Boarding : Welcome to School HouseAt Campbell College, an HMC boys’ day and boarding school of pupils from ages 3 to 18, we aim to promote all personalities, all talents and interests and to inculcate a culture of mutual trust. Academic and vocational study is vitally important to this school and we expect our students to reach for high grades, but Campbell’s view of education celebrates the creative, physical and spiritual as well as the intellectual. Above all, we want our students to leave this school with an assured set of values; we want them to believe that they can make a difference in society; we want boys to leave this school with things that are going to matter to them for the rest of their lives.Boarding has always been central to the life of the College, over the last four years boarding has increased by 50% and the College has invested significantly in fashioning boarding facilities of marked quality. Boarding requires a boy to take responsibility for his own life and to get on with a community of other people. It also provides him with a secure base and a focus of loyalty in a large school as well as an opportunity for exercising responsibility and leadership in a community. Boarders at Campbell have the focussed attention of adults who are committed to a cause. Staff are not there to dictate but to create an environment in which young people will develop themselves. At Campbell boarders learn a level of social skills often far in advance of their years. They learn to mix, to tolerate each other, to appreciate the strengths of someone of a very different nature, to get the best out of each other. It is not, however, just the boarders who benefit from this environment: the whole Campbell community benefits by having manageable numbers of boys from many different countries as part of the school community. Increasingly, schools are required to be more globally minded than in the past and more cosmopolitan. Boys are increasingly aware, in a globalised economy their future competitor is less their fellow Campbellian, rather more the teenager in Delhi or Beijing. To be successful, boys need to understand the cultures with which they come into contact. Campbell is a unique school in the way that it prepares boys for the possibilities of this life, within a fee structure that is accessible to a wide range of parents, on a beautiful 100 acre estate on the island of Ireland. It’s an extraordinary period of academic success for schools in Northern Ireland; it is also an extraordinary time to be young, and Campbell provides an extraordinary full boarding education for boys to the value of £10,951 per annum for EU pupils. |