Inverness Royal Academy

The school has a horrible system to dealing with bullies, plenty of girls being sexualised by boys and Teachers not handling the boys responsible. Racist marks on the walls, bad language from teachers and overall a poor school. Absolutely no respect for pupils who are struggling with plenty of issues, and a lot of teachers are using false reports against students they do not like. Pupils causing fights and drama, and nothing being done to stop anything.

putting autistic teenagers in small dark storage closets seems to be something they enjoyed doing from when I attended.

It has no AC and Heating so the temperature is always too hot or too cold, the teachers are useless at stopping bullying and the guidance teachers don’t help at all. The canteen is far too small and I mean tiny, 150 seats for 1300 students, they are preventing us from going on the first floor too which means we have even less room . The head teachers are all horrible and so are most of the teachers that work there

accepting of me being trans, most teachers are ok

Absolutely awful school with no regard to mental health issues. After being absent from school for a few weeks due to being in hospital upon coming back there was absolutely nothing in place to help with my return. The work load was piled onto me from the weeks I’d missed and I was extremely overwhelmed. Half of the teachers didn’t even remember who I was and the other half didn’t even notice I had been absent from classes and had no clue what was going on. Due to being in the hospital and coming back to constant pressure from the school I developed bad anxiety problems and started to avoid attending school. I ended up getting referred to a therapist. The school started to notice my absence and my mother and I were called in for meetings I was basically told to “get over it and I needed to attend school” my therapist ended up working closely with the school and tried to explain to them what would work in helping and what wouldn’t - they didn’t care to listen much to her. The school had their own social worker woman they assigned to try to help me. She would meet with me outside of school and try to talk about ways of helping me get over my anxiety - as more time was passing by the worse my anxiety got about attending and in the end she even admitted to my mother “I’m so sorry I don’t know how to help” I ended up leaving this school at 15 years old after 3 whole years of struggling with them. They would tell me to attend - I’d try - get about a week in and would then start avoiding again. They would put things in place to try to help me such as assigning me a constant seat so I would know where I was sitting in classes. I would go in the next day and someone else would be sitting there. The school were not consistent with these things and this would heighten my anxiety. The day I told my guidance counsellor I was leaving he basically stared at his computer and said “okay” I asked him if I needed to fill in a form but all he said was no. So I walked out of those doors and haven’t set foot in them since. I had 0 grades to my name so decided to try giving college a shot. Compared to this high school the UHI is so refreshing - they are HUGE on mental health. It’s amazing. I couldn’t get through one week of this high school because I had 0 support for my mental health issues but I got through a whole year of college because of how understanding and caring all of the lecturers are of mental health. I ended up leaving college with exams and now have a great job. If I ever needed to I would 100% go back to the UHI without any second thoughts. I don’t think I would even be able to set foot through the IRA doors ever again without having a panic attack. They have 0 consideration for mental health issues - in their eyes - they have one mould that every student MUST fit into. If not then they don’t know how to deal with you. To be fair it has been a few years since I left and maybe now they have a better plan in place for students that struggle with their mental health - but judging how this school made me feel years ago - I doubt it.

It’s an alright school ig Cons: Druggies. A bunch of them Teachers can be mean PE is mandatory till S5 (3 periods a week min) RMPS is mandatory and one of the RMPS teachers is Homophobic and Transphobic Really crowded halls and it’s hard to find seating kinda cliquey like you have the basic kids, the gays/cosplayers/weebs SMT will prioritise S4-6 bathrooms are manky foods not the worst but it ain’t healthy they give us too much work over lockdown fairly cold very crowded Pros: great range of subjects Dress code is relatively chilled Loads of clubs lots of fundraisers The one way system is pretty good you can get music tuition from Highlife via the school great PE facilities Free period products available in girls bathroom on the first floor, disabled bathroom in the PE dept and in the nurses office School captains and stuff are all lovely one of the few schools with lessons in scottish gaelic

Cons: Academic: School grades compare really badly towards the rest of the country Building: Cafeteria way too small for ammount of people in the school (no chairs);thus people have to go outside, where there arent enough benches for the ammount of people outside. They sell A LOT of unhealthy foods under the lable of healthy bakery or something. They told us we were one of the best schools in scootland (which we arent... by far) so they feed weird propaganda to kids Pros: A lot of the teachers are nice (but in the long run teachers being just nice doesnt always positibely affect your grades) Great language departments, including french, spanish, german, and scottish gaelic. Children are let outside to Asda at lunch Good special needs facilities

The school do to much to worry about school uniform rather than caring about people who need help.