Boarding from a tough beginning

By Sean Coughlan
Education reporter, BBC News

Colin Morrison now runs one of the UK's biggest magazine publishers

There have been calls from education ministers for boarding schools to take children from deprived backgrounds. How does it feel for a child to switch lives in this way?

It sounds like something from a Dickens story. A young boy facing deepening hardship at home is swept away by a benefactor to an upmarket school where he has opportunities his family could never afford.

The boy makes good, becoming a big business success - but he doesn't forget his roots and goes back to help children who might now be in a similar position.

Except this story begins in the Britain of the late 1950s rather than the 1850s - and the boy is now running one of the biggest magazine publishers in the country.

Colin Morrison, chief executive of ACP-Natmag Magazines, was seven years old when he was funded to go to a private boarding school - an experience which he says ultimately proved a great advantage.

His parents had divorced acrimoniously - and his family had faced hardship.

'Rescued'

But the Royal Wanstead School in Essex offered an alternative - a boarding place funded by the local education authority.

Lord Adonis was also funded through boarding school

"We were poor and my mother and I shared a bedroom in a tiny flat. It rescued me from that.

"I was excited about going. But I felt lost when I got there, the first night of going to sleep in a room with 25 other people is a sobering experience, quite threatening and lonely."

"These were the days before mobile phones, so contact was a compulsory letter writing session," he says.

But did it make him feel like an outsider when he went home?

"It changes things when you go home, because you're outside of the friends you used to be close to. There was some celebrity to that - my friends thought I was luckier. But if your experience is different, there must be a gap."

He also says the experience of institutional living can create an emotional distance and a more private personality.

But Mr Morrison, who was at the school for 11 years until 1970, says that neither he nor his mother ever doubted that it had been the right decision to take the opportunity offered.

'Self-starter'

After a daunting start, he says the boarding school environment worked to his advantage - "boarding school suits a self-starter".

Boarding school can teach self-reliance, says Mr Morrison

He says that in terms of the different social backgrounds of children, there was no snobbery between the fee-paying pupils and those funded by the local authority

And he says it gave him a streak of independence and self-reliance which has served him well in business.

This is not a unique story - as this social experiment in using local authority funds for boarding school places also included Andrew Adonis, the current schools minister.

Mr Morrison, whose office overlooks the media land of Soho, now chairs the Royal Wanstead Children's Foundation, which continues to fund boarding school places for disadvantaged children.

Since his schooldays, the overall number of children in boarding schools has declined rapidly - falling by about half in the last couple of decades to about 70,000.

'Degree of danger'

But Mr Morrison believes that the need for supported places is greater than ever before - and that the few hundred places funded by the charitable foundation are only a "drop in the ocean".

He wants to have 2,000 boarding school places for disadvantaged pupils - saying that it would cost the government in the region of £20m. But this could provide a lifeline for children trapped in unhappy home lives.

"Many of the children we're helping are in some degree of danger - they need a break from those pressures and the chance to grow up as children.

"We're talking about children who have been subjected to the depths of misery and abuse and have felt a lot of menace and disruption in their lives. They do appreciate the contrast - it's their golden opportunity."

Although he says there are criticisms that this is breaking up a family, the reality can be that these children have little chance of a "normal" home life.

Image problem

"It might be better to grow up in your home with your family, but we're talking about children for whom that's a pipe dream, children who are scared out of their wits, whose parents can't look after themselves, let alone anyone else."

But he says that there is still a resistance to seeing boarding school as an alternative.

There is an image problem, he says - with negative associations with public-school elitism and children being kept in bleak conditions. The idea of boarding seems to raise class hackles.

"There are still images of Tom Brown's Schooldays, whereas these days you're talking about schools with swimming pools, gyms and computer games.

"There are very high levels of pastoral care for the needs of these children."

He says that he identifies with children who are now facing difficulties - and his work for the foundation is a way of paying back.

"When you see children who are like you were, you have an empathy, you feel as though you understand what they can do.

"I can see myself in a lot of their faces."