Look around
Parental choice Hugh Wright looks back to his Methodist boarding education
Old men dream dreams and young men see visions, or so the Bible tells us. This old man has been musing about how and why parents choose a school for their sons and daughters. All those involved in teaching will have observed this process throughout their careers, whilst members of staff who are parents will have made such decisions themselves. They are important ones, not only for the parents and their children, but also for the schools and for wider society. Independent or state, single sex or co-ed, selective or non-selective, day or boarding, near or far? Not all choices are available, but decisions have to be made. It is only in recent years that I have begun to see how extraordinary the way my parents decided for me must now seem, but the underlying principle remains the same – what can we do for the best? No matter what else, that is what decides it. In my father’s case, it was simple but costly. I was entered at birth for his old school, Kingswood, a single sex boarding school whose geographical location was not an issue for a good many of the parents who chose it. For, like them, my father was a Methodist minister and, since the days of John Wesley, the founder of the school, the Methodist Church had offered considerable help with the fees for its ministers’ sons. This was only fair, as Wesley kept moving his ministers around the country to wherever they were needed, a system that persisted in some form until at least the 1960s, and I was to be the fourth generation of my family to benefit from this provision. That seemed to be that, provided I passed the exam to get in. There was no preparation for this in my Primary School, so I sat it in the house of a friend of my parents. We none of us visited the
school, which of course my father knew well but my mother had never even seen. And that remained the case even when I joined the school at the age of ten, since the junior boys had been relocated from Bath to rural Berkshire on safety grounds at the start of the war. Prior’s Court is a beautiful Queen Anne house near Newbury and I can still vividly remember cheerfully waving my mother goodbye from a second-floor window as she chose to slip away. We had been given a lift there by the parents of a fellow pupil, a family living in relatively nearby Chesterfield and who had a car. We got to Chesterfield by bus, quite a long ride from the small mining village where we lived. After that first time, the journey to school, made with two others from the age of ten, seemed to us to be an adventure joyfully repeated six times a year at the beginning and end of each term. After my bus journey to Chesterfield, there was a train to Birmingham Snow Hill, and then a change of stations, carrying our cases on foot to New Street. We changed trains again at Didcot, and finally took a bus to the school, into the Berkshire countryside. But what can my mother have been thinking as she left me there the first time? She was not able to visit the school again until the last Speech Day and my father never did. Travel cost money that they just did not have and most parents there were the same, which made it seem quite normal. We loved it, she bore it. The same pattern was repeated when I changed to the senior school in Bath, and neither of my parents ever went there until the final Speech Day, when a very special effort was made. The only time my mother ever saw the school was as I
Kingswood today
Autumn 2018
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