Stour Valley Community School

its ok not alot of teachers are nice

Stour Valley was just very average when I attended- teachers either did little in terms of stopping bad behaviour or too much, giving harsher punishments than what was actually deserved. Older students had the tendency to pick on younger ones and it was rare for anything to be done about it. There was a lot of hateful language used in the corridors and classrooms, especially involving race/ sexuality. Sometimes teachers would snap at students just asking questions in class, which obviously doesn’t feel good when you genuinely don’t understand something. A few people were expelled during my time there, one for bringing a weapon to school. The school also featured on the 2022 Everyone’s Invited list, a list of over 3000 schools in the UK with reports of assault and rape allegations; something to bare in mind and definitely check out if you’re interested. Homework amount was average and most teachers did offer support with it if you needed it, but were lacking in terms of support outside work. However, most of the teachers for my subjects knew what they were doing and were very able in teaching it, with a specific few definitely being the sole reasons I got the qualifications I did. The food is pretty good and there’s a good amount of places to sit at break and lunch, however it gets very cold in the winter and last year they refused to open up the canteen to sit in. I thought this was quite a selfish decision seeing as covid had largely died down, and the students were the only ones who had to stay outside. My PSHE class skipped sex ed and lgbt relationships, two things I felt were crucial to the curriculum at the time. Phones were completely banned, and if a teacher found a phone on you that wasn’t in your bag it would get confiscated (even if you accidentally left it somewhere theyd mark it as being confiscated.) The school does offer a lot of instrument lessons done by outside teachers, as well as a lot of sports clubs and it is, for the most part, very organised in terms of schedules and events. There was, at one point, a huge problem with litter but that improved greatly after the covid lockdowns. Teachers also grew more lenient with uniform after a period of strictness, something I think is important with a school full of teenagers wanting to express themselves. Overall, it was pretty much as average as a secondary school could be- lesson wise, everything was pretty successful with decent teaching. The issues are more obvious in the social side of things and teaching the students to be kind and accepting people, something it definitely needs to work on.

This school did go through a time where it was awful, however I think since lockdown most of the teachers have really worked to make it a lot better for us and have stopped being so petty so because of there changes recently I would definitely recommend

Pretty good. Would recommend.

I studied here for 5 long traumatic years. I faced bullying from students and staff and nobody did anything. I would never ever recommend this school to anybody it was awful.