{"id":759938,"date":"2026-09-04T17:34:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T17:34:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/759938\/"},"modified":"2026-09-04T17:34:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T17:34:12","slug":"maid-service-cleaners-its-no-wonder-todays-students-arent-self-sufficient","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/759938\/","title":{"rendered":"Maid service? Cleaners? It\u2019s no wonder today\u2019s students aren\u2019t self-sufficient"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thirty years ago this month, I was packed off to boarding school<\/a>. I arrived with a trunk, a tuck box with my initials on it, a set of uniform my mother had spent the best part of a month name-taping (imagine how long my name tape was) and my own maid.<\/p>\n

Only joking. I didn\u2019t have the last one. But rumour had it the anxious parents<\/a> of another girl in my year, from the Gulf<\/a>, had asked if a maid could accompany her and sleep in a nearby room. This request had been denied.<\/p>\n

I was reminded of this while reading a recent article about the rise in wealthy Americans increasingly paying for their children to have laundry services and maids at university. One Yale student admitted that being able to understand a washing machine<\/a> and do the laundry was \u201ca basic skill that everyone should probably know\u201d, but said that his parents didn\u2019t know how to do it either, so how was he expected to? He\u2019d therefore fallen back on the services of a company that would wash and press his smalls for him.<\/p>\n

\u201cPersonal service providers to college students have exploded in the past decade,\u201d read the piece in The Washington Post. \u201cLaundry, dorm cleaning, meal-prep companies target elite schools [universities], where wealthy families will fork over thousands to save their child a few extra hours each week.\u201d<\/p>\n

To be fair, the cleaning policy at British universities varies, and if you have an en-suite bedroom at an Oxford college, you may well have a cleaner every week, whereas at others it may be a cursory vacuum of the communal corridor from time to time. To encourage cleanliness, Bristol University issues its students a 24-page document entitled \u201cStudent cleaning expectations and guidance\u201d, which includes a list of cleaning dos and don\u2019ts. \u201cNever drink or digest any of the cleaning chemicals\/products<\/a>,\u201d is one of these helpful tips. \u201cIf you do…, seek medical assistance immediately.\u201d Hear that? Mind how you go on the Toilet Duck during Fresher\u2019s Week, everyone.<\/p>\n

I went to university in London and was never in halls. Instead, I lived with two others in a basement flat in Brixton where my bedroom carpet flooded every now and then because the macerator in the adjacent bathroom was constantly breaking, causing loo and bath water to seep under the walls and soak my room. My bed base developed a brown tidal mark depending on how bad the latest flooding had been. Good times. I developed a very close relationship with our mop and Hoover as a result. I was certainly doing my own laundry.<\/p>\n

Might boarding-school<\/a> children be better prepared for university than their day-school peers? No sniggering at the back. OK, it wasn\u2019t Borstal, but there was a reasonably spit-spot regime at my school. From the age of 11, we made our beds every day and had to change them every week. Fortunately, we didn\u2019t have to warm anybody\u2019s lavatory seat, as they did at certain boys\u2019 schools, but we also had to change older girls\u2019 beds in a peculiar \u201cpash\u201d system, which I talked about in this week\u2019s episode of The Poshcast<\/a>. We learnt to do our laundry far before those who stay at home might.<\/p>\n

Nobody suffered homesickness when they began at Edinburgh, Leeds, Newcastle or similar because they\u2019d been through all that several years earlier. After a gap year in India, one public-school chap I knew was so determinedly self-sufficient that, when he arrived for his first year at Bristol, he demanded that the bed in his halls be removed from his room in order that he could sleep on his roll-up mat (although I believe this lasted all of two or three weeks before he asked for the bed to be put back).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Thirty years ago this month, I was packed off to boarding school. I arrived with a trunk, a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":759939,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[250963,5337,2864,59,102,655,44444,2201,250964,250965,56,54,55,4957,157732],"class_list":["post-759938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-boarding-school","tag-comment","tag-family","tag-gb","tag-health","tag-lifestyle","tag-parenthood","tag-parenting","tag-sophia-money-coutts","tag-state-boarding-schools","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-university-of-oxford","tag-us-content"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=759938"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759938\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/759939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=759938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=759938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=759938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}