Townley Grammar School

Okay so this is a great school IF you want to do a lot of sports and preforming arts(art, music, drama, dance exc.) but they don’t do that much for mental health and stuff if something happened with bulling or something that just do an assembly like it will stop anything. The performing arts department is a 5/5 , sports probably a 3.7/5 but the rest of the school eh 2/5. OH AND THEY PROMISE YEAR 7S THAT THEY DONT GET HOMEWORK OR A LOT OF HOMEWORK IN THE FIRST TERM BUT SOMEONE I KNOW WHO ARE IN YEAR 7 IS STRESSING THEIR HEAD OFF.

Hated my 7 years here. They only care about making money and maintaining a so-called ‘good reputation’. No genuine care for wellbeing of students, only care about them getting the highest grades possible even if the students off themselves in the process. If you’re not high achieving they bunk you off, call you a disappointment and treat you like dirt. Praise the high achievers simply for achieving high grades, no matter whether they have good traits or are walking devils. Wouldn’t recommend this school to my worst enemy.

Student hub is a joke. I went there once because I thought I was gonna pass out and they gave me water and sent me straight back to class. Another time I almost puked and they were like, if you do puke, go home but you should be fine. Turned out I had a fever and was ill. One other time I had an accident t that left me hospitalized and the nurse said, and I quote, we get a lot of you guys in here when she saw the uniform. All in all it is a pretty crap service they should probably try to make better, but no. They spend money on new white boards but not on broken toilets or students mental health. DO NOT GO THERE

since i started here, my mental health has gone down really badly, i started to get a ed and had a problem involving a car and me, which left me in hospital. when i came back, the teachers almost gave me a detention for not doing the homework when i didnt know we had any. the food is overpriced and some drink are expired. it has some good aspects, like dance and drama lessons, but it has killed my confidence and my mental health is at rock bottom.

This school really makes me feel safe, and everything just feels so fun. In spring and summer, loads of people eat around the field and everyone's always laughing and having fun and it always boosts my mood.

I love this school so much, there are loads of people to help you when you're struggling, and I feel like so many people expect the school to be perfect, because obviously there are some annoying teachers or whatever, and there are a few faults, but I genuinely believe the school tries its best to help us, to be really diverse, and to be the best school it can be. I am so much happier since coming to Townley and it honestly really annoys me when people complain about it constantly, because they can never give a reason, they just want to moan about it. Everyone expects the school to be super strict and then when it isn't, they call it overrated or a bad school, but I think it's good that they aren't super pushy, but also want us to get the best results. If you want to do well, then I would say to come here. And it's extremely diverse.

Listen, don’t go here. Sure, you might get good grades, but if you care about your mental health in the slightest don’t touch it.
To put it in perspective with one quick experience, in year 11 i was hospitalised after a mental health crisis at school, and the nurse who was helping me at the hospital recognised the uniform and i quote verbatim, “We get a lot of you in here.”
You might not be outright bullied, but the social isolation is no joke.
The people who claim this school is good at diversity- sure they have it on papers, but they don’t do a single thing to protect their students. They pick a poster student and then focus on them and them only.
If you had any desire to learn, or felt good about school, this place will beat it out of you.
The amount of teachers who are also exposed for being predators is also insane- my sex ed teacher being arrested for child pornography ownership, and another who was blacklisted from teaching after an affair with a sixth former, who also commented on seeing childrens bras underneath their white shirts.
I wouldn’t have reviewed it if this was just me or my own struggling’s as an autistic student in a mainstream school, but everyone I’ve known who’s gone to that school echo the same sentiment.
Even down to the GCSE certificates, we received them a year late.
Please don’t go, for your own sake.
Though, I guess I got straight 9-7’s, so yippee to that.

This school strives for academic excellence, that's what selective schools do, that's what we sign up for when we go here, if you dont want that PLEASE JUST GO ELSEWHERE. Additionally, I'm frustrated at other students slating this school for trying to be culturally diverse ! They are trying to embrace us. Everytime they try, people from my culture slate them online, its counterproductive and really sad. I have come from being a shy little girl, to an over achieving, happy, multicultural, LGBTQ+ woman here, Townley has helped make me, I rate it.

Apparently you have a rule where black girls are not allowed to sit together due to “intimidation”
I’m not sure what kind of mindset the people in charge have but whatever it is it’s racist.

I've been at townley grammar for 4 years now and i have to say it is a second home for me. Teachers are welcoming, friendly, and are always reaching out to us for help and support. It is a great working evironment and they always bring the importance of pupils mental health, other cultures, diversity and inclusion and lots more being. it is a great community to be part of with so many new opportunities. It has its ups and downs just like every other school does, but i am really thankful to be part of such a great school and loving community and the school has always helped me out a lot and developed so many of my skills including confidence!

I was at this school for 5 years and from a few weeks in at year 7 I realised it wasn’t right for me. I found most people thought it wasn’t right for them either. The actual school environment was bitchy and unfriendly because of how competitive it was to be the best and anything below an A was seen as underachieving and disappointing. Teachers rarely helped out of class. And I found many of them spoke with such strong accents I couldn’t understand them. It was difficult to settle in and I was so thankful for when I could leave. The dance department was always really friendly and they acted as second mums.

this school talks about feminism way too much. at first, i liked it as i thought it was cool to see a school speak up about feminism. it was fine but they were just doing it over and over again. i know this is an all girls school and stuff but i want to see other topics coming up as well.


some of the teachers are fine i guess. it’s just THOSE teachers. they make me feel so bad about myself especially that my mental health was already quite bad before i entered the school.

the online school was so stressful. there was just issues with the computer and the tech stuff and i could focus at home. i know that we have to for covid but i just can’t. at some point, i had 80+ missing assignments and it was just stressing me out.

the teachers expect so much from you. im not active at all and i feel bad that im letting everyone down. people/teachers put so much pressure on you.

i could go into more detail but i don’t want to.

I have been a student at this school for a while and I can confirm it was the worst decision of my life going to this school, the safeguarding team do not help at all and must of the time make the situation worse or just don't do anything at all. The school puts loads of stress on you for homework so unless you do it the day you get it, it will easily begin to build up a pile even after 2 days. The most pieces of homework I have gotten is one for each of the six periods in one day and each homework takes about an hour to complete so that means you barely have any time got leisurely activities especially if you also have tutoring or do extra curricular clubs.

The only thing the school cares about is grades. I know that one of my friends has had similar experiences to me with the safeguarding people where she has tried to talk to people about struggles with mental health and problems in her family yet they called her dad which caused her 3 days of arguments. If I did not have the support of my friends, I would have committed suicide ages ago. They also do not give help to students who need it, notably people of colour, lgbtq+ people and nerodivergant people. They claim to be supportive and make many PowerPoint on it but we are not treated as we shoukd be and are instead seen as failures.

Another issue I had was being a transgender person at this school. I came out as Non-binary near the end of year seven. My form tutor was actually quite supportive and used my correct name yet most other teachers still refer to the class as ladies as if there are no transgender people there and although it is an all girls school they have got to expect there to be some students like myself who came into the school not knowing they were transgender and not being able to get out because of unsupportive parents.

I genuinely cannot express my hate for this place and desire to leave. I dread to think what gcses will he like and honestly if you care about your child at all do not send them to this school.

Performative activism is this school's favourite thing.

this rating is for the music department. music lessons make my week better and the teachers are very understanding and make lessons fun.

The student services is brilliant however the rest of the school does not care about your childs mental wellbeing. They push you and push you and don't try and help you they just call parents or tell head of year and the students get in trouble. It's not ok for us to continually be punished for mental health issues. So if you're looking for a school that only cares about grades no matter the mental cost, I guess this is for you.

as much as grammar schools are appealing, especially when your child seems naturally gifted and you think they will benefit from a high achieving school, i am here to tell you that they won't succeed if you send them to the townley hellhole for formerly gifted children.

if you try and research this school for yourself, you'll find that the results are very split - you will either find a web page saying how great the school is, or one that says it's the worst place in the world, however if you look more into it you will see that the positive posts are made by the school, and the negative ones made by anyone who ever went to it.

some of the teachers there were lovely, but a lot of them weren't. they were rude and horrible, singling out students in the class to pick on and berate in front of everyone for not being "smart enough" despite achieving grades much better than the national average. the senco and student services workers provided no support to children with mental health problems, and anyone who tried to speak up about their struggles were immediately shut down/told they were faking or attention seeking.

most people that i know from that school came in happy and confident, and left with some kind of mental health problem due to the lack of support and unrelenting pressure.

there were multiple students in my head group alone who actually developed anxiety induced siezures/loss of consciousness because of the pressure put on students, and many others fell to depression/suicide because they felt like such failures for getting 10 GCSEs in stead of 11.

overall, the whole place is a failing mess who put all their efforts into parading their high results average in the faces of potential parents aka pay checks, and put no effort into actually improving the school for the welfare of the students already in its facility.

The school pretends to care about all its students, but in reality they only care for the neurotypical, physically able students. Since the moment I joined the school in year 7, they have continuously put me down and punished me for struggling with my mental health. I struggled with receiving multiple pieces of homework everyday and when i asked for help recieved detentions and phone calls to my parents. The school also decided it necessary to phone my parents multiple times to inform them that i was suicidal- but not once asked me if I was okay. The entire time Ive been at this school me and my friends have had to put our mental and physical health aside to be able to simply pass our lessons without being punished. I am also disabled and have had to explain multiple times to multiple teachers that while I did not have an official diagnosis, I was still disabled and struggled to walk everyday, and yet I am still made to do 5 minute runs every lesson and am told that I am unfit and unhealthy for walking instead so that I am not in extreme pain
They won't let the school's least able student use the lift incase of a bomb threat but if you have a sprained ankle you're good to go.
They terrorise students for a small error to the point they cause insomnia a year on, and their terrible handling of covid 19, the lack of communication between teachers and students, the fact they think depression can be cured with an assembly and a workshop, the fact that they can replace all windows and doors with automatic ones that broke in a week but can't fix toilet door locks that have been broken for over 2 years now.
Diversity in ability and mental health is severely overlooked in favour of having a “model school”.

This school advertises itself for being good with mental health, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. In the BBC documentary, the SENCO was seen discussing anxiety and available support with a student, so please explain to me why that same SENCO told me that everyone gets a little stressed at times when I was having a literal panic attack. I would also like to know why the head of art thought it acceptable to accuse me of faking mental illness for attention and for an excuse to be lazy in front of other students and with absolutely no evidence, at a point where I couldn’t verbally defend myself. The school’s staff puts way too much pressure on their students, and that pressure unfortunately did major damage to my mental health. And to think that for four years I was punished for struggling to achieve, and it was only when GCSEs were approaching that they realised that the punishments weren’t helping and actually decided to offer “support”. It took them until they realised I could lower their image to actually look into my situation to bring my grades up instead of just dishing out punishments because my autistic self wasn’t a model student. There is so much more that I could say, but this review is long enough and I think I’ve got my point across about the mental health stuff.