Reviews

2.4
Based on 6 reviews and 53 answers
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Student
Apr 15, 2024

Canteen food

Canteen food is trash and doesn't fill you up and should stick to packed lunch so you know the ingredients in the food and no shit
Student
May 16, 2023

my head of year

My head of year has made me have 2 break downs in 2 months. Today i was crying in class and he comes up to me and says "Ill help with this maths question so don't need to cry."
No way. I'm having a break down and my friend is holding me trying to comfort me.
The school always says " we care about your mental health" full lies. If you care you wouldn't be talking about the maths question to me.

P.S - I told him "im crying right now and your just talking about maths?"
the school is messed up i hate coming into school knowing they never will care . they just want the money
Parent
Jan 8, 2023

Bad school

As a Christian school they sure do not practice what they preach. The head teach is not very responsive. When contacted with concerns he makes his deputy deal with the issue and the deputy is always back tracking on what he said. Their disciplinary policy seem to be more hash on black students compared to the white students. They fail to deal with bullying and harassment effectively. I think this school is very racist and as a catholic school they are not very Christian like.
Former Student
Sep 15, 2022

Fake community

The “community” they preach so much about is incredibly toxic, nasty, all of the students are horrible to eachother. No sense of community at all. never met a group of children like these.
Parent
Sep 30, 2021

6th form

Let down .

i have had 4 children go to this school and attend 6th form, but my last child applied for 6th form got a guaranteed slot but did not get the grades required to study his subjects, so they dropped him on the day he went to start 6th form. He is disabled and they never did allow him extra time to sit his exams, and this was only discovered when he enrolled in another 6th form, where the senco officer conducted a report into my child's needs. This was a distressing time for my child that they could just toss him to one side. I thought they had followed all the requirements for my sons education at this time and felt let down by this and my son suffered due to having to relocate to unfamiliar school to continue his choosen subjects.
Former Student
Nov 5, 2020

about average

I’ve attended St Albans since year 7 and found that I’m my first years at high school we’re great. This all suddenly changed in around year 9 when particular teachers wouldn’t help motivate the students to complete work and create a poor environment to work in.

When your in the younger years you are completely oblivious to the fact of how the school is run and how the teacher interact with yourselves and peers. It’s all taken with a pinch of salt but as you proceed through the years things change. You begin to find certain comments from certain teachers hurtful especially when your going through your teens and GCSE exams scheduled to come up soon. So, what do I mean? Well, let me inform you. Over the years you hear many things. as gossip goes around like wildfire. For example you have teachers shouting at a student because they were defending their younger sibling for a wrongfully given out exclusion. If you read up about how a school should deal with an exclusion this school did not follow through as the student councillor from A block gave a exclusion out where the headmaster is supposed to do that.

The current headmaster to be fair seems like a decent teacher but you don’t see him very often as you would expect. The headmaster is the ‘top man’ and should be expected to be on time for a start to assemblies and also walk around the school to show his face a bit more.

I gave the food quality rating poor because in all honesty it’s not good. Everything that caterlink provides is extremely overpriced. A small portion of chip will cost you £1.30 which is a ridiculous amount when you think a 1.2kg is the same price as that. I won’t be all negative here as all the food isn’t awful, they do good fish and chips of fridays.

So, I hear you ask how helpful the teachers are in the teaching aspect and motivational skills? Well, the majority of teachers are very relaxed as in that they let you get on with the work and more than helpful to come over and assist with your needs but saying that you always get a few that aren’t so. These tend to be in the more academic subjects and when I say a few I do literally mean a few. Also, when I’m writing this review I am talking from personal experience not just from the grapevine. I had an English teacher who to be fair was amazing in year 10, he would make Macbeth interesting with his silly voices for characters esc. But, as soon as we hit year 11 everything went down hill. He would have lessons just like the ones in year 10 and others where he would refuse to teach us literally. Say one week we would do an assessment and the next lesson he would hand out our results and sit on his chair at the front of the class and rant at us how we all did badly. When you think about it, if the whole class is doing badly in an assessment surely the teacher has a part to play in this too? Anyway after his rant we would be given our work and told to complete this in silence as he didn’t want to teach us.

Following my last paragraph it leads me to my next rant. This teacher who I’m not mentioning for data protection esc was being investigated as some of my fellow classmates weren’t happy with his behaviour. He left many of my classmates in distress and many crying. He was investigated and pupils were chosen at random to tell the story of what happened to see if we weren’t lying esc but nothing more was done about it. This teacher was given a free pass and no punishment was issued when he punished innocent year 11s who he told would be on zero hour contracts at Tesco.

I conclude that St Albans is not an amazing school but neither an awful one. Never the less there’s always room for improvement but generally my time there was a happy one and wouldn’t change it for the world. This was because of the environment the students created with one another that kept us all going.

Thank you St Albans

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