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. 

  

The Value of a Gold Standard

Bryanston was recently delighted and honoured to be awarded Stonewall’s Gold School Champion Award in recognition of the school’s work over the past three years with regard to LGBT+ awareness and inclusion. Ian McClary, the school’s LGBT+ lead, writes…

On 6 September 2018 the Indian Supreme Court unanimously voted to repeal its colonial-era law which criminalised homosexuality - a cause for great celebration, not only for India’s LGBT+ community, but also for countless others who want them to be able to live and love, free from fear and discrimination. There might well be a long way to go before prevailing attitudes catch up with this change, but it is nevertheless an important step forward in the world’s largest democracy.

It wasn’t so very long ago that the UK took a similar, though more tentative step, in 1967, to partially decriminalise homosexuality. Indeed, it wasn’t until the first decade of the 21st Century that we made the more significant strides forward, both in terms of legislation and general attitudes. Many will remember the controversial Section 28 of the Local Government Act, introduced in 1988, which effectively ensured a culture of silence about and discrimination of LGBT+ people and issues in schools until 2003, when it was repealed. The only positive aspect of its legacy (and, I am sure, an unintended one on the part of the government at the time) was that it inspired the formation of Stonewall, which has become the largest LGBT rights charity in Europe.

Their extremely successful School Champions Programme is something that Bryanston has been

involved with since 2015, and has helped us to make our own strides forward with regard to LGBT awareness and inclusion. Each year we have worked towards a range of increasingly ambitious targets relating to school policies, challenging homophobia, biphobia and transphobia (HBT), supporting LGBT+ pupils and embedding awareness in the wider curriculum and the school community. In 2016 we achieved their Bronze award in recognition of our efforts and, in 2017, their Silver award for our continued work in these areas. This year we become one of only a handful of schools in the UK to be granted their Gold award as we demonstrate sustained evidence of our long-term commitment to LGBT+ inclusion and awareness in the school.

So what do these awards say about us as a school? Bryanston has always been a school in which the individual can thrive, but we tended to assume that we were LGBT+ aware and inclusive without doing anything actively about it. These awards demonstrate not only that we have thought a great deal about how we operate and what life is like at Bryanston for LGBT+ people, but also that we have been much more proactive in ‘promot[ing] respect and understanding of LGBT+ people and issues’ (Equality Act 2010). But we haven’t done it as a box ticking exercise simply to comply with this particular piece of legislation. Nor has it been just about getting the award, but rather embedding best practice and ensuring that it continues. Just as in the classroom - it’s not the qualification but rather the journey of learning taken as a whole which is more important. It is wonderful, of course, to know that we have achieved Stonewall’s gold standard, but we are acutely aware that our work does not end here; indeed, once a standard is reached it needs to be maintained - in a community which replenishes itself by almost a quarter each year, we need to continue to encourage and support, and celebrate. 

Where the School Champions awards have been extremely useful is by helping Bryanston to structure its work as we develop and evolve in this area. Take our dress code for example: it was always possible to wear it in a gender-neutral way but its most recent iteration has now evolved to be fully inclusive of trans and non-binary identities. Furthermore, our pupil-led Equality Society is now in its fifth year - the result of sustained interest and effort on the part of the pupils who regularly meet to explore a range of issues relating to equality, diversity and human rights, including sexuality and gender identity. I hope that LGBT+ pupils at Bryanston feel increasingly comfortable being who they are at school and coming out if they feel the time is right for them. I hope they, and all pupils, know that any form of HBT language or behaviour is unacceptable at Bryanston, that LGBT+ pupils (and staff) are valued for who they are, and that they are, in the words of Stonewall’s motto, ‘[accepted] without exception’.

As an OB and recent A2 Current Affairs speaker put it, ‘Returning to Bryanston after 25 years it was inspiring to see the journey of inclusion the school has been on. When I was at the school, Section 28 was still in force, the HIV epidemic prompted scaremongering which demonised gay people and the only time trans people were visible was in freakshow journalism - it wasn’t a good time for me to be a gay teenager struggling with their sexuality and I can’t say those memories are my happiest. To see now how the school is embedding inclusion across policies is great, but what is really inspiring is the way it is manifesting this in the culture and ethos of the school so that every young person in its care can truly find their authentic self in a supportive environment where teachers and pupils are visible allies and stepping up to create a more inclusive future’. (1)

It’s important to ensure that all our pupils thrive, including the 10% of our pupils who do not identify as heterosexual or who are questioning their gender identity (2). Uninformed young people are vulnerable young people, LGBT+ or otherwise, and it is concerning that LGBT+ young people experience higher rates of mental ill health on account of negative stereotypes, prejudice and HBT (3). Although this is, I am glad to say, gradually being reduced in the UK, thanks in no small part to the work of organisations like Stonewall, we need to continue to ensure, for our part, that Bryanston is a welcoming, respectful and supportive community for LGBT+ people. Having been privileged enough to have had the opportunity to celebrate our wedding at school, my husband and I can attest to just how welcoming it is!

(1) Dr Justin Varney OB - National Strategic Advisor, Public Health England.

(2) Bryanston School pupil LGBT survey 2016.

(3) Stonewall School Report 2017.

School lingo

This week the Head, Sarah Thomas, demystifies the language of schools, including the word tutor, which has a particular resonance for Bryanston.

Schools are full of the most remarkable lingo. I’ve worked at a school where prefects were called praepostors (but were generally known as pollies); where lines (the sort you write as punishment for a minor offence) were called solaces; where some senior members of staff were known as Div Heads (you might imagine how one slip of a typing finger could turn that particular title into something much more of an insult). Of course, Bryanston has its own language too: Every day, we use terms such as hsm (pronounced, as one Good School Guide entry some years ago put it, to rhyme with bosom), correction periods (which to me conjures images of medieval torture implements), EMRs and breakers, to name but a few. Hsm, a rather wonderful piece of non-gender-specific language, thankfully all but eliminated one of my own favourite spellcheck-induced typos – housemattress, which computers tend to prefer to the rather unwieldy housemaster/mistress.

EMRs (Early Morning Reports, requiring pupils to report to a prefect early in the morning), breakers (a breaktime run) and the now defunct nooners (an afternoon run) refer to forms of punishment for minor misdemeanours and hark back to Bryanston’s early years. As a new foundation, keen to move on from some of the more questionable public-school traditions, Bryanston was, from very early on, a school that did not believe in corporal punishment, so perhaps we should not be surprised that there exists a canon of pure BrySpeak about the alternative ways of confronting errant behaviour.

As for correction periods, perhaps we should call them You-Won’t-Believe-Your-Luck periods. Rooted firmly in the language of the Dalton Plan and long modified over the decades into, in effect, the Bryanston system, these are the times pupils spend with their individual teachers, one to one, or perhaps in pairs, in the sixth form (and from B upwards in some subjects), which allow them to review last week’s work and build upon it, looking forward and planning improvements. It’s a wonderfully individual method: some pupils can use the correction periods to ensure everything covered thus far has been clearly understood; others can use them to push their work on into new, limitless areas. No one else need know which of the two it is.

And then, of course, there’s the tutor. A word commonly used in schools and universities, at Bryanston it has a unique resonance, which owes more to its Latin derivation: watcher, protector, defender, guardian. I’ve been at Bryanston now for 13 years and am clear that one of the jewels in the crown (and there are several) is our tutoring system.

All tutors at Bryanston are assigned to pupils by me. It is one of my most important tasks as Head. Of course, I can’t do it alone – I have the help of my senior team of Admissions Registrar, Director of Admissions, Deputy Head Academic, and Senior Tutor. I also have a range of information to inform my decisions, from my conversations with the pupils themselves before they arrive at Bryanston and from a series of references supplied by the pupils’ current school.

I know our tutors very well. No one can tutor at Bryanston unless they have taught here for a year and been trained during that first year by the senior tutors. A tutor is assigned to a pupil on the basis of compatibility and interest at 13, and at 16 on the basis of direction too (for example, a 16-year-old entrant might well know they want to study in the USA or become a doctor and I can choose a tutor accordingly). There is nothing accidental or arbitrary about who tutors whom. It is not done on the basis of which house the pupil happens to be in or which members of staff happen to be on that house team. It is done on the basis of the pupil.

A tutorial between tutor and tutorial pupil will always be a one-to-one situation. The basis of the relationship is an academic one, with a focus upon the chart (now electronic, ripe for its update in September, and part of the system in one form or another since the school’s earliest day). But no child conveniently drops into two halves, one academic the other pastoral. And so, no tutor only deals with the academic, but also discusses general pastoral concerns (which will be shared with the hsm as appropriate) as well as, crucially at Bryanston, the extra-curricular life of the pupil in this school full of amazing and diverse extra-curricular opportunities.

I have had two daughters through Bryanston and each of them flourished in no small thanks to their fine tutors, Neil Boulton (Bryanston legend par excellence) and Hannah Fearnley ( a woman of enormous warmth, wit and wisdom). I don’t think there’s another school that does this essential job of looking after pupils as well as we do and that’s because I think our system is the tip top of it all. I am convinced that, whilst I logically might have to concede that my girls might have done as well or better in some respects elsewhere, because they are, when all is said and done, two wonderful girls (I am biased!), they would, simply put, not have enjoyed their universities (and yes, they were multiple in each case) as they did without Bryanston’s tutorial system, nor gained the degrees they did (likewise multiple), nor found the directions they did, nor even the careers they have.

I rarely wear my heart so boldly on my sleeve, because my nature is towards the self-deprecatory but I am passionate about this. Some people have remarked that some of my colleagues, such as Edrys Barkham, are evangelical about our tutorial system. Well, perhaps that’s because, just for once, we know, absolutely know, that we are right.