Shropshire Star

On board, but never bored

Girl boarders at Wrekin College have formed their own big, happy family. Ben Bentley hears the secrets of the common room.

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Now the feathers will fly . . . Lucy Barker-Davies, 17, Felicity Sharp, 17 and Charli Roberts, 18, boarders at Wrekin CollegeIt's break time in the boarding school yard, but there's not much sign of the trademark St Trinian's uniform - the dishevelled gymslip or the old school tie fastened about the neck in the fashion of a punk rocker after an accident with a privet hedge.

If Shropshire's Wrekin College in Wellington is anything to go by, in 2007 British boarding schools appear almost devoid of rebels without a course.

Modern boarding life might, on the surface of things, seem a light year from the post-war girl power of all-female schools of the 1950s and early 1960s.

But in Gordon Brown's Britain there are similarities - girls living together away from home and discovering all manner of interesting and stimulating ways of entertaining themselves in the absence of mum and dad.

Wrekin College is one of several boarding schools in Shropshire, a historic seat of learning which can make the casual visitor feel like he or she has just bunked off into the 1880s; in comparison, the heady era of St Trinian's seems thoroughly modern.

It is a mixed school, although individual houses are home to same-sex boarders.

The girls' uniform - navy blazer, ankle-length kilt - could not be further from the racy St Trinian's get-up of short skirts and fishnet stockings. It would be most impractical - one presumes - for dashing around carrying out chores for the likes of dodgy old Flash Harry, played by George Cole in the movies.

Harriet Edwards, 17, and Sophie Sahota, 16Clarkson House is an all-girls house and smells of toast (they all do, I am told). During term-time it is home to 35 pupils who get along as much like sisters as friends, finishing each others' sentences and talking everything from school projects to hair colours.

"I love it, it's like one big sleepover all the time," says 17-year-old Abi Varley as she sinks into one of the sofas alongside a gang of fellow boarders in the common room.

"I'm a forces child so I've always lived away - it makes you very independent."

"It's like one big family," says head of house Charli Roberts, 18, who has been boarding for the last eight years."

Thoroughly modern in an old-fashioned way, boys are allowed into the girls' house - as visitors.

Charli explains: "The guys come round in the evening so we can mix with them - we cannot go to their rooms - and they have to be out of here by 10.15pm. It's a good thing, you have to unwind."

After that it's girl time.

"We have our chats," says Charli's 16-year-old sister, Philly. "About anything - what's gone on during the day, what we did at the weekend."

"We like to eat ice-cream," adds Abi who talks about slobbing out and watching horror movies from under their duvets, and huddling together in the common room during the recent storms.

The pure hell of St Trinian's: the fondly remembered films depict a school closer in atmosphere to a zoo than to the reality of boarding at Wrekin College"We do stuff like singing into the hair brush, have fake tanning sessions in the common room and dye each others' hair."

Talking of which, boarder Jo Holland, from Washington DC, is the girls' unofficial hairdresser. It's all very well having brains, but hair still clearly has an important role to play in a growing girl's palate of free expression.

"I can honestly say I can't remember my natural hair colour," she says. "I've had it bright red, platinum blonde - Mr Berry the housemaster takes the mickey out of me for it, but I don't mind."

The talk continues: of trips to the pub (all legal of course); of capers in the shared sixth-form common room, and of dressing up for various balls and making sure their outfits don't clash.

It's all thoroughly harmless fun. Andy Nicoll, marketing officer for the college and a former boarder herself, fails to find comparison between the pupils of 'modern' boarding with the Little Miss Behaviours of her youth.

"We were always naughty but I could not possibly say what we got up to," she says.

"We used to do quite cheeky stuff. We used to jump out of the windows to get to the boys' house.

With housemaster Phil Berry are Svetlana Busygina, 17, Lucy Watkins, 15 and Abi Varley, 17"We were allowed to go to the wine bar on a Saturday night and I had to have a special letter from my parents to say I was allowed to go, but I didn't always have one and the housemaster used to trawl round and I would always get caught."

In comparison, the current crop of girl boarders are models of impeccable behaviour.

Then again, in the 1950s there weren't things like SATS and performance indicators to worry about; children could be children and schools were places where kings and queens of high jinks got the cane if they stepped out of line.

Times have changed. If girl gangs have come to prominence in more desperate walks of life, groups of girls produced by the county's boarding system seem level-headed and caring.

The girls at Wrekin College say they feel empowered by the boarding-school experience: females aged 13-18 living under one roof as one big family and taking responsibility for one another's actions.

A recent shopping trip to Birmingham would have provided the ideal opportunity for the girls of St Trinian's to get up to mischief - and probably flee the country. But as Andy says: "They all came back, so that was good."

Clarkson housemaster Phil Berry - as in Mr Berry - says he gets it easy because by and large the girls look after each other and sort out any problems between themselves.

Andy adds: "We were far naughtier. We were always fighting each other to do the most outrageous things. We used to order pizzas for teachers, again, again and again.

"Putting washing up liquid in the headteacher's fountain - that's the only thing I can think of that's happened here."

By Ben Bentley