St Ninian's High School

I am a student leaving school this year in 2025. This is a review of my experience over S1-S6 in St Ninian's High School.

I have no complaints about 1st year, introduction was great and I felt welcomed to the school. You get a try of all the classes and then pick 5 of them (English, French and Maths were mandatory) for Nat 5.

S2-S3 was bliss - no complaints about academic performance and the teachers were all fine except for John Docherty OBE, the head teacher, who had gotten a reputation for publicly ridiculing students and using them as an example of what not to be. In January of 2022, Gerry O'Neill took over as head teacher.

In S4 he began to make changes, mostly in the form of rules. We had an issue with pulling the fire alarms so he decided to put cameras on the fire alarms, this stopped the issue. The uniform rules however got stricter though, and you were expected to come into the relatively cold school in full uniform and were made to take off extras such as hats and boots the second you came in the door.

S5 was the beginning of the decline of Religious Education, the principal teacher of the department was replaced in S4. In S5 R.E., we learnt nothing about the Roman Catholic religion other than pilgrimages, and assisted dying & euthanasia for some reason.
This year the school began stripping rights to the bathrooms, began locking bathrooms entirely, and they made a system of reporting anyone who leaves class to go to the bathroom via a Microsoft form the teachers had access to.
This year, assemblies became very frequent and a lot of the time of these was spent by the head teacher complaining about attendance or the bathrooms. This sometimes resulted in us heading to our next class late.
The only good thing to come from this year was good exam grades.

In S6, the school is beginning to crumble from the inside.
You are now not allowed to go to the toilet during class whatsoever, every bathroom except one or two is now locked, which results in crowdedness in the bathroom and longer time spent out of class, which I assume was what they are trying to avoid by banning toilets. During changeover of classes, they now have teachers stationed at the toilet doors instructed to not allow anyone into the toilets.
I am a witness to the head teacher coming into the toilet himself and searching it and the cubicles for pupils. The two first years in there were given out to for taking too long.
The assemblies are now even more frequent and end nearly every time without fail in running over into the next class, which in my case, is an Advanced Higher which the school have already allocated less time to relative to other subjects. Detrimental damage to a serious, valuable class.
The head teacher made a decision that was highly unpopular among students to ban all school trips past the new year because it was "academic season".

I should also mention that in PSHE a whopping zero of the classes throughout the year were productive, leaving us to keep ourselves entertained.
In Religious Education, I can recall 5 classes through the year that we did anything remotely productive in.
Due to this, there is a problem with attendance in these classes, which adds more time onto the almost weekly assembly. They send calls and emails home to parents of pupils who don't attend these dead-weight classes.

Thank you for reading this as I understand it was a long review.
In conclusion, the school is falling into a dangerous position and is not showing signs of stopping.

I don’t like teachers but I’m going back in to school 🏫 to do some more work so I’m not sure what I’m doing today I just

i know its the kids doing it but the school needs to take more steps in penalising the guys that think its funny to say sexual things to women in the corridors. i would say i dont go one week without being harassed in some way wether thats people being gross and even moaning at me or people physically harassing me (multiple girls including me have been touched inappropriately wether this being people pretending to fall on me while hugging me to being touched in the lunch queue). The school needs to take action.

aren’t allowed to wear hoodies so freezing all the time

Good school academic wise, but the pressure on students to get all As is so overwhelming and their mental health support is nonexistent (they will say all the talks in pshe give good advice but it doesn’t help one bit). Also a sense of entitlement which is to be expected as loads of the people are pretty wealthy. Massive focus on religion, becomes pretty annoying when we’re constantly being asked to go to mass and other religious groups. It’s a good school but it has its challenges just like all other schools.

Staff are generally really lovely and help you learn but a lot of the students aren’t very friendly which is such a shame.

St Ninians truly is amazing.

No Covid19 plan in place and no face masks it is disgraceful