Boarding school trauma at the heart of Wicked

Once we’ve romanticised the story, there seems no need to worry

Image from NBC Insider

I am writing this piece in a landmark week for the holiday blockbuster Wicked. It hits the streaming platforms having already grossed more in cinemas than any other film version of a stage production. The total, apparently, exceeds £500 million. Yes, that’s even more than Mama Mia! The film is en route to becoming a classic, a story that will carry lasting meaning for Anglo-American culture.

That makes this the perfect time to reflect on a set of questions bubbling underneath the surface, which haven’t yet received much attention in online discussions. They relate to the educational context within which the story takes place. The production team has been clear that Wicked is not the next Harry Potter. It is especially not based in a boarding school setting. I’m not so sure.

Maybe that was true when the story was first published as a book, with the reader left to imagine the setting from words on the page. However, this re-telling from Universal Pictures has shifted the story’s tone. I think we are witnessing a boarding school community in action, and I think it matters that we recognise that. A growing number of boarding school survivors are working to get us to understand the complex emotional dynamics of these institutions. They want us to stop believing in the romantic myths we have told ourselves about them in the past. I would like the voices of those survivors to be heard more widely.

Some readers may be wondering whether I’ve pushed my Fierce Curiosity project a bit too far this time. Wicked is a holiday film. It’s entertainment. It doesn’t seem equivalent to serious topics I have explored elsewhere, like children’s hospitals and chimney sweeps and corporal punishment. I disagree. Classic stories matter. They tell us something of who we are, as a society. They seep into our ideas about how we adults should treat young people. They slip dreams into the minds of our children.

Stories are the fabric from which human lives are fashioned. That makes them an excellent focus for a bit of Fierce Curiosity.

Re-telling stories

For anyone who remains unacquainted with the sensation that is Wicked, let me explain that it is a re-telling of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, first published in 1900. Actually, that’s not quite correct. Wicked is a ‘pre-telling’ of that story. We learn how the Wicked Witch of the West came to be wicked – and we end up asking ourselves whether that’s a fair description of her true nature. The story of Wicked has gone from book in 1995, to Broadway stage in 2003, and now to big screen splendour in 2024. Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande give grand performances in the lead roles of Elphaba and Galinda, as we witness the two characters negotiate the tricky pathways toward friendship and adulthood.

There will also be individuals reading this piece who are unacquainted with the vociferous debate that now exists about boarding school harms. Thirty years ago, therapist Nick Duffell introduced what was then a provocative idea about the emotional consequences of being forced to grow up in an academic institution. His was a lonely voice, despite his 1994 book and television programme, both titled The Making of Them. Not any longer. In the three decades since, a movement has grown up, full of people who want to talk about the long-term damage inflicted by this form of ‘education’.

Those courageous individuals have undertaken all sorts of action to bring awareness to the public and support to their fellow survivors. Here is a brief list of some of them.¹

• Charles Spencer’s book A Very Private School was one of the most anticipated memoirs of 2024. On the very first page, he declares, as a member of the British nobility, that these institutions “are built on a lie…of the cock-and-bull notion that children are better under its roof rather than living as nature intended, with our families”.

• Isobel Ross’ book, Almost Boys, published also in 2024, affirms Spencer’s contentions, even though she is focusing on a very different type of establishment. She tells the story of the co-educational school she attended in the 1960s, designed to serve middle-class children from professional families. Ross’ analysis reveals troubling consequences that follow from leaving vulnerable boys and girls to mature together in unsupervised and unsupported circumstances.

• Charlotte Beal reminds us that these concerns are not historic. “Every September, more than 10,000 children become boarders. They face the same shock, disappointment and loss as thousands before them.”

• Nicky Moxey’s edited collection Worlds Away from Home, due out in February 2025, examines the loneliness felt by children and young people arriving at school from international and expatriate families. She points out that the proportion of overseas students in British schools is rapidly climbing, heading toward 40%. She thinks this shift places new responsibilities on school leadership teams.

• Richard Beard’s book Sad Little Men, published in 2022, uses his own boarding story as a lens for making sense of incompetencies displayed by politicians such as Boris Johnson and David Cameron. “Boarding school gives you extensive training in dissembling and putting up a front.”

• Bear Grylls, having gained a reputation as celebrity adventurer, has shared that he found adjusting to life in the specialist SAS military forces to be reminiscent of learning to cope at boarding school at the age of 8. “You develop survival mechanisms to deal with the upset.”

• Joanna Brittan is a long-time campaigner against early boarding and an advocate of mandatory reporting for child sexual abuse. She has been very active in speaking out about child sex trafficking. When Mohamed al Fayed’s predatory activities at Harrods were revealed via media coverage in September 2024, Joanna highlighted links with girls at nearby boarding schools. She asks why the media and police have been reluctant to investigate these connections, given their willingness to expose other aspects of his abuse.

• Giles Moffat has become an unexpected activist, campaigning for prosecution of the teachers who abused him and his classmates during their years at Edinburgh Academy in the 1970s and 1980s. The treatment to which they were subjected is nothing short of horrific.

• Tom Perry, who was the first complainant in the Caldicott School abuse investigation, has gone on to found the pressure group Mandate Now. It calls on the government to introduce a law requiring staff working in regulated activities to report any suspected or known child sexual abuse to the local authority. His efforts have proved to be frustratingly unsuccessful, since most people are surprised to discover this legal requirement is not already in place.

• Chris Braitch has chosen to set up a new online support network for survivors, offering connection groups, learning resources and subsidised therapy. Its title ‘Seen & Heard’ addresses the silencing that occurs in the lives of all boarders.

• Piers Cross and colleagues have spent the past two years gathering material for a documentary film, now expected for release in 2025. It includes commentary from survivors, archive footage of politicians, and insights from leading trauma theorists including Joy Schaverien, Nick Duffell and Gabor Maté.

These are but a few of the many people urging our society to craft a new narrative around boarding school. They want to untangle the dysfunctional notions about independence and resilience and ‘character’ that continue to circulate. They want recognition of the ways in which Britain’s power structures are closely aligned with educational practices intentionally designed to inflict emotional hardship during childhood. They want teachers and administrators and marketing managers and journalists and politicians and most of all parents to stop and look more closely at the truths of children’s psychological experiences.

These campaigners know their message is not a popular one, and they are used to being met with resistance. I think Wicked, for all its catchy songs and entertaining intentions, is likely to strengthen that resistance. We may not even notice that’s happening, since the movie is not framed as a boarding school story. That is precisely why I wanted to write about it.

But isn’t Wicked based in a university?

The author of Wicked, Gregory Maguire, has insisted that his story should not be seen as an alternative to Harry Potter. While both sets of students may have an interest in magic, his aren’t attending Hogwarts. They are enrolled at the University of Shiz, the preeminent college within the land of Oz. Think Harvard or Oxford or Yale or Cambridge. Think “grand old institution of higher learning”.² That’s the kind of place Shiz is.

Maguire points out that Wicked was published in 1995 and Harry Potter came afterward in 1997. His fictional vision could not possibly be derivative. Nor is Shiz intended to echo Malory Towers or St Clare’s or Greyfriars School or any of the boarding school archetypes passed down to us through children’s literature. The University of Shiz, as imagined by Maguire, aims to depict “the Edwardian and Bloomsbury [collegiate] life of pre- and post-WWI Britain”. He was inspired in its aesthetics by the work of writers such as Evelyn Waugh and E. M. Forster and Dorothy Sayers and Virginia Woolf. Maguire wanted his educational portrait to “be familiar enough to be welcoming to readers but distinct enough to be recognizable on its own merits”.

Except, except… when Universal Pictures tells the story of Wicked, it doesn’t look like a university. Instead, it looks like…a British boarding school -- an elite one, where well-off parents can pay the fees and scholarships are probably available to the scruffier, less polished Munchkins. The movie is stuffed full of boarding school motifs. Here’s a list of some of them:

• We’re situated in a country house estate, with a courtyard and prominent front gates.

• The surrounding grounds contain lush forests and fields, with plenty of space for horse riding.

• Separation from parents needs to be managed, both at the gates during parting and later in letters home.

• The student body is attired in matching uniforms – jackets, pocket insignias, bow ties and even short trousers for some of the rumpled Munchkin boys.

• Trunks feature prominently.

• Academic study takes place in old-fashioned, individual wooden desks.

• Sports lessons matter.

• Meals are communal, consumed in formal dress.

• Peers bully one another, forming cliques and inflicting humiliation on the outcasts.

• Outcasts, like Elphaba, understand that they are expected to endure the bullying with fortitude, expressing no complaint or retaliation.

• An obsequious Head Boy and Head Girl are hard at work: reinforcing institutional hierarchies, overseeing the bullying and, in general, fawning over stylish Galinda.

• The cocky lead male character, Prince Fiyero, has been kicked out of lots of schools before he turns up at Shiz.

• There are no adults available to help the youngsters with their struggles.

• And especially worrying: some of the teachers are mendacious. They groom children for their own purposes.

In the Universal Pictures’ version of Wicked, we are witnessing the pressures faced by teenagers adjusting to boarding school, not those of young adults embarking on university. I say this even in the knowledge that Universal Pictures has designed a website that allows fans to complete their own ‘application’ for ‘enrolment’ at Shiz University. The hype is congenial and witty – and distracting enough that we are likely to miss many of the valuable, if discomforting, insights the movie has to offer.

Emotional dynamics: Where the harms occur

What kinds of problematic emotional dynamics arise within boarding school contexts? What painful memories do children tend to carry with them into adulthood, and which ones do they repress? How do therapists explain these distorted dynamics?

Wicked touches on very real dilemmas encountered by boarders, but it does so in such a fleeting way that it is easy to miss the significance of these moments. As viewers, we are wrapped in cinematic cotton wool, protected from having to think about the real-life pain of real-life children. This takes us straight into the territory of Fierce Curiosity. Human beings love narratives framed in this way. They offer the comfort of denial. But adult denial doesn’t help struggling children. What might we see if we chose to look more closely?

Here are four dynamics that feature in the movie Wicked and also in contemporary analyses of boarding school impacts.

Parental separation

All children who head off to residential institutions, whether university or boarding school, face the moment of parting from their parents. The emotional consequences when you are 18, though, differ considerably from those at 16 or 11 or 8 or 6 years old. Theorist Joy Schaverien sees separation from parents as so fundamental to relational functioning, especially at younger ages, that it constitutes one of the core risks of her four-part ABCD model. A = Abandonment.

Wicked shines a light on this dynamic, but it passes on almost instanteously. Galinda remarks as she turns away from her parents, “They’re going to miss me so much.” Munchkin Boq replies in contrast that “my parents don’t even know I left”. The story races on.

The recollections of real-life partings are much more troubling. Bear Grylls recalls crying, as an 8-year-old, watching his parents drive away as they, too, “bawled their eyes out”. He wondered “what part of nature thinks this is a good idea”. Alex Renton recounts stories of children who were physically forced from their parents’ car, “their fingers levered off the headrest one by one”. Charles Spencer describes hearing his father say to the matron, during the brief time it took to deposit his 8-year-old son at his new prep school, that “Charles has never spent a night away from home on his own before”. His misplaced hope was that this information would garner help for Charles later that evening, as he prepared for bed in his strange new surroundings. Ian McEwan chose, in his 2022 novel Lessons, to place the parting of 11-year-old Roland in a parking lot for coaches, thereby saving the parents the bother of travelling all the way to the school grounds. Roland is already on the bus before he realises other children are getting “noisy hugs” from their parents, and it is too late for him to go back to get one from his mother. MumsNet, the digital support network for parents, regularly features discussions in which mums ask other mums for advice on how to handle telephone calls from their pleading children who are not adjusting to the boarding environment. Some commentators recommend going to “fetch” the child; others suggest negotiating a “trial period” of up to a year.

Partings and reunions deliver lessons in trust. The discoveries a child makes about the emotional trustworthiness of his or her parents are stored in their biology. That makes it inevitable that these lessons will play a role in future relationships. That is the central insight of Attachment Theory. What would happen if more boarding schools understood this science and used it as the basis of advice they offer to parents?

Rising above the pain

Children sent to boarding school are told that it is a privilege, that it will be good fun, that it will be the making of them, that their parents have saved to afford them this advantage. This creates what psychologists call a ‘double bind’. The child can’t express discontent, as that risks upsetting or disappointing their parents. They wonder if maybe there’s even something wrong with them, if they aren’t enjoying this opportunity their parent worked hard to make possible. If you can’t be honest with your parents about your pain and you are ashamed of feeling it in the first place, then the next best thing to do is bury it. Move on. Get over it. Concentrate not on what you feel, but on what your parents feel.

That’s exactly what Galinda does. As she and Elphaba settle down into school life, thrown uncomfortably together in their dormitory room, we witness Galinda writing a letter home to her parents. She sings: “There’s been some confusion over rooming here at Shiz. But of course I’ll rise above it, because I know that’s how you’d want me to respond.” Perfect. Push down the discomfort. Make them proud. In fact, turn your ability to repress feelings on this occasion into a general strategy for dealing with all uncomfortable feelings. Once a child has set off down this path, they are on their way to acquiring what theorist Nick Duffell calls a ‘strategic survival personality’.

Charles Spencer describes the double bind perfectly: “I felt it somehow my duty to my father to pretend that things at school were all right: to have done otherwise would have upset him. I didn’t want to disappoint him.” Fraser Harrison recollects the same dilemma in his 1990 autobiography Trivial Disputes:

“My parents had, after all, sent me away from home, which was bad enough; what might they do if I made a fuss? It could only be worse. And anyway, I wanted to please them, not to irritate them… I was frightened of losing their love by telling them how much I needed it.”

Galinda is telling her parents the same set of untruths. She’s reassuring them she will be just fine. It is her duty to save them from worry.

The trunk

One of the most symbolic images for boarding school survivors is that of the trunk. It encapsulates the inescapable pain of packing, preparing, parting. It epitomises the shock of a life divided, apportioned between two places, between two selves.

The trunk is so emblematic of these feelings that therapist Thurstine Basset used it as the cover of his 2016 book Trauma, Abandonment and Privilege. Images of the trunk also dominate in the opening scenes of Nick Duffell’s 1994 film The Making of Them. And a trunk sits front and centre in photos offered by Charles Spencer as publicity for his 2024 book. We see Charles as an 8-year-old, dressed in jacket and tie, sitting glumly atop his trunk, the letters of his name neatly stencilled in shiny gold paint. The photo captures the moment just before he and the trunk are both loaded into the car, to be driven off to the dreaded first day at school.

Image from The Guardian

Wicked is full of trunks, many of them Galinda’s, because she brings with her endless outfits and cosmetics. We understand that Galinda has been self-indulgent in taking up too much space in the shared dorm room and that it is her indulgent, loving parents who have created this selfish child. We are encouraged, as viewers, to disdain these character faults, noting that her trunks are a garish pink and adorned with overly glittery, gold Gs. We are allowed to scorn her, just a bit. And we’re also allowed to envy her. Imagine the possibility of having all those possessions, all that confidence, all that attention, all that love! The trunk has been transformed into a symbol of success, rather than sadness. Indeed, the Cambridge Satchel Company is offering the opportunity to live that dream by purchasing a pink trunk just like Galinda’s, which they will ship to you for only £250.00. Overall, the movie’s message is that we are allowed to have fun with all this fluffy pink self-indulgence, because we expect Galinda will eventually discover her nice side and stop being a mean girl. We are released from any moral obligation to wonder whether she might be sad.

In more recent years, the use of trunks in boarding environments has declined. That isn’t surprising, given developments in lightweight, wheeled suitcases. Boarding options have altered too, with weekly and flexi boarding more common and with overseas students, in their increasing numbers, dependent on planes for transport. Perhaps the symbol of the trunk no longer holds the significance it once did? Chris Braitch, founder of the support organisation Seen & Heard, believes that while that may be true for large trunks, the mini-trunk commonly referred to as a ‘tuckbox’ has lost none of its force. This is a sacred space of safety for many students. He describes it this way:

“Your tuckbox housed all the worldly possessions you owned at school. It was your tiny corner of the world, the only place that was secure and your own. It was the only place you could put something safely. I can’t tell you how symbolic my tuckbox remained for me, years after I left school.”

Sure enough, the Cambridge Satchel Company offers Wicked mini-trunks too. They come in a choice of “popular pink”, “Shiz blue” and more traditional black, at a cost of only £215. The lettering on the brass label proudly proclaims them as part of the trendy Wicked range.

What a contrast between these trunks and the one depicted in the animated film made by boarding school survivor Tony Gammidge. The storyline in Norton Grim and Me starts with the haunting story of a child who has been kidnapped and shoved into the boot of a car. Darkness and fear ensue — until it emerges that the child in question is Tony himself. Or almost-Tony. Viewers come to realise it is his trunk that is being described, and that it is being loaded into the boot by his father so that he can be driven to school. This trunk is more than just a box containing Tony’s things. It has become a metaphor for his sense of self. Age 7, he was bundled into a dark new life, having given no consent or agreement to his loving parents, who freely took on the role of kidnappers. Tony Gammidge wants parents to stop being fed fantasy stories about how their child will adjust to abandonment.

Treacherous staff

It seems likely that all children who lodge in British boarding schools will learn that staff can be unreliable. Some children will learn harsher lessons: that staff can sometimes be downright dangerous. Some of them are happy to hurt you.

That’s certainly what Elphaba learns. Madame Morrible, Dean of Sorcery Studies, who enthusiastically pressures her into joining Shiz in the first place, turns out to be treacherous. She has harboured secret reasons for tutoring Elphaba’s nascent magic skills. She hopes this young woman may have the talent needed to read the ancient spells contained in the book of The Grimmerie. If a way can be found to recite those forgotten incantations aloud, then finally all the animals of Oz can be silenced and enslaved. When Elphaba begins to doubt, realising that dubious motives are at work, Madame Morrible attempts to regain control by gaslighting Elphaba: “We are doing this to keep you [and all the people of Oz] safe.”

How many children and young people living in boarding institutions have faced this very same moment, when they realised that an adult whom they had trusted was dangerous? Alex Renton estimates, on the basis of research studies, that at least 6% of children who board are subjected to sexual abuse by staff. Given a current population of around 75,000 UK boarders, that’s a minimum of 4500 children likely to experience sexual abuse by teachers. How many more historic cases does that suggest? And how many cases of physical abuse and neglect can be added, such as the incomprehensibly sadistic acts described by Giles Moffatt, Nicky Campbell and the other men who were once pupils at Edinburgh Academy? It becomes clear how badly institutions have taken care of Britain’s children. Even more unsettling is the realisation that parents are often gullible when entrusting their children to someone else’s care.

Wicked ends with a pulsating sense of possibility and empowerment. The audience knows Elphaba is strong enough to take on the corrupt power structures of Oz. We know her inner child will manifest in moments of uncertainty. The strains of Defying Gravity pour through the cinema speakers, and we leave happy, knowing that Elphaba is capable of being her own heroine.

Our relief at Elphaba’s strength makes it easy to overlook the fact we’ve just witnessed grooming. That’s a surprising word to use in this context. We’re more familiar with its application to child trafficking or drug gangs. But in this holiday entertainment, we have just watched Madam Morrible trick a young woman into trusting her, knowing all the while that she was planning to misuse that trust for her own nefarious purposes. That’s exactly what grooming is.

The movie’s tone of empowerment has led commentators, including People Magazine, to dub it a tale of “girl power”. One might take from it the message that if you stoke up your confidence, you too can challenge warped power structures. Unfortunately, many boarding school campaigners discover that finding their courage is not enough to bring about change. The organisation Mandate Now, for example, points out there is still no legal obligation for suspicions of child sexual abuse to be reported to local authorities. Neither of the Independent Child Abuse Enquiries operating in England or Scotland have implemented satisfactory steps for preventing the abuse of children in future, despite nearly a decade of reporting, at the cost of tens of millions of pounds. Both of these outcomes are contemptible.

It seems we are still not very good, as a society, at taking care of children or at helping those who were misused as children to heal from the wounds that adults inflicted.

Looking toward the future

I’m glad that Universal Pictures has given us a feel-good movie for the holidays. I have no doubt its storyline and its songs will weave their way into our culture, perhaps to the same extent as did Judy Garland’s 1939 performance of Dorothy, walking with her friends down the yellow brick road of Oz.

That is precisely why I don’t want this romanticised tale to obscure our view of reality. Nor do I want it to sit separated from reality. What if this blockbuster wasn’t seen merely as a work of entertaining fiction? What if it became a tool for boosting our courage? What if it helped us walk in Elphaba’s footsteps, facing up to the dangers that our systems allow into the real lives of real children? The lens of Fierce Curiosity is designed to encourage just such a shift in mindset.

1. My apologies go to the many determined individuals who have spoken out about the traumas of boarding school, but whom I have not had enough space to name individually.

2. This quote is taken from Josh Weiss’s 2024 NBC Insider piece on the origins of Shiz University.