Scooters for the Upper Sixth, the Dishwasher for Everyone

The sixth-form house, Founders, comes with cooking and laundry. A pupil who joined in autumn 2019 wrote in the school magazine that life there meant fitting washing, cleaning and the dishwasher into the day, and that a tidy room does not stay tidy for long. I have a fourteen-year-old. I could have told her how long.

The eldest has read the Benenden website, which mentions a skills programme covering tenancy agreements, and proposed a deal: Upper Sixth privileges now, starting with a scooter, in exchange for a tenancy agreement. I read his draft. It had a clause about the Wi-Fi password and nothing about the dishwasher.

Even Benenden’s scooter has a jurisdiction. The 2024–25 handbook lets sixth-formers walk to the village shop in twos once signed out, but asks for no scooters or rollerblades on the way. The eldest took this personally, for a boy without a scooter.

The one place a Benenden pupil can own the transport outright is the board game. In 2016 two sixth-formers worked with Winning Moves on an official Benenden Monopoly. Scooters and the school bus replaced the stations, and Chance became Pink Slips and Blue Slips, so you might get “a present in Prayers for your birthday or a detention for a misdemeanour!” The then headmistress, Samantha Price, was grateful not to have decided “which location went on the Old Kent Road spot”.

We found one second-hand for the eldest’s birthday, so he could own the bus at last. He bought both scooters on his first lap and charged me rent every time I passed. I went bankrupt in forty minutes, on the school bus.

It was the most independent he has ever been, and none of it involved the dishwasher.