St Thomas More Catholic School and Sixth Form College

This school literally caused severe mental health declines for me and my friends. It only truly supports cis straight students (especially boys), even defending them when they do something bigoted or cruel. My group were harassed, called slurs and mocked for years (often in full view of teachers) and they did absolutely nothing despite several instances where we brought this to their attention. We got told they couldn’t do anything because “we can’t change their views/religion” when half of the instigators didn’t care about religion, they were just bigots. There were even times where the instigators got physical (attacking us with footballs and other things) and all that happened was one of them was told to stop (they obviously didn’t).

Even the teachers seem to be in obvious ‘cliques’ that made the school environment even more toxic. I’ve seen a teacher throw a book at a student, another was suspended for a bit for something unsurprising and some would gossip about other teachers in front of students.

The religious aspect of this school is shocking. You claim to hold Catholic/Jesuit values but when people come to the pastoral team for help or compassion, they do nothing. I have had friends in extremely hard situations, tell the school and they got barely any support. I even had to contact them at one point and I just got told to keep coming into school and that I’d be fine. This place cares more about attendance and bringing kids into school than fixing the problem that makes the kid miss school in the first place. Also I once had a teacher pridefully announce their dislike for gay marriage, saying it is invalid because they can’t produce children with another openly mocking trans people, in front of at least 2 trans kids.

Every time lunch or break ended you had to dodge the impending swarm of seagulls that gathered on the playground because of how disgusting it was. Other students were often made to touch half eaten, squashed food that others left behind to put it in the bin just because they happened to walk past it to try and get to class.

Speaking of getting to class, the hallways were horrendous. You had to physically push through crowds of screeching year 7s and 8s to even try to get to your lesson (often being bossed around by the students or even teachers behind you). The corridor that joined the science block and the english block was the worst. The amount of bruises I gained from the walk in my earlier years is ridiculous. Not to mention the death trap that is the science stairs.

Furthermore, the handling of the GCSE’s this year were horrid. Geography and history students were forced into 2-4 hour long useless lectures where the teachers flexed their vocal cords and screamed at kids for misbehaving as if they didn’t just put all the ‘naughty’ and ‘distracting’ kids in the same room for the last couple hours. The amount of students I saw crying in these days were ridiculous. So much unnecessary stress when it’s the school’s fault for cutting the course that we had already learnt for a year instead of one of the ones we hadn’t, forcing us to learn more in a shorter time frame.

The only good thing I could say about this school would be only a few teachers who seemed to genuinely care about the students and how we did, I genuinely wish them the best for their futures.

The school was terrible the teachers speak down to students and are downright rude and selfish. They claim to have a no tolerance policy towards bullied however it stops for a while and then gets worse

Do not go to this school if you are not catholic or if you are lgbtq+. While you can get quite good grades from the school, the environment is very strictly catholic to the point of discrimination. All of my lgbtq+ friends and I felt out of place and underrepresented. We couldn’t get the help we needed surrounding our identities and mental health, and our grades were very often put in a higher importance than our mental health- not to mention that we weren’t believed when we said that we thought we had mental issues. After all of this though, there are a few good teachers. I had a couple of teachers who were a great exception from the school and I cannot wait to see them again at the school reunion. Also, me and my friends did come out with very good grades, even if our mental healths were messed up.

On average, most people wont have a problem at this school. However if you want to do anything to do with creative arts i definitely wouldnt go, its severely underfunded compared to the rest of the school and the quality of the lessons arent the best either. The morality of some teachers is also a bit odd, the number of girls in my year who were innapropriately touched in one way or another by a male student is concerningly high and the teachers never seemed to take it seriously. Also not the best choice for any students with mental health problems as the teachers do not have the proper understanding to help and will usually put grades above the students mental health. Theres also been times in RE lessons when teachers would take students beliefs personally, so if your child isnt catholic this could protentially be a damaging environment for them. I was told once by a teacher that it 'wasnt very good' to be lgbt after struggling with my identity, Said teacher said their reason was because jt was a catholic school. Id say on average the experience at the school was fine but for those who had a bad experience it was a VERY bad experience