Colchester High School

Awful school- not worth the money at all. The teaching varied dramatically, some members of staff were very good others were awful. I remember one teacher who would make people read paragraphs of the text book out loud to the class and then tell us to do the questions at the bottom of the page and that was his teaching done. Certain students would then spend the rest of the lesson harassing other students and making racist comments which the teacher would very obviously just ignore.
Other teachers weren’t fit to teach- many had lack of control of the classroom resulting in constant disruption and bullying to occur. Some teachers acted like children themselves- one in particular had less maturity than us children, purposely making problems out of nothing and then when the students would try to defend themselves for the minor thing they had done ( or in some cases nothing) in a calm manner the teacher would purposely blow it up and then report it to senior staff.
Lack of facilities is shocking. 4 toilet cubicles for all of the upper school girls (yr 7-11) and at certain times of the year you couldn’t use the toilets at all if the hall and drama block were both being used for exams.
There was this culture which ment certain groups of boys were never punished. The teachers would favour them and they would be extremely racist, homophobic, and sexist and teachers would turn a blind eye or implement very little punishment.
Very little pastoral support, they pride themselves in all this positive wellbeing stuff when they don’t care at all, the school breeds an environment of bullying and harassment and then turn a blind eye when they see it happening.

Absolutely awful experience. decent education but SEND support entirely underwhelming full of empty promises and the SENCO always forgetting conversations and promises she made because she has two jobs. The school environment encourages an astonishing amount of bigotry among students by not properly dealing with clear and evidenced instances of racism homophobia and sexual harassment. many instances have been reported to higher staff about the severely toxic rape culture at the school that school support staff either minimise or cover up to a shocking extent. i could go into more details about how students are severely failed by the school and how shocked i am that they haven’t been sued for false advertising for claiming to create children prepared for tomorrow’s world when our PSHE lessons supposedly teaching us about tomorrow’s world consisted of an untrained teacher with a free period annoyedly rushing through a ten minute powerpoint that they themselves don’t understand and telling everyone to just do work for fifty minutes. i can recall one PSHE lesson when we were taught about what she wrongly called cognitive brain therapy and about how under 18s cannot be prescribed antidepressants which is categorically wrong and im shocked this hasnt been rectified. we were also shown a video about homophobia and told to watch the end at home as they couldn’t show us at school but much to the horror of me and my classmates the video showed a graphic depiction of a young child ending her own life. this is not the school you want your children and especially not your daughters in if you have any respect for their wellbeing. find a school that cares