Spectator Life

Lancing College, West Sussex Lancing is a public boarding school for children aged 13 to 18 in West Sussex. Set within the South Downs National Park, it offers an open-air theatre, a state-of-the-art music school, an equestrian centre and even the tallest school chapel in the world. As impressive as its facilities, though, are its alumni: Evelyn Waugh, Sir David Hare and Lord (Stephen) Green to name but a few. Nowadays, many students at the college – where fees start from £12,602 – come from its sister preparatory schools in Hove and Worthing. Also arriving this month is a new headteacher, Dr Scott Crawford, who will replace Dominic Oliver after 11 years.

‘Always keep a-hold of nurse/ For fear of finding something worse,’ warned Hilaire Belloc in his poem ‘Jim’, about a little boy who ran away and got eaten by a lion. These days, Jim would be lucky to have a nanny at all given their exorbitant cost. Recent figures released by the nanny payroll provider Nannytax show that the average salary in London has risen to more than £50,000 as pushy parents demand ‘additional services’ such as training in autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and special educational needs (SEN). A far cry from Sebastian Flyte’s Nanny Hawkins in Brideshead Revisited, the new breed of ‘hybrid nannies’ can command up to a 20 per cent salary premium by catering to the growing number of families who now require SEN expertise.

Back in July 2009, at my baby shower, someone kindly gave me a little book on the benefits of having twins. Apart from the swollen ankles and the enormous bump I was carrying, I already felt pretty blessed that, at 35, I was only going to have to do the whole pregnancy thing once. I like efficiency and this route to procreation was right up my street – not to mention the fact that I only had to give up cigarettes, Brie de Meaux, gin and chardonnay for a single period of nine months. But I hoped there would be some other benefits as I was starting to realise that, with two newborns to prepare for and no hand-me-downs coming our way, twins came with challenges of their own. I quickly scanned through the book; it was very short. Three things stood out.

‘Before you ask, Mummy, the answer is no.’ While this could be any number of conversations that I have with my seven-year-old daughter, this one has a particular tang. It is the thrice-annual bargaining round that I do in the run-up to any school holiday in which I try to get her to go to a kids’ camp. An executive at Goldman Sachs in equity sales does not work as hard as I do to seal the deal – but I fail every time.  For a brief, prelapsarian period when she was five and more biddable, I had some success. I managed to get her into all manner of summer holiday camps in Oxfordshire: activity camp, Shakespeare camp, tennis camp, even God camp. You name it, I signed her up. Sure, we had some argy-bargy at the moment of drop-off, but in she went.

There are three little words that strike horror into the heart of every parent of school-age children. They are the words that cause you to break out in a cold sweat or let out a moan in your sleep in the dead of night – even in the middle of winter. They are ‘school summer holidays’. Hear those three words and you may very well envisage jubilant children spewing from the school gates and then remember the dim, distant sun-kissed summers of your own youth. But mention them within earshot of a parent of appropriately aged offspring and you’ll see the light go out in their eyes. Oh yes, the kids are happy – just like the waving teachers who weep with joy to see their charges depart. But now it’s time for the parents to weep.

My younger daughter finished prep school last week. These years are often billed as the best of one’s life. Indeed, I know the most charming 18-year-old whose pleasingly unfashionable dream is to teach at his old prep school – such were the halcyon times he enjoyed there. At my daughter’s leavers’ assembly, I shed a few tears – as did she, since she’s been exceptionally happy there since she was two years old. There hasn’t been a single day when she hasn’t wanted to go in. She’s had some inspirational teachers, and the occasionally eccentric nature of the educational offering has really suited her. (Another reason I cried was because I’m a sucker for anything remotely mawkish, so a group of kids warbling the chorus of ‘Time to Say Goodbye’ is catnip.

Ávila, Spain At school I wasn’t much good at anything – until, that is, I had the good fortune to land in Mr Hodges’s French set. It wasn’t just the ten words of vocabulary and the irregular verb we learnt every day, it was the whole structured Hodges approach which gave me confidence, showing how the apparently unmanageable job of learning a language could be broken down into small, achievable tasks. Since Mr H also taught Spanish O-level, when the time came I opted for that rather than German. The scenes of Spanish life in the textbook fascinated me; they were only black and white line drawings but they promised something romantic that I knew I’d never find in cold, wet 1970s Birmingham. I pored over those pictures.

Nothing in life prepares you for the school run. In theory, on paper, it ought to be idyllic. What could be better than feeding a nutritious breakfast to your nine- and five-year-old, before scrubbing their cherubic upturned faces and combing down their buoyant hair, and then helping them get dressed and out to the car for the short drive to school, whereupon they can skip through the gates happily to education-land? Instead, it’s a Thursday morning – by which point the week has taken its toll – and you find yourself shouting ‘GET YOUR SHOES ON’ for the 30th time at the sort of level that would be a serious breach of health and safety regulations were the noise emanating from a hairdryer or lawnmower.  But your children aren’t wearing ear protection.

Many years ago, long before Covid and when Donald Trump was still a property magnate-cum-reality TV star, I crossed the pond to study for my PhD at Penn. Not Penn State, which everyone seems to have heard of because of some obscure sex scandal; not Princeton, basking in its Michelle Obama afterglow; but Penn. It’s in the Ivy League, before you crinkle your nose: it has Gothic Revival buildings, frat houses, jocks, and Americans talk endlessly about how old it is. Some call it the Jewish Ivy, thanks to its high proportion of JAPs – Jewish American Princesses – who went there after a Gossip Girl existence at private school in New York. I wasn’t sure what to call it, but I was young, impressionable and ready to wear the Penn merch and Nikes at the drop of a baseball cap.

My daughter has asked for my advice about what to study at university. Yeah right. She’d rather eat her own hoodie. But I’m going to give it anyway. She is wavering between history and English. Do both, I say. But not many universities offer a joint honours degree, and her (otherwise excellent) teachers seem to think that it is better to focus on one subject, to demonstrate laser-like commitment to your chosen path. I see specialisation as the enemy of the humanities. Everyone should study at least two of these ‘disciplines’ – which of course overlap with each other. In a way, Classics gets it right, for it mixes literary criticism with history and philosophy, and other things too – politics, history of art. I studied English. I loved it, at first.

I can’t remember the exact date of my departure from university. It was sometime in the summer of 2021. My flatmates and I packed up our things, had a sombre pint at the pub, hugged, and then went our separate ways. I boarded the train at Bristol Temple Meads with a degree in English and Philosophy and no feasible job prospects. I was also broke. Three years had come to a precipitous end, and it was time to move back home. I was worried about my future. The thought of becoming a bum terrified me: the sort of graduate who day drinks, listens to Limp Bizkit, starts a true crime podcast from his bedroom, and screams at his mother for not washing his pants. But I returned home in spite of my fears, largely for one reason: I couldn’t bear the thought of becoming a university hanger-on.

There is a story in private education circles of an apoplectic father who raged to the bursar that he was unable to find a prep school for his son ‘without central-heating’. It is probably apocryphal, but it reminds us of the mad heights to which some private schools have stretched: rowing lakes, glitzy IT centres, West End-style theatres and Olympic-sized swimming pools, no doubt necessary for storing the ever-growing associated fees.  My small Dorset school, where it was not uncommon in winter for the inkwells to freeze over, produced two Dames of the British Empire It wasn’t always this way.

As the first term of the school year draws to a close, pupils’ reports will soon be landing, encrypted and password-protected, on parents’ smartphones. But once they’ve finally managed to open them to find how little Amelia or Noah has been performing, there will be another code for them to crack: what on earth the teachers are actually trying to say about their child. These days, reports tend to be written with the help of AI software or templates, which makes it impossible to work out how your child is really doing. In our super-sensitive age, many schools now play it safe by couching all comments as positives, and only using approved adjectives from word banks and drop-down menus.