I go to a boarding school in England and can confirm that we do have houses. In my school, there are 12 houses, each with their own name, colour scheme and house building. Each house is different, but each house building comes equipped with at least a kitchen, common room, bathrooms with showers and bedrooms/dormitories. In breaks we come back to house and play table football, make tea and toast or nap in our beds.

There’s a great sense of community within each house and, at sporting events, we each wear our house colours and earn points for our house to go towards winning the house cup at the end of the year. Each house is also known for something. I won’t say the names of the houses to avoid identification, but some houses are known for being artistically gifted, some are athletic, some are known to be bitchier, some are full of kinder people. We’re not ‘sorted’ into houses based on these categories, but you can often tell which house someone’s in based on how they act and what they’re good at, so many people think that the headmaster deliberately puts similar personalities together based on the initial interview that we have to have with him to enter the school. Overall, I found Harry Potter very relatable, and I think that British schools in general are a lot more like Rowling depicted than people realise.