St Francis Xavier School - a Joint Catholic and Church of England Voluntary Academy

When I went there, the school was absolutely terrible at cracking down on bullying. Especially when it came to racism and homophobia, having one assembly about the basics of the LGBT community doesn't mean you've just solved the bullying. I had a 50/50 experience with the teachers. For example, my YR 11 RE and Maths teacher were absolutely delightful to have, and they ignited a genuine interest into the topics we were learning. In contrast, my YR 11 Art & Design teacher was horrible, played favourites, was hypocritical and often confused me for one of the only other asian students in my class. She burnt out my passion for traditional art. and art in general, which is, to this day, an extremely huge part of my life. The teachers who genuinely enjoyed teaching and respected their students were the primary highlight of my time at this school. What we learnt and the core of our lessons was fine, it was just the terrible community and culture that had breeded on the school grounds which made everyone I knew so pessimistic and petty towards each other. Understandably, it's extremely hard to discipline a bunch of edgy, hormonal teenagers, but I always felt like they only cared about students getting good grades and improving the school's reputation. In relation to this, I feel like I was semi-well taught. My grades were at a steady increase throughout the five years but I had a lot of friends who struggled because of how strict and unforgiving some of our teachers were. In this area it is especially hard to find a good school. If you are able to find something else further away from Richmond, i strongly suggest you take you take your child there instead unless you want to teach them passive misogyny, racism and homophobia and maybe how to do a quadratic equation. My hental health deteriorated greatly during my time there (although, the standard culture for a secondary school would make anyone miserable unless you were popular), and i would not ever want to associate myself with the school again.

I currently go to this school and whilst being there I have noticed that the school really doesn’t do much about homophobia and racism for example last week a group of kids said the f slur to a girl who had just come out and said a lot of racist things and only got a slap on the wrist with a two day exclusion and they said they would talk about it in assembly but all they talked about was how it isn’t ok to film people in there uniform not about the hate speech on the video another thing that you have noticed about the school is that it can be very stressful work wise by this I mean that the school is very grade based and anything that is under a 7 isn’t a good grade and you need to get it higher they need to seriously work on a lot of basic things that should be in place in any school like support for LGBTQ+ youth and more punishment for hate speech especially since it is a Christian school so a lot of families are homophobic

Very grade focused, enable ableism and homophobia in the name of religion. Sees anything less than a 7 as a failure. Too much pressure not enough care.