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What Makes Boarding Schools in Australia Special?
Are you a parent with a teenage son or daughter who is about to enter secondary education? You are probably in search of the right school for your child. Are you choosing between regular day schools or boarding schools? And what is the difference between the two?
Let us focus more on boarding schools because these are the less conventional type of schooling between the two and the one parents most likely will find hard to choose. Why? Well, let's start first by explaining what is a day school.
A day school is the regular kind of school we are all very much familiar with. In this system, your child still stays at your home and he just commutes every day to school.
Now boarding schools are different. As the name itself suggests, students live within the school premises for the whole school year. They only go home during vacations and school breaks.
Do any of these words or names sound familiar to you? Hogwarts School of Witchcraft. Gryffindor. Slytherin. Hufflepuff. Ravenclaw.
Of course they are familiar names. They are from the Harry Potter series. You see, the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft is a perfect example, although very fictional, of what boarding schools are. A boarding school is divided into Houses, which in the case of Hogwarts, are Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff, and Ravenclaw. The students are divided to live in each of these houses for the rest of their stay in the school.
Each house is managed by a senior faculty member and assumes the title of housemaster, housemistress or residential advisor depending on the naming tradition of the boarding school. Now each house is usually composed of 50 or less students where they are housed in their own building or living quarters. It is usually forbidden for students to go and visit other houses.
A tutor is also assigned to help the students of each house in these boarding schools with their studies.
Every house is properly taken care of by a matron who serves as the house help. He or she makes sure that the establishment is clean and everything is in perfect working condition.
To further provide discipline and monitoring of these students, a senior student is assigned as a prefect or monitor to oversee his fellow students. He makes sure that none of the students engage in rowdy activities and that they are always behaving properly and focused on their studies.
So why would students study in this kind of school? There are a number of advantages that boarding schools can offer.
By living on their own, students learn to be independent. They learn to discipline themselves so they can study on their own or with their fellow students and at their own specified time.
Students are also properly monitored so they can focus their time only for their studies. Unruly and untoward incidents are also kept at a minimum with this setup.
By comparison, the educational facilities in boarding schools are often superior than those in day schools. The faculty members are also often required to have post graduate degrees and often have double specialties in education.
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