It’s no coincidence that many of the schools riding high in the value-added league tables are boarding schools, as Hilary Moriarty explains
Parents perusing the numerous school league tables on offer will come across the term ‘value added’. Put simply, value added is the difference between the grades a pupil is predicted to gain on joining a school and the grades that they actually achieve at GCSE and A-level. When the actual performance exceeds the predicted one, that difference represents the improvement the pupil has made – the value that has been added during their time at the school.
Value-added data is useful as it shows which schools have made a difference to their pupils’ performance, as opposed to those that simply select the most academically gifted pupils for admission. It can be very difficult to add value to the most able cohort, so some highly selective schools will not score highly, despite doing a fine job.
The figures in the league tables are an attempt to measure the value added using a points score. The school’s value-added score is the average difference between the predicted and actual achievement. Most boarding school pupils shoot way ahead of the predictions – proof that the school has added value to their education.
24/7 learning
If the best way to learn a foreign language is total immersion – live in the country, live with a family, jump-start a reluctant monoglot brain into ever-faster responses to chat and conversation and signs and newspapers in a whole new language, live it, breathe it, soak it all up and come back confidently, happily bilingual – then maybe a boarding education is the equivalent for learning. Boarding makes learning 24/7.
Perhaps not literally. Boarders do sleep, in their comfy beds, in warm and cosy bedrooms shared with three or four friends if they are younger boarders, in single or double study-bedrooms if they are in the serious examination years of GCSEs and A-levels or the IB. And they are likely to sleep very well, because their days – longer than most of those available in any day school – are certainly busy and action-packed.
At an independent schools fair, one large boarding school was able to tell enquirers that there were 82 different clubs and activities available to boarders every week. That’s the scale of organised and well-resourced activities that boarding schools can manage, often because the staff also live on site.
An ideal environment
The environment of boarding – with teachers on site, and students away from home – lends itself to the cultivation of self-discipline and independence of thought. Leadership opportunities abound – research indicates that three-quarters of boarding students say they have been given leadership opportunities (think of all those house matches, in everything from debating to tiddlywinks).
Boarding undoubtedly offers time to grow academically. No wasted time on bus journeys and in traffic jams; no long evenings on a computer game; very little midnight oil being burned without someone taking an interest, which is different from a parent nagging. Many students convert from day status to boarding in the tough examination years, when they crave peace and quiet, structure and order, and time, time, time to study.
Not surprisingly, boarders also develop their capacity for independence and self-reliance, which will ease their path into university and the adult world. American research reports that almost 80% of boarders surveyed believed they were just as prepared for the non-academic aspects of college life, such as time management and social life. They were ready.
The world they will enter is shrinking fast. Boarding with students from a diverse mixture of nations and cultures, learning respect for others and a capacity to rub along with them, makes boarders confident occupants of our of our shrinking world, equipped with friends for life from all over the globe.
Fulfilling potential
For students who find themselves perilously close to public examinations and perhaps, for whatever reason, ill-prepared, boarding can be a life-saver. The son of a colleague of mine was happily progressing in a rural comprehensive school in the north of England when his father took a promoted post in the south. In the son’s new and enormous city comprehensive a long way from friends, he floundered. When his parents attended a Year 9 parents’ evening, they were told by a chirpy young teacher who clearly did not know their son – probably because he had become one of the middle swathe in the class, neither super-bright A* material nor idling in the danger zone – that of course he would be fine to do GCSE in her subject. ‘He will get a C, no problem!’
They decided that was a problem. They thought he was capable of better. But they realised this teacher, and possibly many of her colleagues, neither knew nor cared if he could do better. With hectic schedules and long working days of their own, they opted for a boarding education for Years 10 to 13. Not all the damage of two wasted years was reparable, and he achieved a mixed bag of GCSE grades, though they included four A grades, including one in that young teacher’s subject. But after two years in the sixth form, he left for a premier university with straight As at A-level, having been a prefect, with colours in three sports and a regional prize for public speaking. The rest of his life will be built on these successes.
Hilary Moriarty was the National Director of the Boarding Schools’ Association from 2006 until August 2014. She was for six years Headmistress of a girls’ boarding school, and previously Deputy Head of what was at the time the oldest girls’ boarding school in the UK.