Overcoming the boarding school jitters

The transition to boarding can be a nerve-wracking process for any parent. Chris Tolman, a young housemaster at Harrow, offers reassuring advice on how to manage homesickness and help your child settle into school.

“Five hundred faces and all so strange,
Life in front of me, home behind,
I felt like a waif before the wind,
Tossed on an ocean of shock and change.”
(Excerpt from ‘Five Hundred Faces’ by Edmund W. Howson)

The words above, from an ancient Harrow School song written in 1883, provide a poignant reminder of how starting public school can feel, even to the most robust 13-year-old boys. These days the process is much milder than the mid-19th century, but many of the emotions felt by a new boy in 2009 will be very similar. What has changed is the way in which schools seek actively to alleviate this sense of “shock and change”. The art of helping boys to settle in successfully is one which has developed considerably, and the modern house master is skilled at managing the transition from prep to public school.

The settling-in process begins well before the luggage is unloaded on the first day of the Autumn term. At Harrow, for example, a programme of activities during the preceding months include a new boys’ lunch in March and a tea party in June. This allows the boys to get to know each other and to meet their roommates for the first term even before they have left prep school, removing what used to be one of the main sources of anxiety when starting a new school.
Older boys also make a valuable contribution. Over the summer holiday the new head of house will write to each new boy, reminding them that he too was new once and immediately establishing himself as a source of support and guidance. Each new boy is assigned a ‘shepherd’ in the year above to help with initial issues of orientation and organisation. Senior boys such as house monitors provide more sophisticated pastoral care and actively encourage younger members of the house...