Boarding at Wesley College is a world away from what you might have imagined, with some students coming from within walking distance, writes Arminta Wallace.
An endangered species, you might think - a relic of the bad old days when youngsters had to be shipped halfway across the country to the nearest secondary school. Weren't boarders the sad kids who were dropped off in September, complete with tuck box and regulation supply of stout underwear, and picked up again at Christmas? But there's a new kind of boarding school on the block. And far from being a relic of the rare auld times, it appears to be appealing to boomtown parents: bigtime.
"Boarding is changing," says Chris Woods, principal of Wesley College in Ballinteer, Co Dublin, which is about to embark on a €2m refurbishment of its boarding facilities. "The big difference between boarding schools now and boarding schools then," he adds wryly, as we make our way past mounds of mobiles, MP3 docking stations and other electronic equipment plugged into chargers in the corridors of Wesley's girls' boarding house, "is that now everyone needs at least four sockets by their bed."
Woods says he's "astonished" by the numbers of people who could easily drive to and from the school every day but choose, instead, to sign their children up for five-day boarding. Time was when the boarders at Wesley, situated near the Dundrum exit of the M50, would mainly come from Donegal, Cork and Galway. Now, as often as not, the journey home involves a trip to deepest Rathgar, Kildare or Greystones. Some of the boarders actually live within walking distance of the school.
With two and a half hours of supervised study built into the daily routine, the arrangement has obvious appeal for Celtic Tiger parents, beavering away until well past dinner-time and too exhausted to yell at teenage kids to get off the PlayStation and do their maths homework. But Woods insists that this isn't the reason why five-day boarding is so popular. Boarders can, he says, take advantage of a full range of extra-curricular activities every day, both before classes begin - with choral and debating activities scheduled for eight am - and after school.
"It's not that you're dumping your children off on a Sunday," he says, "it's that you're providing something for them which they may not have at home." With the fees adding up to a gulp-inducing €11,000 a year, however, five-day boarding isn't an easy financial option. So why do parents choose it? "I went to Wesley as a kid myself," says Dirk van der Flier, whose sons Johan and Joshua are both five-day boarders. "So there's a slight emotional attachment in sending my guys there. They could commute, to be quite honest with you - we live in Wicklow - but it would take a big chunk out of their day. They're both sporty kids, and they can do lots of stuff that they'd never get to do if they were at home. And the thing is, they're doing it with their peers, which is totally different to doing it with adults at home."
Claus and Carol Renner had been living in Australia for five years, and wanted to come back to Ireland. Having researched a number of schools, they chose Wesley for their daughter Roxy. "It's not a cheap thing to do, but it's worth every cent," says Carol Renner. "Roxy wanted to board - she's an only child - and from the first day, she absolutely loved it. To me, education is the greatest gift you can give your children. Forget buying them houses, or whatever. The character-building that is going on between these children is for life."
In the foyer of the girls' boarding-house, a large bowl of fresh fruit sits on a table alongside a healthily rumpled pile of fresh newspapers. A radio is playing. The vibe here is definitely "home" rather than "school" - as the house mistress, Carole Ward, confirms. "We like to have a very different atmosphere in the boarding house," she says. "I'm not a teacher, so it's not as if they're meeting me in class and then finding me here after school as well. They call me," she adds with a grin, "Mrs W". Wesley's refurbishment, which will be totally funded by the school, will concentrate on the dorm areas, especially the junior dorms.
"Some boarding schools have decided to change from the old dormitory style to a kind of bed and breakfast approach, with each student in a single room," says Woods.
"We've made a very conscious decision not to do that, because the friendships which grow up here between students who share rooms is very much part of our ethos. But we do want to have more social space, better lighting, a more comfortable feel to the rooms."
Students Amy Roulston, Caroline Shaw and Eddie Fox, from first year, fifth year and sixth year, respectively, are unanimous in their enthusiasm for boarding. "It was my decision to be a boarder and I haven't regretted it for a minute," says Fox, who was a day student during his junior cycle.
"I think the bond between boarders is pretty special. All sorts of barriers break down in the boarding house, because you get on well with all the other years - like, you'd even have a laugh with the first and second years." Roulston is from Donegal, so doesn't go home at weekends. "Well, there's a few other people who stay - and on Sundays they take us to the cinema or something, so that's good fun," she says. In her six months at the school she has become involved in "drama, arts, netball and sometimes badminton and hockey".
Shaw, meanwhile, has just finished editing the latest edition of the school's book Lifelines, an anthology of poems chosen by famous people, including Seamus Heaney and Paul Durcan, which is a fund-raiser for Concern. "I'm big into debating," she says, "so I do the Model United Nations and a bit of German debating - and I do a lot of choir as well. I used to do sport, up until third year, but then I discovered I had no hand-eye co-ordination, so I decided that was a bad idea. I love being a boarder. You make really good friends because you're living with them the whole time, so you really get to know them."
It's clear even to the casual visitor that there's an exceptionally positive atmosphere on the Wesley campus - which is perhaps why parents are, literally, queueing up to get their offspring in here.
"Education in Ireland is becoming increasingly difficult because of people putting their names down when children are just born," says Woods. "We now have applications for 2018. The only way we can deal with it is to take everybody's application; then, two years prior to the year in question, we'll respond to everybody and we'll deal with everybody. Otherwise we get into an enormous mess."
How do they decide? He smiles grimly. "What we absolutely don't do is discriminate on the basis of ability, or an access exam," he says. "We try to get the children of past pupils looked after. We try to get a reasonable number of boarders relative to day students. We try to balance boys and girls. It's a Methodist school, so Methodists get priority, then other Protestant denominations - but siblings get the same priority as Protestants because we are categorical that families will be kept together. And if anybody applies as a boarder, we try to be sure they get in."
You don't have to be a rocket scientist to work it out. From here on in, for many hard-pressed parents, boarding school may not be the last resort, so much as the only hope.
