Systems Mapping

Understanding the Boarding Ecosystem

We have an ongoing stakeholder and systems mapping project which aims to capture the diversity and complexity within the global boarding school system. Systems mapping is invaluable tool for informing a strategic rather than a tactical approach to research and systems change. It is critical to avoid bias in research and listen to all experiences, as well as view the whole picture, and this includes mapping negative issues and emerging reports of harm as well as the perceived benefits of boarding.

We have hosted the range of maps on our members-only forum, to enable free discourse around the many issues that are arising. Already, these iterative, systems maps, co-created with sector experts, have been instrumental in helping us situate this Community of Practice within broader international and global contexts. The mapping has helped us grasp a range of inter-sectoral issues, such as the attributes boarding shares with similar systems such as residential care, social care, and disability provision; that family of origin characteristics may significantly shape experiences and outcomes, and adverse outcomes of an institutionalised childhood may be surprisingly similar even at different ends of the affluence and deprivation spectrum.

The mapping also encouraged us to examine ways in which legacy issues and a reverence for tradition within institutionalised care systems such as boarding can foster hidden power imbalances which discourage scrutiny, and how, in extreme cases, benign or even meritous objectives can subverted to exert societal, religious or cultural control.

Above all, the mapping has informed our Theory of Change and the structure and focus of our three Specialist groups - Latent Effects, Rebalancing Narratives and The Institution.

Mapping is an ongoing process. Members will be invited to contribute to our system mapping at our regular systems and stakeholder mapping events. Meantime the outputs are available in the members-only forum. However, if you are invovled in this sector, and wish to view them, or have something pressing you would like to see added to the systems maps, please email us and we’ll see what we can do.

Next Step:

We will be hosting our next system mapping workshop in early 2026 to deepen this work, this time focusing on stakeholders - that is, mapping every individual, group, party or organisation that holds an interest in a the system we are examining (the boarding institution as a proxy for familial care) or might be affected by the activities of that system.

Professionals who have signed up to the BSR Hub Members-only Forum will automatically be invited, so be sure to sign up if you are interested in joining. Everyone’s opinion is valid. There are no right or wrong answers. We’re just collectively and singly rather well informed about entirely random elements of a very complex picture. Just getting all those gems of wisdom down on one sheet of paper is an amazingly powerful tool for research planning.