Boarding becomes a second landscape of the heart, never replacing home, but expanding it.
National Boarding Week, 10–16 May, is a time for celebration. Each year across Australia, around 200 boarding schools accommodating 23,000 boarders spend a week in festivity, recognising the great qualities that boarding students bring to school communities.
This year’s theme, ‘Echoes From Home’, was particularly poignant as Ascham celebrates our 140th year. Echoes play out in a boarding house through the conversations boarders have with each other and staff, through photos of their siblings and animals pinned on the walls, the warm blankets from grandma on the end of the bed, and the dusty boots traipsed from bag to bag each holiday period. These rituals and echoes have been playing out at the same frequency over the last 100 years, and not just at Ascham but across our continent as boarders make the journey along well-trodden paths to and from boarding schools, often like their parents and their parents before them.
To commemorate this significant year, each boarder was given a small vessel to take home in the holiday break and fill with something that captures the spirit of where they come from. Girls have returned with soil, fleece, shells, wire, dust, cotton, grain, fabric—the list goes on. Each vessel, a glass test tube with cork, will become part of a permanent artwork, installed in Ascham Boarding at the end of 2026.
To mark National Boarding Week, we invited day girls to lunch, held a Boarders’ Bake Sale raising funds for Aussie Helpers, and hosted Ascham Old Girl boarders at our Formal Tuesday Night Dinner. This occasion was the highlight of our week, hearing from past students (from as early as the Class of 1959!) regale us with stories of our boarding past. It was an absolute delight to welcome them back to our community and we can’t wait for the next time they visit.
The Monday of National Boarding Week is always Boarders’ Day. So, on 11 May, we celebrated the wonderful heart of our community with obligatory cupcakes and the once-a-year joy of wearing pajamas to dinner in the Dining Room. But while cupcakes and pjs are important annual rituals of boarding life, it’s always important to reflect on what it truly means to be a boarder…
Practically, boarding is about navigating a very real set of expectations for community living:
- Routine and accountability—where days are structured to help build positive habits.
- Building resilience—emotional literacy to make relationships sustainable, manage conflict and recover from mistakes.
- Embracing skills for living—like being organised and tidy, doing the laundry, practising punctuality. These are not ad hoc lessons, rather core-curriculum for adulthood.
But a boarder graduates with much more than a practical set of skills. In a real sense, their journey is about holding two identities at the same time—one at home and one at School—where they constantly hear the echo of the other.
Boarding life lessons are not taught but rather encountered: Patience is learnt at the breakfast table, empathy is forged in shared tidiness, and responsibility is practised when nobody is watching.
A boarder knows:
- how to carry home within them
- how to stand alone without being lonely
- how to live with difference without fear
- how to be guided without being dependent
- and how to care without being asked.
So this year, I celebrate our amazing boarders, past and present, and all the work their families do to support them on this journey.
By: Allysia Heness-Pugh | Head of Boarding
