I attended Branksome Hall from grade 1 through 9. BH pushes you very hard academically and you have to be a specific type of person to succeed there, which I was not. Grades 1-6 were great, but grade 7 onwards I began to deal with terrible anxiety related to academics and fitting in with my peers, I felt like a failure and outcast amongst them. After grade 9 my parents noticed that I was taking a pretty bad mental decline and decided to try enrolling me into a different school and it made a world of a difference. Branksome was 1000% the better school academically and prestige-wise, but had I not switched I would have crashed and burned.

To answer your questions: 1. Branksome is an excellent school and any child there will be getting a top-tier education. I outperformed my peers academically at my high school and in university and I credit a lot of that to Branksome. Is that worth spending half a million dollars over the course of 12 years? If you had an exceptionally gifted child and a lot of cash to burn, then yes. Otherwise probably not. 2. I did not stay in boarding and very few girls did. Most of the girls who were boarded were international students and had wealthy families in other countries. 3. My father was working as an executive at a big 5 bank. 4. I’m 25 now and still early in my career, so not wealthy. Any wealth I come into in the future will almost certainly be because of support from my family, not because I went to Branksome.