Springwood High School

This is an absolutely terrible school!! For starters the head teacher Mr Johnson only cares about the kids with good grades and attendance so he’s all about how his school looks, they don’t care about why the children are off or why their attendance is bad, they should be speaking to the children and finding out why they’ve been off and understand their reason or health condition not just ring up threatening their parents with prison or a fine and sending the attendance officer round to drag the child out of bed. The school are also terrible for not letting kids go to their prom just because of their attendance!! the children are leaving school for ever and may never see some of their class mates again so how can you take prom away?! Also to employ a staff member like Mrs Moate says it all really. I’m writing this to warn parents who are thinking of putting their kids in ‘the best school ever’ springwood has no bullying policy and are equally as bad as KES. The better high schools for your kids would be Alderman peel or Terrington.

I went here September 2015 - February 2018 and had a bad experience. Year 7 was the best year for me which isn't even saying much considering the fact that not even a week in I had already developed anxiety. There was also this one girl in my year who kept spreading false rumours about me, I wasn't even in any classes with her at the time but she straight up lied to my brother's face saying I had gotten a detention for swearing in class; she was most likely projecting, since I was a little miss goody 2 shoes afraid of getting into any trouble. I think this was one of the contributing factors to my anxiety since I wasn't even like this in primary school, the worst part is that I still struggle with anxiety to this very day.

At the beginning of year 8 I was just like how I was in y7 but about 2-3 months in, my home life worsened. This made my anxiety worse as a result of it, on some days I didn't even want to go to school. No one cared about how I was struggling mentally, except for a few of my close friends and the senco team. All springwood cared about was my attendance, plus the house officer for my house (Oxburgh) was the most careless member of staff so she did nothing helpful either.
I also had a couple of lessons that I really hated (Spanish and maths), for Spanish it can be summarised like this:
- 3% actual work.
- 47% people messing around.
- 50% people laughing.
There was also this one time where someone threw a sharpie at our teacher and we all had to write down who we thought it was. Now I don't think I can really talk when it comes to people messing around since I used to be a bit like that when I was in primary school, but it never got to the point where I threw things at people or disrupted their learning.
Maths on the other hand wasn't full of disruptive people (only about 2-3 were in this one) but we did have this teacher who would get angry at the drop of a hat. I'm not even kidding you could just exist next to him and he'd start shouting at the top of his lungs. It wasn't just the walking on eggshells that made this class bad, there was also a specific seating plan where these people behind me would throw little bits of paper in my hair. One of them kept stealing the pens from my blazer pocket too and she also put a bleeding pen ink cartridge in there once.

Year 9 was when I left, but there were a few changes. The first one was an actual good change, changing house officers to head of year. The year 9 head of year was actually helpful, she actually cared about me and she was going to set up some meetings about my mental health (along with the senco team) but my mum took me out of springwood shortly after this decision was made. I also had a few teachers who cared about my mental health, such as my English teacher and my biology teacher.
There were some really weird rules that were made that year, such as not being allowed to wear leggings for pe because they apparently "turn on boys"... even though boys and girls were separated for pe. They also made it so that you can't show your ankles at all, for the same reason as the leggings.
After I left, one of my friends kept me updated on what was happening at the school. There were 2 outrageous things he told me:
- My friend was anemic and he was off school quite a bit because of it, all springwood did was send him letters about his poor attendance, they'd also say he was "lazy and unbothered".
- My friend also told me about how a guy in our year sexually assaulted someone (attempted rape) and only got excluded for 5 days. That's basically a slap on the wrist.

To wrap this up, I did have a few good moments at springwood (one of the most notable was springfest/endeavour in year 8, but I don't know if they even do these anymore), though I had a lot more bad moments now that I look back on it.

I was at springwood from 2013-2018. overall a good school, i have some fond memories and i managed to get good grades. some of the teaching staff are questionable. i recently got diagnosed with autism and i went through the entirety of school without any teachers noticing signs. i appreciate they helped me when i had bad mental health, though. some of the rules are a bit ridiculous (they’re funny about wearing certain socks or keeping your blazer on). the music department is absolutely phenomenal, playing in the concert band was hands down my best experience here. i don’t regret going here at all, but it’s definitely not a perfect school