Some of the most prestigious schools in the world are Britain’s ‘public’ schools, vast architectural masterpieces from a bygone era with sweeping entrances, extensive grounds, sports fields and incomparable facilities. Founded by the church, royalty or self-made men who would make their mark in spending the fortunes they had amassed on establishing educational institutions, these schools established a role where the ‘well to do’ and aspiring classes would send their children for generations and still do. Education was seen as the way for the middle classes to progress in the world and the ‘public’ school system provided a language and accent that defined their class and ensured that like would know like. It is seen as what is ‘done’, to send your young to boarding school for a ‘public’ education, to be the ‘making’ of them. ‘Public’ refers to students coming from anywhere, but anywhere does not mean anyone! The eye watering fees and entrance requirements mean that these schools are there to embed privilege. It is a model that has been emulated all over the world – a schooling system that assures the maintenance of privilege everywhere, not just on British soil.

But what of the young children who enter these schools? A guarantee of privilege is not a guarantee of children being cared for and nurtured. When a child is sent to boarding school, some as young as five, what happens to them? What is it like to be stripped of all home comforts and arrive in a strange environment where your parents are replaced by boarding house staff? Where the rules and time schedules are more important than what is needed for each individual child. Where each hour of every day is marked by bells and demands to perform? There is no sanctuary of a bedroom door to close on the world at the end of the day. On that first day of term until the end of school days, what happens when the commanding front entrance closes and the child is left to the school to raise? Through the 1950s to the 1990s the contributors of this book attended these schools and these are their experiences, which attest to their resilience within a system where emotional and physical abuses are designed to crush all sensitivity out of the child, and the product of the system is intended to be a leader of society, but what is the society that is intended from such a product?

These are the stories from behind closed doors.

AMG, Editor