“All change please, all change” – well, not quite: the transition from a junior to a senior boys’ house

Growing up in London and venturing onto the London underground system, I was always anxious about the need to change lines to get to my required destination. Was I aiming to head north or south, east or west, and what was I to do when the tannoy announced “all change please, all change”?

From the outside, moving up to a senior boys’ boarding house at Bryanston might seem a little like this. While a sense of anticipation, even some concern, is perfectly understandable, it is important to remember that it is not “all change” by any means. The grounding of a year in a junior house is already in the bag, so pupils know where to go when asked to meet in Main Hall, or realise that having an assignment in Dorchester is basically working on prep in the maths subject room rather than working on some undercover operation in Dorset’s county town.

Similarly, as Year 9 boys transform into Year 10s when they arrive in their second September at Bryanston, they have the immense comfort of returning to the guidance of their existing tutor. While the new academic year represents a clean slate, a tutor will knowingly ask about the summer break in Cornwall perhaps, or a particular theme from the previous term’s reports, and then of course, how their charge is settling into their new senior boarding house. The continuity provided by the Bryanston tutor system is one of the key elements that eases what might otherwise be a more fundamental transition.

The move has also been smoothed by the hard work undertaken in the summer of Year 9. The process starts with a senior housemaster receiving a confidential list in their common room pigeon hole; it is like Christmas, except we have no real idea at that point who is coming our way. There follows a rapid round of enquiries about this list of names, where we know there is no randomness or partiality at all – the list has been carefully crafted to meld together a group who will live under the same roof for the next four years of their school life. The boys themselves have suggested who they’d like to be with, the junior housemasters have balanced this against the need to share talent around the five senior boys’ houses and an honest assessment of what is best for each boy, and the alchemy is completed by a dash of careful social engineering. The senior housemasters then receive a ‘dossier’ on each new boy coming their way. All in all, it equates to the planning we might all make before embarking on a tube journey across a capital city.

I (and the other senior housemasters) then meet our new boys, inviting them to visit their new boarding house for a quick look around; in the following weeks there is also an overnight camp by the river, team-building, story-telling, a group BBQ perhaps, and a ‘graduation day’ when I also get to meet the new parents. Finally, before the summer holiday begins, the dorm combinations for September are arranged, i.e. the boys know who they’ll be in a room with in the first term of the next academic year, avoiding the peril of a tenterhooks return to school in September.

Once in the senior house, like all tube journeys, there is not one route that fits all, so the journey to the Leavers’ Ball at the end of Year 13 can take various detours with stops along the way, and the route each pupil decides to take is pretty unique to them. Some will take the Circle Line all the way from South Kensington to King’s Cross, while others will opt for the Piccadilly, Central or Victoria line, and that’s because a pupil will have different skills or preferences. It matters not because they all reach their final destination in the end and with their personal confidence pretty well complete. Some might take the circuitous route for a while, or pass through many more stops along the way. Some may even go south on the Bakerloo when they should go north; but between the housemaster, tutors and teachers, we will nudge them in order to get them going back in the right direction towards Baker Street.

During four years of travel, there is plenty of guidance offered so that any pupil should know what’s coming up and when they need to react. “The next station is Paddington. Change here for the Bakerloo line and National Rail services”. And then there is my own personal favourite – ‘Mind the gap’. Nobody aims to put a foot wrong, but it does occasionally happen, even if the warnings have been made clear. Unlike the junior houses, the adolescence card is in play rather more, and this is part of growing up – but we are on hand to avoid the ‘gaps’ or to pull the emergency handle as required.

Finally, unlike at some schools, the senior house does not alone define an individual at Bryanston, rather it is what they achieve in the milieu of the whole school which does. Yes, the friends and experiences they have in their house are deeply personal and unique to the surroundings, but, like each and every tube carriage, they will spend so much time with other people, each with their own individual personalities, that it is the journey through school as a whole which has the greatest resonance.

So, for those of you reading this who are curious or even a little uncertain about Bryanston’s transition of house for boys between Years 9 and 10, it is far less a matter of ‘all change’ than might seem. More like a little change, at the right time, at the right station, and onto the right line with plenty of comforting continuity.

Settling in at senior school: how junior boys’ boarding can help

Stephen Davies, junior boys housemaster explains how Bryanston's junior boys' house system helps ease the transition to senior school...

A long time ago, when I was at a not very distinguished school in Wales, the Year 9 boys were known as ‘plebs’. While one might admire the erudition of such a nickname, it was hardly a compliment. Teachers called us plebs, older pupils called us plebs and both told us how lucky we were because plebs used to have a much harder time of it in the old days. We should be grateful for small mercies. There was even a verb: one could ‘pleb’ a junior (i.e. ask them to do something menial or unpleasant) or the junior could ‘be plebbed’ (carry out such a task). I remember being sent to the not very local shop with a 1p coin and being told to buy a 1/2p sweet and bring back the change. The sweet wasn’t the point of the exercise. The point was that I was a pleb, so I should just grit my teeth and get on with it, and one glorious day I would be able to carry out the full range of plebbing activities myself.

I’m afraid I never really did, not that I can remember anyway . . . instead I find myself running a junior boys’ boarding house at Bryanston, catering exclusively to Year 9 boys. You might say that I have a house full of plebs and some might argue that my career is now entirely based on plebbing – telling small boys what to do – but I would say that is to misconceive what we are up to these days. No modern school worth its salt would or should tolerate any culture of exploitation. Thankfully, those days are long gone. What is striking and different, and brilliant about Bryanston’s approach to boys’ boarding, is that over 30 years ago (about the time that I was at school and getting plebbed) the school established the junior boys’ house system. 

To explain – because it is unusual – all of our 13-year-old boys go into one of our two junior boys’ houses, either Beechwood or Cranborne, for their first year. In each of these houses the boys have their own space: their own pool table, their own workrooms and common room.  So, on their first night of boarding at senior school (and for a good number, this is their first night of boarding ever) they are not likely to be bumped off the pool table by a large and hairy 1st XV prop forward. The boys will have time and space to get to know the others in their house in an environment that probably feels a bit like a prep school. If they are used to being a big fish in a small pond, the junior house acts as a sort of holding pond before they enter the tidal waters of whole school life. Friendships are forged. Hand-picked prefects from the sixth form (boys and girls) act as role models and work as mentors in the house, guiding the boys through their first few weeks and months. There is a lot of laughter and an awful lot going on. Add in the fact that Year 9 is a time of enormous change anyway, with adolescence often kicking in, a new sense of independence, physical, emotional and social growth, it seems desirable that these things can happen in a protected space.

The system also allows boarding staff to specialise. A junior boys’ housemaster is not distracted by sixth-form goings on, UCAS references, GCSE choices and so on. We can focus on and keep learning about our boys and their needs in those crucial months as they find their feet. We can ensure that they are making the most of the opportunities on offer. We can also offer guidance to parents – who need to settle in too – as we begin to recognise patterns and routines. In particular the sudden separation of school and home can throw up issues on both sides and the junior boys’ house offers the perfect context in which to discuss and resolve these things.

But as I often find myself saying to parents, the thing that makes Bryanston unique in its house system for boys is the way we allocate them to a senior house. We resist the tribalism of more traditional environments and we try to create a balance of talents and personalities across all houses. We actively encourage socialising between the two junior houses and then we give the boys a say in who they are with; they give their junior housemaster a long list of those friends that they would like to be with in a senior house. Neither the boys nor the parents get to choose a house (parents don’t have to audition housemasters, fortunately) and nor do housemasters recruit for their house (this seems invidious to me). Instead, the groupings for senior houses emerge in a series of meetings over several weeks in the summer term. The boys don’t always get what they want, but they do get, we think, what they need, in terms of their peer group for the next four years. The final piece of the jigsaw is the tutor; boys will be allocated a tutor by the Head before they arrive at the school. The tutor will support the boy on an individual basis throughout his time at Bryanston, so the work of the junior housemaster is always backed up by those one-to-one conversations that take place weekly in tutorials.

The first year of senior school used to be one that had to be endured rather than enjoyed.  Now, thanks in a significant part to the real boost in confidence and security that boys (and parents) get from the junior house system, most older boys will look back fondly on that time.  “Do you remember when, in Beechwood . . .”  is often a conversation opener from a cheery-looking A2 school prefect. It is a year to be enjoyed, a year of great change and development, and, we hope, the best start to a very positive school career.