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. 

  

Speech Day reflections

As another school year comes to an end, Sarah Thomas looks ahead to the future with one foot firmly rooted in the past. Discover why she believes that Bryanston’s motto of “Et Nova et Vetera” – both the new and the old – is more apt than ever.

Back in January, Bryanston turned 90 and through OB Simon Wheeler’s (C ’93) extraordinary series of films, we are able to look back and remind ourselves of why this school is so special. The place, the people, the ideas and the principles that continue to guide us. In June, we were able to look forward, with the announcement of my successor.  I’m delighted that Mark Mortimer will be leading Bryanston onwards and upwards from September 2019 and look forward to having a year in which I can do whatever makes most sense to allow him, his lovely wife Anna and their three children, to get to know this wonderful school. 

Speeches in the Elder Concert Hall

At last year’s Speech Day, the Chairman spoke on the theme of necessary change and evolution within schools. Schools do change.  They must; they would disappear into oblivion if they did not.  But that does not mean that the things that matter must change.  Our guiding principles of creativity, breadth of ambition, individuality, the sense of a loving family, of humanity, and of resilience, have been embedded in our DNA since 1928 and will endure, I am certain, because of Bryanston’s collective good sense, the quality of the governors, and their choice of excellent headmasters. Those guiding principles will ensure that Bryanston continues to evolve boldly and positively, without losing the critical constituents of what makes Bryanston Bryanston.

Peter Tait, former headmaster of Sherborne Prep and a great friend of Bryanston, likes to torment us with this question: ‘What is a proper curriculum?’ Are we still, in effect, teaching what we taught 50 years ago, regardless of new, more relevant subjects, and without reference to what our pupils actually learn from them?  Teaching is not after all learning.  Then there are the real-world issues: funding for state schools and affordability for the independent sector; the fact that more overseas children are now educated in branches of UK independent schools abroad than here in the UK; and above all there’s the looming threat of AI. What kind of world are we actually preparing our young people for? And how do independent schools – how does Bryanston – stay relevant in the face of the fantastically significant changes that are coming our way? 

Duncan Emerson directs the orchestra

Sir Anthony Seldon in his book The Fourth Education Revolution challenges the model which most schools still adhere to – that of The Third Revolution: industrialised learning; schools as factories; chalk and talk, or its 21^st-century equivalent, Powerpoint and talk. Sir Anthony predicts we will meet the challenges of AI by adopting a new model and following a 5-point plan: (i) ending early specialisation in schools; (ii) investing in staff who understand learning and analytics and technology; (iii) emphasising the human in education, to produce competent adults who are better than any algorithm; (iv) personalising learning; (v) challenging and stretching young people, by making school more than about lessons.

Guests relax in the sunshine

This is precisely the model that Bryanston has striven to follow, and with some success, over the past 90 years, often in defiance of the conventional wisdom that academic success is the be all and end all. Ending early specialisation? Embracing personalised learning? Stretching our pupils beyond the classroom? Look at our tutorial system and the Dalton Plan, our correction periods and one-to-one attention to the individual.  Added to that, we have a curriculum that is particularly diverse in the formative D year, an extraordinary range of extra-curricular opportunities and an A level programme which always seeks to ensure there are no impossible subject combinations. And better still, the IB.

Tennis on the grass courts

Bryanston’s model has explicitly set out to help children to develop the human.  It’s why Bryanstonians invariably end up in such a range of careers and don’t necessarily trot off into those professions which, we are told, will soon no longer exist. At Bryanston we have always known that education is not about mere subjects.  It’s about an outlook, an attitude, a lifelong ability to learn and adapt; to work in teams; to influence and persuade; to direct and lead. To laugh at yourself and to put things right when you’ve gone wrong. The future requires real people, with real values and real emotional intelligence. And real education.

Whilst the changes technology have brought have been huge (both for good and bad) I am happy to predict that one of the longer terms effects might be that we refocus upon, and rejoice in, what makes us human, not machine. Because the world changes – we all know that – but what does not change is what it takes to be human.

Independent learning

This week we welcome Bryanston's Deputy Head (Academic), Dr David James, with a blog on independent learning.

Bryanston has a long commitment to promoting independent learning: in every weekly assignment period, correction period, and subject room, this approach is visible, pushing our pupils to take ever greater responsibility for their own learning. Of course, that does not mean that the teacher removes him or herself from the process. Instead, an effective teacher knows when to give direct instruction, and when to provide the appropriate levels of support the pupil needs to go beyond what is prescribed in the National Curriculum.

But how is that balance struck? How does a teacher know when to intervene, and when to allow the pupil to try, sometimes fail, and learn to succeed? To some extent the answer is: we never know for sure, and there are challenges within every aspect of ‘independent learning’ that pupils, parents, teachers and policy makers have to be aware of before they start advocating it as some sort of panacea for every conceivable educational situation.

Independent learning is often a matter of judgment by an experienced teacher. Get it wrong, and difficulties may arise, but get it right, and you can inculcate in a pupil an attitude of mind that can last a lifetime. However, we live in an educational system that seems to conspire against it: increasingly prescriptive curricula, more rigorous assessment, league tables, high stakes final examinations, among other factors, contribute towards creating a situation where anything that is not clearly focused on measurable outcomes - on the part of the school and pupil – is considered a potential distraction.

But teachers have to persevere in trying to make pupils increasingly responsible for their own learning because the alternative is...what? Spoonfeeding? Do we conspire in creating a culture of risk-averse, over-dependent young people who are ill-equipped to deal with the demands of higher education and the pressures of work (but who might get good examination results)? Few teachers have gone into the profession to do this, although all will have felt competing pressures to do just that.

What we have to do is develop in our young people an ability to work on their own, and with their peers, both in the classroom and outside. We have to provide them with the skills to self-monitor, so that they know that they are progressing (or not), and to see work not as something to endure, but as something that is enjoyable and, ultimately, liberating. But we cannot assume that pupils will somehow, instinctively, know such things, and have the intellectual apparatus, to achieve an independence of mind.

Great schools develop in their pupils a real pride in their progress, but also an understanding of how they develop. And great teachers give their pupils the vocabulary to make sense of their own learning. Key to this is discussion, and reflection. Bryanston does both through the weekly charts, and through our unique tutorial system, but these can only ever work effectively if the pupil learns to play a full and active part in each: it is in both that a personalised focus of academic achievements (and challenges) is developed. And when this happens, ideally, pupils begin to learn that education is not something done to them, but with them, a joint endeavour undertaken between teacher and pupil, and with a shared destination in mind: independence in the truest, and most empowered form, because it comes with a real sense of purpose and responsibility.