Today's boarding schools are no longer Dickensian visions of cold dormitories, communal showers and bad food. But cappuccino machines and motel-style rooms may not be enough to save a dying institution.

On a recent winter evening, six couples from the rich grazing lands of Victoria's Western District gathered around the dining table at David and Melinda Kininmonth's sheep farm. They had driven from all parts of the region for a winter solstice feast - an annual treat that the Kininmonth family hosts at their remote bluestone farmhouse near Winchelsea.

The dinner was a beloved family custom in a district where wealthier graziers like to embrace the traditions set down by their ancestors. As the guests tucked into marinated roast beef, beans, potato and roasted capsicum washed down by fine red wine, they talked about the issues of the day: their farms, their sheep, their last visit to town. "Then we started talking about our children," recalls Melinda. "And boarding schools."

Boarding schools have been a way of life for the children of Western District farmers for generations - Malcolm Fraser, a former Western District farmer, was once a boarder. Like several of his dinner guests, David Kininmonth had been a boarder at prestigious Geelong Grammar, as had his father and grandfather. But when these boarding school baby boomers, most now in their early forties, started talking about what they would do with their own children, it was clear that a local tradition was about to be broken.

"What we found was that everyone there was looking at different options to boarding schools", recalls Melinda. For some it would require huge personal sacrifice. Several of the couples had decided they would drive their kids up to an hour each way, each day, to school simply to keep them out of boarding. Others planned to discard the old school tie and send them to new local schools in regional towns rather than the established boarding schools in Geelong.

"I feel that you've only got your kids for a short time, they are almost on loan," says Melinda, who plans to drive 60 kilometres twice a day to take her three children to high school rather than have them board. "I think mums are happier commuting with their kids and being involved in their schooling if they have the option."

What unfolded over dinner that night is a trend being observed across the country. Boarding schools - once a rite of passage for the children of parents in the bush, the landed gentry, and the established plutocracy in the cities - are under siege. Faced with the triple whammy of the rural downturn, new parenting philosophies and the bad press associated with bullying and indecent assault scandals like the recent case at Sydney's exclusive Trinity Grammar School, boarding school enrolments are in steep decline.

"The pool of boarders is drying up very quickly," says Linda Vining, director of the Centre for Marketing Schools - an organisation that teaches schools to market themselves - in Sydney. Timothy Hawkes, principal of The King's School in Sydney, the country's oldest boarding school, concurs: "There has been a decline in boarding enrolments and to pretend otherwise is a nonsense," he says.

Between 1990 and 2000 the number of children at Australian boarding schools fell from almost 30,000 to 22,500 - a drop of 25 per cent - while some states such as Victoria and Tasmania have seen declines of up to 32 per cent. This number might have fallen even further in the past few years if not for the hugely popular Harry Potter books, which romanticise the boarding life and are credited with slowing the fall in boarding enrolments in Britain.

When St Patrick's College in Ballarat in central Victoria announced it would close its boarding facilities from the end of next year, it received a stinging rebuke from Sydney Catholic archbishop George Pell, who accused the school of "turning their backs on 100 years of history" Faced with dwindling numbers, the school intends to build a separate facility to accommodate boarders, to be managed by the community.

But St Patrick's is hardly alone. Chevalier College in Bowral, which had 360 boarders in its heyday, and SCEGGS girls school in Sydney, are among many schools now phasing out boarding or transferring their declining numbers of boarders to other schools. "Boarding in Australia has become more of a convenience for a lot of people rather than a necessity," says Father John Mulrooney, headmaster of Chevalier College.

FOR MANY OF THE BABY BOOMER Generation, the news that the sun is setting on the era of the boarding school will be received with barely restrained glee. The public perception of boarding schools in Australia is that they are Dickensian. It conjures visions of long corridors, cold dormitories, bad food and rigid discipline; a loveless environment where bullies rule.

"Boarding school education has this immense, powerful grip on the public's imagination through children's fiction and through adult fiction," says Nicholas Sampson, the British-born principal of Geelong Grammar. "But the image goes back to Tom Brown and before - it is based on a set of archaic constructs." Sampson says the reality these days is quite different, with once stuffy boarding schools trying to turn themselves into motels with everything from cappuccino machines to 24-hour e-mail access in an effort to entice students.

Despite trying to project a softer, more caring image, many boarding schools are being slowly strangled by a cruel confluence of events - some of their own making and others they cannot control. One has been the rural downturn that has hit families who have been the bedrock of the Australian boarding school tradition. Less money on the land means many country parents, who went to boarding school when they were kids, are now struggling to afford a similar education for their own children.

Campbell Nelson, a sheep and crop farmer near Cressy, 70km west of Geelong in Victoria, is one of many on the land who is finding that boarding school fees are beyond reach. "It is a huge burden - a big financial commitment if you do it,' he says. Two of Nelson's three children are in their early teens but, rather than go to boarding school at a joint cost of around $48,000 a year, they take a long daily bus ride to get to school in Geelong.

But the most damaging blow for boarding schools has been inflicted not by the economy but by parents themselves. Put simply, there has been a seismic shift in parental attitudes about being separated from children compared with previous generations.

"More and more parents want to have their children closer to home," says Megan McNicholl, a mother of three who lives on an 8,095ha cattle and wheat property near Roma in south-eastern Queensland. She is also the federal president of the Isolated Children's Parents' Association. "Many of us went to boarding school and never saw our parents, and today's parents know how important it is to be involved with their children when possible."

The isolation of her farm means McNicholl has no choice but to send her three children to boarding school. But she chose a closer one in Toowoomba rather than a more established school in Brisbane because it means she can drive to see her children more often. Even so, McNicholl says her husband found it difficult to accept the notion of boarding school. "He's a city boy and he hates the idea of boarding school for the kids. It was terribly hard for him to send the kids away - he never realised how traumatic it would be as a father to send them away. He never really came to terms with it."

Former deputy prime minister Tim Fischer, who had a lonely existence as a child boarder at Melbourne's Xavier College, is one of those who says he will try to delay boarding school as long as possible for his two children, Harrison and Dominic, who live on the family farm in south-western NSW. "We are determined that they not go before the age of 12," he says. "We want to keep the family together. Boarding school has advantages but I think it will provide a better foundation for our family by holding them back a bit"

Such parental sentiments are a far cry from a generation ago. "In the past it was assumed that if you sent a boy to boarding school you were good parents," says Brother Laurie Collins, principal at St Patrick's College. "Now in some quarters that is being challenged - some say you are dodging your responsibilities." Collins disagrees with this new attitude.

The debate about whether "good" parents send their kids to boarding school is emotive because many parents in remote areas have no choice. Sampson says there is often an "implicit accusation that parents are abandoning their children" by sending them away for schooling.

Timothy Hawkes of The King's School believes many parents who went to boarding school suffer from a "30-year reality gap" that affects their judgement. Geelong Grammar's Sampson agrees: "We know that one of the problems boarding has is that it is judged by anachronistic standards."

Yet parents might be more inclined to abandon "anachronistic" perceptions if boarding schools did more to stamp out anachronistic behaviour. Nothing has done more to sully the image of boarding schools in the eyes of parents than the recent indecent assault and bullying case at Sydney's Trinity Grammar.

"What happened at Trinity is the sort of thing that will last a generation in the minds of families," says schools marketer Vining. "It has not only impacted on Trinity, it has impacted on all boarding schools around Australia - it makes parents question the quality of care"

A Sydney children's court heard earlier this year how boarders at Trinity were routinely subjected to degrading harassment and bullying. In one instance a 14-year-old boy was grabbed and placed between two bunk beds with his arms and legs bound with school ties. His two attackers, both aged 16, then pulled down his pants, leaving only his boxer shorts on, and held a wooden dildo - so large it was dubbed "The Anaconda" - against his bottom as other boys watched and laughed. No staff were on hand to come to his aid. "Worst of all," Children's Court magistrate John Crawford would later say, "[is that] the offences occurred in an environment where the victims were entitled to feel safe and protected."

The Trinity scandal, along with several other disclosures in recent years of sexual abuse at religious boarding schools, has made parents more reluctant to send their children to board. "Trinity was one school, one incident, one court case, but paedophilia has been unearthed across Australia in many prominent Catholic and Anglican schools," says Vining. "It has made parents anxious about what happens behind the boarding school facade and the glossy brochures."

Hawkes is frustrated by the damage these cases inflict on the image of the majority of boarding schools, which he says are well run and safe. "It needs to be remembered that bad news sells and good news doesn't," he says.

In an effort to restore public confidence, a new regulatory body was established in May to set national standards and accreditation of boarding schools and their staff. The Australian Residential Schools Association - to be chaired by Hawkes - is aimed at "promoting greater professionalism" among boarding staff and to prevent future scandals like those at Trinity.

A similar charter of boarding school standards has been adopted in Britain, stating that children "are not to be hit in anger, deprived of food or drink, locked in a room or be required to wear nightclothes by day as a punishment"

In Australia, new laws have also been introduced requiring all boarding school staff to report suspected cases of physical or mental abuse of a boarder. Hawkes says all staff must now be given a police clearance before being allowed to work with children.

Boarding schools are also trying to reinvent themselves in a softer image. Instead of cavernous dormitories with long rows of beds, more schools are introducing individual motel-style rooms for senior boarders. Another boarding school staple - large communal showers - are on the way out, with privacy now the buzzword for boarding. Tudor House in Moss Vale, NSW - one of the few Australian boarding schools for children as young as seven - last year introduced individual shower cubicles in response to pressure from mothers (and despite opposition from some fathers who saw it as being too soft). Extra heating has also been installed.

Technology is further changing the face of boarding, with e-mail access allowing children to make contact with their parents whenever they want. The once infamous restrictions on telephone calls to parents are largely a thing of the past. Old, grey sick bays have been replaced by air-conditioned, 24-hour healthcare centres painted in bright colours. Even the food - the famously stodgy English menus of bangers and mash and overcooked vegies - are making way for more modern Asian-Australian cuisine. Adelaide's Seymour College, a boarding school for girls, has installed a cappuccino machine in the cafe-style eating house that has replaced the old canteen.

"By far the most significant things boarding schools have done to attract enrolments has been to upgrade the quality of care given to boarders," says Hawkes. "This is reflected in carpets, heating, good quality food, increased privileges, greater access to computers and greater privacy"

Says Vining: "Boarders today have posters of all the latest pop stars, modern music, lots of photos of home, photos of boyfriends and girlfriends, photos of sexy women. There is a much more liberal approach, which reflects the broader liberalisation of the boarding house."

TO COMPENSATE FOR DWINDLING country enrolments, boarding schools are marketing themselves aggressively to working parents in the city. As well as full-time accommodation, most boarding schools now offer day boarding, where a child stays until about 8.30pm each night before going home, and weekly boarding, where the child goes home only on weekends. In many boarding schools, city-based boarders outnumber those from the country; the number of international boarders has also risen.

Boarding schools are trying to present themselves as a protective haven from city life. "City parents face a number of pressures," says Geelong Grammar's Sampson. "Not only the party culture, not only the traditional worries about drink, but also the drug industry and how it preys on the young. For [some], this [boarding school] is a positive choice"

Sampson also cites boarding school as a possible solution to the much publicised academic and social problems facing adolescent boys. "I think you can argue very strongly that boys lack safe anchorage in the cities," he says.

Schools that once had to fend off wannabe boarders now employ marketing agents and spend heavily on advertising. Linda Vining says boarding schools now comprise the biggest part of her schools marketing business. "Five years ago only five per cent of my work was with boarding schools. Today it is 60 per cent."

Despite the trends, Hawkes maintains that the slow death of boarding schools is exaggerated. "There will always be a place for good quality boarding schools in Australia," he says. "The sheer size and unique history of our country will require boarding schools to remain in existence. However, those that survive in the 21st century will be those which meet the academic needs of students but also their social, emotional and spiritual needs"

Hawkes will get no argument from mothers like Melinda Kininmonth at Winchelsea. She has nothing against boarding schools and applauds the efforts to improve them. It's just that Kininmonth is part of a new generation that doesn't want to give up their kids unless they have to. "I don't want to lose my involvement," she says, casting her eyes towards her children. "I want to hang on to my kids for a bit longer."

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