

I don’t think people who have been to boarding school are less capable of communication or emotionally inept. There can be an increased bravado in people who had a hard time there: men who say to one another: “Weekends off? Goodness, when I was at school we didn’t come home from September till Christmas,” and that sort of thing. Perhaps that makes them more independent and used to a tougher environment, with expectations that their children will benefit similarly. But that’s not the same as aloofness and most of the time it’s far from crippling. What of the children at day school whose parents were working too hard or long to see them during the week: where, instead of extra-curricular activities and common rooms and dorms, the children are left to their own devices? Aren’t there many other potential issues with an equally severe, if different, impact?

There are now many coed boarding schools, where boys can go grow up with girls and female teachers too, so they don’t suddenly meet them “on the other side” with no idea of how to deal with them. Some children respond better to single-sex and some to coed, but the choice is there.

Boarding is not for everyone. You have to make sure that the child and the school are well matched and that the child has some part in the decision-making process. But they offer choice, and, as parents and children have more input into what they get out of them, they can stimulate, not stunt, a child’s progression into adulthood.

Hilary Moriarty is National Director of the Boarding Schools’ Association

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