Millais School

I have been at this school long enough to know that the teachers will only treat you well if you are in the top sets you are constantly being pounded with more and more work the amount of people at this school that have mental health issues caused by this school is heartbreaking.

To see what this school does to such young teenage girls is disgusting and will never leave me.

The school don’t care about your mental health they only care about you getting that homework done in time or making sure you attend your class they don’t care if your child is crying, angry, or begging for help they simply don’t care they only care when it is to late.

At this school bullying isn’t handled the way it should be they don’t care and will mostly defend the bully and see why they are acting like they are and blaming the person being bullied for not trying to make peace it is disgusting.

Teachers have even said “your best obviously isn’t good enough” and “your not trying it’s obviously” it’s mentally draining with have adults constantly knock you down this school lies and only cares about looking good.

Also this school is homophobic and doesn’t let your child be themselves.

Don’t send your child here unless you want them to be mentally destroyed.

Shit school, helen lever is ableist btw

Millais is a total disgrace of a school and would never recommend it to anyone. The bullying is disgusting and nothing is done regarding it which significantly has a detrimental impact on the young peoples mental health. The amount of students that self harm as a result of the pressure the school puts them under and not dealing with bullying is disgraceful and could easily be avoided. All the school is interested in is grades and attendance. There have been two extremely traumatic incidents in the last year that have been handled extremely badly. I would never recommend this school.

This school is horrible I’m in year 9 and these have been some of the worst years of my life! With the incidents that have happened in the past year and covid, this school doesn’t care about anyone’s mental health all they care about is your grades, uniform and their reputation. All the mental health talks they’ve had has done nothing all they really say is that you should be sad. The only reason they do them is to make it look like they care for the students. THEY DONT. It’s hell most students I know say they hate it at the school. Please don’t send your child here unless you want them to have a horrible mental health.

Reading all of the reviews here, I am surprised. Millais is an exemplary school. It’s not perfect, but compared to some others…
Millais is a huge school, bigger than Tanbridge I believe, yet despite this I have always loved the atmosphere. Your form tutor, head of year, girls in your band and year group all make you feel a sense of community. In addition you get to know all of the ‘traditions’ of Millais, such as the Christmas teachers’ pantomime (which they still managed to do in 2020 Covid, albeit with some alterations).
The grounds are lovely, since Covid we’ve been spending a lot more time outdoors and there feels as though there is plenty of space despite the huge number of schoolgirls. They are well maintained although recently the amount of litter I’ve seen produced by us is atrocious. We have lots of facilities which are put to great use.
Most teachers are lovely and always happy to help you as long as you ask for it… how can you expect so much extra support if you don’t ask for it, or get your parents to email? The girls are generally nice too, as long as you have a good group of friends. Lessons aren’t usually disrupted. I’ve never dealt with bullying and I’ve never seen any incidents that haven’t been resolved.
The teachers work really hard to provide all sorts of after school activities and support. We have ‘SPAs’ run everyday by subject teachers, so you can go and have some one-to-one support from them. We have all the usual music and sports clubs, as well as some more specialised ones. Debate club is usually very popular. The library is also open every day at break, lunch, before and after school and students are always encouraged to try leadership roles and a variety of extracurriculars and school trips (Covid depending).

One thing I figured after five years of being at this school was that the school only cared about how they looked, not how the students were. They were so strict, always focusing on our skirt lengths and grades, but really lacked in mental health support and failed to take into account how school affects student in terms of stress. A lot do the teachers were very good, but the school itself often felt disorganised and unprepared.

I currently go to millais and am at the end of year 9, however I’ve been here long enough to say that this school does not care about your child’s mental health whatsoever. They try to make it seem like they do but as soon as they’re presented with a student who’s not doing so great mental health wise they have no idea what to do and so just leave it and let them deal with everything themselves. This also goes for bullying, friendship problems, any type of disorder etc. They only care about your grades so as long as your doing well school wise they’re happy.

If you are thinking of sending you child here I would think about that twice before you do, would you rather your child suffered and had a good grade, or had a good grade and was happy? I would try sending your kid to bohunt or tambridge if you live in Horsham.

I attended this school in the 1980s & reading these reviews suggests very little has changed. Bullying was a culture between pupil to pupil & teacher to pupil. The Upper band were given a good education, the lower band barely received an education. When I finished school I had very little understanding of comprehension, essay writing, revision techniques. I self taught myself the basics of education after leaving Millais at 16. I’ve also discovered I’m dyslexic. I did not digest information due to the trauma in my home life. I’ve since been diagnosed with complex PTSD. I was described as daydreaming & withdrawn but no one asked why? I honestly began to believe I had been misplaced in a mainstream school & should be at a special school. Lots of the pupils in the lower band were abused at home, but the school ignored it. Some pupils ran away from home for weeks at a time, the schools response was to severely punish them. I was abused on a daily basis at home, I informed the school & they did nothing despite me being constantly covered in marks & bruises. Some pupils distress was displayed by negative behaviour others total withdrawal. We all were punished. The senior management team were the worst, so harsh displaying no warmth. Despite being called thick I worked really hard after leaving school to become a nurse. However, the level of abuse, lack of self worth & kindness displayed at home & school has resulted in an abusive marriage & poor mental health. I’m now 50 & unable to work despite all my hard work to gain a career. Millais failed me & many of my peers.Reviews suggest you are still failing students. Why has an public enquiry not been held regarding the quality of education & well being support provided by this school?

I started going to Millais back in 2008, and at first was excited to be at an all girl's school. The teachers seemed nice, and I had a few friends; so when things went sour and I started being bullied, I naively thought it'd be easy enough to get support.

The majority of the teachers who knew about it did nothing. And when I got tired of being constantly picked on during form time, I spoke to a senior teacher about moving forms. The result? She told me to try and make friends with my bullies, and reprimanded me when I apparently wasn't making enough of an effort. When speaking to my parents about this, she even accused me of lying about it. I stuck with it and was eventually able to move forms, but not without my form tutor trying to persuade me otherwise because, and I quote, "haven't you thought about how this is going to make us look?" I was just a child who wanted help. Children should feel like they can ask for help and not get guilt tripped for it to try and save face - but as other reviewers have noted, all Millais cares about is its reputation.

While I was now safe during form time, the bullying didn't stop, it just moved into lessons instead. One teacher moved the seating plan around to put me and my other bullied friend further away from them, but he was the only one who bothered. It was made abundantly clear that speaking up about this was merely an inconvenience. After over a year of this, a different senior teacher finally gave these girls a talking to, and for the moment, things got better. I would name her and the maths teacher here to thank them if I could.

These girls for the most part left me alone from here on out, but the general atmosphere of Millais was constantly hostile for the quiet kids, or 'targets.' My friend's form tutor even joined in with the popular girls' mocking from time to time.

There were teachers who very clearly didn't care about helping their pupils understand things, and when we would ask for clarification, they would insult our intelligence. An art teacher told my girlfriend at the time that I was a "bad influence" on her for reasons that were unclear (I was never a badly behaved pupil), only to deny it when asked about it at a parents evening. Other teachers were blatantly homophobic.

I could go on and on. While I was there I developed several mental health issues, one of which was said by multiple therapists to be directly caused by the bullying and general environment at this school. In fact, it's not a stretch to say that I nearly didn't make it through my school years at all, and years later the scars very much remain. What is truly saddening, though, is that from what I've heard and read, years later none of this seems to have changed, not even with a different headteacher.

This is not to say that ALL of the teachers were bad. In fact, I can think of a few who kept me going when things were at their worst. I know that every school has good and bad points, good and bad teachers - but overall, my days at Millais were the worst of my life, and sadly I know for a fact that I'm not alone in this.

Please, please think twice before sending your daughter to this school, especially if she's the quiet & sensitive type. Don't be fooled by the deceptively pristine reputation Millais has.

For the most part I enjoyed my time at Millais school. Some of the staff were nice and majority of the students got along and were okay to each other , obviously not everybody got along and there was the classic attitude you would expect from an all girls school. However I found, and 2 of my other siblings who attended full terms here , found that unless you were very smart and where in the top set , not much care of opportunities were given to you. This meant students who were in the bottom to middle sets had to work twice as hard. In addition I had many friends that should of been given exam arrangements like extra time for dyslexia and other things and kept asking to be seen by Millais but there was just a flat out refusal and now they have gone onto college and been properly diagnosed. Another thing ever since the new ************* took over the standard of new teachers being hired at school was atrocious, towards my later years the new teachers brought on were worse and worse but the worst department was science , all I can say if you take only double science they will give you their worst science teachers that have been there donkeys years and probably shouldn’t be allowed to teach due to how bad they are. However the thing that was the worst at Millais , was the consideration for students mental state and bullying , many people would be denied talking to teachers they were comfortable with and would instead have to talk to special mental well-being people who were atrocious and didn’t really care.

Millais is a good school education wise and they do attempt to help with mental health issues but defo do not try hard enough. They have cancelled every single one of my learning mentor appointments so I am getting worse everyday. The teachers don’t care about my mental health all they care about is that you do the work and the hw!

I think that you should take the reviews with a pinch of salt. What student LOVES school? And how many satisfied students are going to take the time to write a review? I would say that the rating on here is not a clear reflection of the overall student satisfaction.
Having come from an OFSTED rated ‘good’ school to Millais which is ‘excellent’, I think you can definitely tell the difference. I know that some teachers aren’t great, but on the whole they really do care. The staff have adapted to the current COVID situation in the best way they possibly could, although the fact that they make us sit outside is not ideal.
I have never personally experienced bullying and I’ve never really heard of any bad incidents. There is generally a sense of comradeship amongst the girls. I joined Millais a few years ago from a mixed gender school and although everyone told me that girls are catty, my experience hasn’t been any further from the expectation.
As I said before, I think a lot of the teachers really do care. This is evident in the yearly teacher panto that some of the teachers take part in. This year, they recorded a COVID safe talent show for us to watch on the last day before the Christmas holidays.
Yes, there is some room for improvement but I still wholeheartedly recommend Millais as a school. I’m going to miss going here everyday, no matter how much I moan about it right now.

this school is so so bad. They care more about the ones who are well skilled and smart, unlike my daughter who is dyslexic and struggles with keeping up since COVID-19, and the school are absolutely appalling in terms of help with children like mine. Please, DO NOT send your child here!!!

it’s not the best school

Yeah. Pretty good. There’s definitely a community and the teachers are all nice. Some are even friendly. I’ve never been bullied or anything and I’m pretty sure it’s not super common or anything. I would recommend!