Boarding school - students live during the part of the year - Internat schools

Boarding school is a school in which most or all of the students live during the part of the year that they go to lessons. The word 'boarding' is used in the sense of "bed and board," i.e., lodging and meals. Some boarding schools also have day students who attend the institution by day and return off-campus to their families in the evenings.

Many independent (private) schools are boarding schools. Boarding school pupils (a.k.a. "boarders") normally return home during the school holidays and often weekends, but in some cultures may spend the majority of their childhood and adolescent life away from their families. In the United States, boarding schools comprise various grades, most commonly grades seven or nine through grade twelve—the high school years. Other schools are for younger children, grades two through eight. A military school, or military academy, also features military education and training. Some American boarding schools offer a post-graduate year of study to help students prepare for college entrance, most commonly to assimilate foreign students to American culture and academics before college.

In the former Soviet Union similar schools were introduced; these sometimes are known as Internat-schools (Russian: Школа-интернат) (from Latin: internus). They varied in their organization. Some schools were a type of specialized school with a specific focus in a particular field or fields such as mathematics, physics, language, science, sports, etc. Other schools were associated with orphanages after which all children enrolled in Internat-school automatically. Also, separate boarding schools were established for children with special needs (schools for blind, for deaf and other). General schools offered "extended stay" programs (Russian: Группа продленного дня) featuring cheap meals for children and preventing them from coming home too early before parents were back from work (education in the Soviet Union was free). In post-soviet countries, the concept of boarding school differs from country to country.