Colchester High School

Our daughter attended CHS for 3 years.

Easter 2024 she became deeply unhappy at the school due to friendship issues, which, despite some effort by the pastoral team, were not solved. Finally, we took the stressful and difficult decision to move our daughter to another local school.
We gave the school around 17 weeks’ notice before the start of the next term, that our daughter would be leaving. Contractually we had to give the school an exact school term’s notice which is around 13 weeks. We were told at the time that we may have to pay for the next term according to the contract as we had not given them an exact term’s notice but that discretion could be shown in such circumstances.
We have been informed by parents that the place that our daughter vacated was filled for the next term. We felt that because we had given them significantly more notice to fill the place in this instance than our contractual obligation, that the school might reasonably decide to show this discretion and not charge us for a place our daughter was not using and that they had filled.

We did not hear anything from anyone at the school until September when the normal term bill was sent without any additional comment. We repeated our request for discretion to be shown to us, and heard nothing again until a threatening letter was sent to us from their Senior Revenue Manager around 4 days before Christmas. This letter ignored our request and asked us to pay up or they would commence legal action against us.
We replied with several reasonable complaints about the school’s conduct and that they had failed to justify why they felt it was reasonable to hold us to the contract for their fee when we had given them more notice than, the contractual 13 week term, to fill the vacated place. To this we received a reply from the Senior Revenue Manager ignoring our questions and again threatening us with legal action.
After taking legal advice ourselves, we wrote a response simply asking them to answer our questions. Their next response ignored our main question about why they felt enforcing this contract on us was fair. The Revenue Manager even tried to suggest, 3 letters in to a dispute about payment, that they had never even received an appeal from us about this payment.
Throughout this whole process the Head has not once reached out to us, either about the fees, to simply obtain feedback on our daughter’s troubles or to express concern and regret that our daughter had become so unhappy at the school – this despite us emailing her directly. Furthermore during the distressing period our daughter was having at school, the Head even chose to get directly involved without first speaking to the pastoral care team to find out the exact situation – she assumed incorrectly our daughter and her friend were excluding a more academic pupil and admonished them instead of the pupil who was in the wrong.

Our local MP and her team were surprised by the school’s stance. So much so they have tried numerous times over the past few months to contact them to express their concerns about their treatment of us. To date, neither the Head nor the Senior Revenue Controller have responded to any of their attempts to contact them.

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