By Lucy Carroll
Amelia Croker was on the cusp of starting year 11 when she moved from her local public high school just north of Goulburn to boarding at a private girls school in Sydney’s inner west.
“I went from a school of 200 kids to one with more than 1000 – it was a bit of a shock,” says Croker, who completed her HSC at St Scholastica’s College in Glebe two years ago.
“I knew I would end up at boarding school. It’s quite common if you’re from the country to board for only [senior years] because it’s a big financial commitment. It’s also harder when you’re very young,” she explains.
Amelia Croker boarded at St Scholastica’s College in Glebe for year 11 and 12. She is now a supervisor at the boarding house while she studies law at UTS.Credit: Wolter Peeters
Concern about HSC subject choices at her local high school was another reason for the switch to boarding, she says.
When she started in year 7 at Crookwell High, there were about 75 students in her year group, but by year 11 that had dropped to fewer than 20 students. “The teachers were dedicated, they would have wanted to offer more subjects, but they didn’t have the student numbers.”
Across NSW, boarding school enrolments are slowly recovering after falling in the years before and during the pandemic. There were about 6350 boarders in NSW last year, up from about 5900 in 2021 and 2022, Australian Boarding Schools Association (ABSA) data shows.
Principals say international student enrolments are still below pre-pandemic levels, with about 425 in NSW boarding schools last year. Nationally, international boarders are at 1556, down by a third from five years ago.
ABSA chief executive Richard Stokes says he is watching for any knock-on effect from the 20 per cent VAT sales tax added to school fees in England, and if price hikes there mean more overseas families consider Australian schools.
“The greatest challenge for boarding is cost,” he says. There are 46 boarding schools in NSW; many are elite private schools that cost upwards of $81,000 a year for boarding and tuition, including King’s, Knox Grammar and Kambala.
Public boarding schools charge about $13,500 a year, while some regional Catholic schools charge about $30,000.
At St Joseph’s College in Hunters Hill, headmaster Michael Blake said the school has seen a rise in post-pandemic boarding enrolments, driven by families from the Southern Highlands, Newcastle and the Hunter Valley.
The college has set up a bus service to the Southern Highlands to shuttle weekly boarding students back to campus on Sunday evenings.
“Demand from regions within 90 minutes’ drive of the city reflects many families moving after the pandemic,” he said. This year about half of the boys at the school are boarders, Blake says, after several years of the boarding cohort dipping below 50 per cent of the total enrolment.
“Day students can also stay through until 8pm for after-school sport, dinner and a few hours of supervised study where they don’t have their phones with them. It means phones are away and the constant pinging isn’t distracting them. A lot of parents comment on that: they like that structure.”
The number of boarders at St Joseph’s starts at about 40 students in year 7, but by year 12 that grows to around 180.
Josh Mulcahy, a year 9 boarding student at St Joseph’s College in Hunters Hill.Credit: Wolter Peeters
Year 9 boarding student Josh Mulcahy is among the 620 boarders at St Joseph’s this year. Moving to the school was “daunting”, but he says he quickly adjusted to the boarding routine.
“The thing that’s helped me is having study sessions at night, and I like getting up early for training,” he says. “About half the weekends in a term I go home, but with Saturday sport and rugby it can be easier to stay.”
Other private boys’ schools such as Riverview and King’s enrol upwards of 300 boarders. At girls schools, including St Scholastica’s, Kambala at Rose Bay and Tara Anglican School for Girls at North Parramatta, boarding enrolments hover around 50 students.
At Kambala, the number of boarders has almost halved in the past decade, and this year the school merged its two boarding houses, Fernbank and Tivoli. Cranbrook’s boarders have also dipped from about 100 to some 75 students over the same period.
Tara principal Adele Ramsay said boarding enrolments had been hit by a loss of international students, but are now stabilising.
Teacher shortages in rural areas and travel time to sports training are among the reasons students from Dubbo and Wagga Wagga choose to board, she says.
At Tara Anglican School for Girls there are about 50 boarding students. The school’s boarding enrolments were affected by a loss in international students in the past few years, says principal Adele Ramsay.Credit: Steven Siewert
“We’re seeing some recovery because parents see boarding as giving a structure and framework that works for teenagers. Even around technology, and students often like the tech rules because they get more sleep,” Ramsay says.
For year 7 to 10 students, laptops and phones are kept in technology cabinets overnight, she says. “The girls have passwords for these cabinets, but they are disabled during sleeping hours as we know the importance of good sleep. It also allows them to decompress from the day.”
“There are also more and more kids who live within two or three hours of the school who go home most weekends, not all weekends, depending on sport.”
The Morning Edition newsletter is our guide to the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up here.