Board of Boarding Board of Life

  When looking at the modern boarding houses, there is one  day to day issue that for me shine above all others; the mobile phone. When you have prestigious heads calling them those ‘infernal machines’ 1 there can be no doubt that the management of schools, classrooms and boarding houses is now as much about managing the pupils’ addiction to screens as it is their general behaviour and attitudes.   However, the management side of the issue is something that I will leave to SLT members to discuss and plan - it is the mental health and online aspect that I am more concerned with and have seen creeping into the boarding House. When two in five children now feel online anxiety 1 and that 8% feel that they have negative experiences all or most of the time whilst online, there is no doubting that we have an issue. I have even had parents calling me up and asking for advice on managing their son’s phone use. This is clearly a growing epidemic that boarding Houses...

Last week, Matt Haig released his book 'Notes on a nervous Planet'. The book offers his personal advice on dealing with anxiety and depression in today's modern world. Being a huge fan of Matt and his previous books (Humans, How to stop time and Reasons to stay alive) I have quickly devoured this book and wanted to parallel it with my own experiences within teaching teenagers inside a boarding school environment. Matt's 'Reasons To Stay Alive' was a book that I first read before I had any real serious experience of dealing with depression and anxiety within boys. I had witnessed and helped several girls with panic attacks and anxiety issues but boys were always thought to be exempt from these issues (how wrong could we be). Matt outlines his story of dealing with his own path of depression, anxiety and ultimately a near suicidal experience in Ibiza. 'Reasons To Stay Alive' is his own personal account whereas 'Notes On A Nervous Planet' is a ...

A question that I have been posing myself for some time now is 'why do boys self harm? '. Having never had a self harming thought in my life apart from maybe 'I wonder what it feels like to touch that electric sheep fence?', I have found this question one of the more difficult ones to get my head around as a Housemaster of Boys' Boarding Houses. Some of this article I shall be basing on academic evidence and some other areas will be my own personal experience of working within a boarding House and the ideas that I have ascertained from speaking pastorally to boys during my 15 years of teaching . 13 Reasons Why has been a phenomenon on Netflix. The first series saw an increase in boys asking me questions about mental health and actively encouraged a few boys to speak out and avoid any depression that they may or may not have been heading towards. The first series began a positive conversation within my boarding House and I was not one of the sceptics that saw it...

On the day that the Chair of the Independent School's Council has stated that the best GCSE grades do not go to merely the brightest, they go to the ones t hat work the hardest , is there a better time to look at the idea of grit, perseverance and resilience? I am currently reading Angela Duckworth's book entitled 'grit'. She is a former teacher, turned consultant, turned psychologist. In the book, she explains her fascination with the idea that hard work, passion and perseverance are more important that just 'talent' alone. Duckworth states that we, as humans, have a fascination with 'talent' yet often fail to see hard work and perseverance as a talent in itself. Barnaby Lenon today says that pupils that work for 7 hours per day should see a real improvement in exam results on the back of the productive work that they put in over the next 2 and a half weeks. I usually suggest 6 hours for pupils broken into two hour chunks but this still follows ...