House system
[This paragraph needs citation(s)] In some boarding schools, a primary purpose of the house system is to provide pastoral care to the students.
Separated from parents for long periods, children will rely on the school to fulfil their socio-emotional needs, in addition to meeting their basic physical care.
The smaller within-school structure of the house facilitates this, by promoting personalised care, with more frequent interactions, and lower child-to-adult-carer ratios, than within the wider school.
Similar benefits of closer relationships between teachers and students may occur in day schools that use house systems for this purpose.
One headmaster of an English-style school – Brighton College Bangkok – David Tongue, writing in an editorial,[3] described the team-spirit engendered by school houses this way: "This camaraderie and solidarity is second to none and the benefits of this vertical interaction, where the young look up to the elder and where the elder look out for and support the younger, are profound."
Merit points for behaviour and academic achievement may also be totalled up for comparison between houses.
In boarding schools, the term housemaster or housemistress is the title held by the member of staff responsible for pupils living in a particular house (or dormitory).
In state schools, members of staff are appointed as (or volunteer to become) head of house.
[7] The house system has since featured prominently in thousands of school stories books, with many authors writing a whole series of books such as Chalet School and Malory Towers which have been published around the world and translated into several languages.
[7][8] The Harry Potter books and films (re)popularized this genre, and resulted in unprecedented awareness of British boarding schools (and their house system) in countries where they were previously largely unknown.
[7] The Harry Potter books have updated the boarding school to 21st-century values, for example by depicting mixed-sex education houses.
[9] This forces translators to insert extra explanations in the dialogue, making foreign readers think that the house and boarding systems were a special feature of the fantasy setting rather than a real-world feature which would not need to be explained to a typical British child.
