Leading a Co-Educational Boarding House: Culture, Space, Staffing & Safeguarding

🏷️ From £135
📍 Online
✅ Included in BSA CPD Pass

Course Outline:

Moving from single-sex to co-educational boarding is about much more than putting boys and girls under the same roof. It requires careful thought about culture, leadership, staffing, physical space, safeguarding and the experience of both pupils and staff.

This practical session will explore what it takes to establish and lead a successful co-educational boarding house, drawing on my experience of leading the merger of well-established boys’ and girls’ houses into a single co-educational house, followed by the subsequent move the model to a second house a year later.

Training topics will include:

• What culture do you want to create, and how do you establish shared expectations from the outset?
• How do you bring teams from different houses together and move beyond existing house identities and personalities?
• How do you ensure that shared language, values and expectations underpin the new culture?
• How can boarding spaces be designed or adapted cost-effectively to create appropriate separation, privacy and security while maximising capacity?
• What practical systems and tools can be used to manage access, separation and safeguarding?
• How do you identify and mitigate the risks that are particular to co-educational boarding?
• How do you approach staffing, including ensuring fairness and appropriate arrangements for male and female residential staff?
• What are the simple, low-cost changes that can make a significant difference?
• How do you communicate the model effectively and give parents confidence in the safety and quality of co-educational boarding?
• What I wish I had known when I started: practical lessons, mistakes and solutions from implementing change in a live boarding environment.

The session will be deliberately practical and reflective, giving delegates ideas, questions and tools that they can take back and apply within their own boarding context.

Learning outcomes:

• Understand the key cultural and organisational considerations when establishing or developing a co-educational boarding house.
• Be able to identify strategies for creating a house culture in which both boys and girls can thrive, with shared values and expectations taking precedence over individual personalities and historic house identities.
• Understand how to create safe, appropriately private spaces for pupils while making effective use of existing accommodation.
• Consider practical approaches to separation, access control, supervision and safeguarding within a co-educational boarding environment.
• Explore strategies for managing and integrating staff teams fairly and effectively.
• Identify ways of communicating the co-educational model to parents and building confidence in its safety and effectiveness.
• Take away practical, cost-effective ideas for addressing common challenges in co-educational boarding.

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This event will be held jointly with: 

Speaker:

Callum Carroll, King’s School Rochester, Head of Classics; Housemaster of School House; Housemaster of Whiston; Pupil Council Coordinator

I am a Member of the Boarding Schools’ Association (MTIOB), a Level 2 Accredited BSA Practitioner and Head of Boarding, with five years’ experience working in boarding, and 9 years working within a boarding school. I have also served as a Day Housemaster for 3 Years, and I am our DDSL for Boarding. My experience includes three years working within a boys’ boarding house while working closely alongside girls’ boarding provision.

Over the past two years, I have led the merger of well-established boys’ and girls’ houses to create a single co-educational boarding house. Following the establishment of the co-educational model, a further decision was taken to bring the houses together, requiring me to rethink how the boarding provision managed transition, physical separation, staffing, supervision and safeguarding across two co-educational houses.