George Watson's bullying culture -- has it improved?

[invisibleflamingos]

My child was lucky to be accepted to Heriot's, Watson's and EA for P1. We're making a big list of pros and cons to each place.

There are positives to each school. One big 'con' that is coming up under Watson's is their approach to bullying based on my reading of historical events.

I read the story of what happened to the primary student who triggered the inspection in 2017, and I was truly appalled by the messages from the teachers and the headmaster's eventual response after the inspection report. There seemed to be no real apology acknowledging how wrong they had got it.

This has given me serious pause. Can anyone with recent experiences speak about whether they've reflected and truly changed the culture? My nephew was bullied horribly at school and it has profoundly affected his confidence, so I'm keen to send my child to a place where it is taken seriously and addressed from the start.

I cant say specifically on their bullying culture other than whats been reported. There are a couple of posters on scotsnet who had experience of issues at Watsons but im not sure whether they predate 2017. Hopefully they will come along. There has been a few articles recently on children transitioning and how the school are handling it in both the telegraph and the times most recently. The old head seemed to be taking advice on the matter from people connected with Mermaids! I found his opinion quite concerning. The school had a new head towards the end of last year so im not sure whether she plans to follow the same path. There is no doubt that the school has fantastic facilities and lots on offer though. Congratulations on all of the offers!

i can only report on our experience where our S1 boy was getting shoved from some other boys. He’s particularly sensitive so we reported it and they had snuffed it out within 24 hours, all friends again now. This was a year ago, and we were very impressed.

DS is in his last year at GWC having been there since nursery and he loves the school.
I think the best thing you can do is ask them for their written procedures for bullying. There's also a new head starting for the new academic year and I suspect she will be an improvement on the current one.

The other thing I would say as whilst I don't have a lot of faith in current head, both the junior and senior school heads seem like very competent and compassionate individuals.

The new head doesn’t start until August and is still at Gordonstoun, but I have hopes she will bring about a bit of culture change. We had cause to report bullying in my child’s form class a few months ago and it was dealt with swiftly and fairly robustly by the year head and form teacher.

My bad, iv no idea why i wrote the new head had started at the end of last year. The article in the times with the current head that i was referring to was only printed a couple of year ago. New one definitely not started!!

I went to this school from 2006 - 2008 for my final two years, and I hated it. It changed my personality for the worse. I looked different and the children were completely pitiless about it, despite my being (before then and since) fairly socially capable and well-liked. I think they were so afraid of one another, because of this culture of fear within the school, that they wouldn't approach anyone who looked different for fear that it would somehow affect their own 'standing' with their peers. The kids at the top of the school's social 'hierarchy' were incredibly nasty and exclusionary, which created fear throughout the whole year group. The level of snubbing was extreme; many students wouldn't even make eye contact with each other. I saw students who'd known each other for years barely even speak to each other. They would do things like start a conversation, then mid-stream turn and walk away, leaving the person on their own. Everyone was so afraid of this kind of behaviour that they barely interacted.

The teachers did nothing to stop it, and in fact I think some of the teachers were part of the problem: I witnessed one time a female gym teacher, sometime in 2006, screaming abuse at a schoolgirl in the corridor, practically spitting on her. It was terrifying. There were a couple of similar episodes. It was so over the top and excessive, that now I wonder if perhaps there was something wrong at the heart of the school that was tainting everything else.

In any case, my overwhelming memory of the place is feeling afraid, excluded, and judged by otherwise completely ordinary people. It felt like a place with a chip on its shoulder and a great deal of insecurity, which perhaps explains the snubbing/unpleasantness. At the time I blamed myself, as any teenager would, so it was a very negative experience. But years later, on a university exchange in Europe, I met students who had encountered people from my Watson's year at their own universities - and their opinion of them was strikingly negative. This confirmed to me that I hadn't imagined it, and the school, at that time, probably did have a problem. I have no idea if it has changed since then, I've never been back and don't intend to.

ok... my post got a little more heated than I expected just there, perhaps it does bother me a little more than I realise. Anyway. The TL;DR is: I really didn't like the school. Perhaps it's good for other people, who am I to say. But I'll never send my kids there.

I think maybe the fact it keeps getting glowing reviews is what irks me, like everyone is drinking from the cool aid. I am certain I was not the only one in my year who really didn't like their time there, and it feels like there's no way to acknowledge that anywhere.

My child was relentlessly bullied elsewhere and this school was such a haven of calm and friendship. I’m sorry to hear your tale. Maybe things have changed over the years - though I am not sure how you go about changing a schools ethos - or maybe we got lucky and you got unlucky.

Who’d go back to being a teen though? My secondary school experience was similar to yours and I am so glad I got through it, went to uni and started enjoying life so much more. I hope you did likewise.

It took me many years to get past it, though therapy helped. I just went from having a lot of friends to losing all sense of who I was, due to the total isolation, which was difficult. I loved uni and everything was fine afterwards in terms of not experiencing that kind of behaviour again, but I struggled to make sense of happened at Watson's. Perhaps the culture has changed now, and I think my year were especially bad, as those in years above and below seemed to be more emotionally normal and to enjoy school more. But I'm certain that what I saw in my year was not the standard 'didn't like high school' experience everyone has to some degree in school. Some of my year were really screwed up, and even when I met them years later they seemed to be living under this psychological bubble they developed at school, as though trying to be accepted by their high school peers shaped their entire lives even at the age of 25. The only friends they seemed to have were people from Watson's, like they were stuck. They'd carried their mental 'chains' well beyond university. It's hard to describe it exactly, but the group had this way to make you feel intensely awful about yourself while keeping it subtle enough that it could not be called out and pretending to be your friend. The people I met on exchange in Europe were if anything even more scathing/traumatised than I was, one was practically in tears - and they were from two different UK unis so not even the same Watson's individuals..

I'm glad your child found a safe place at Watson's. As I said, it might just have been my year. During my time there, the head master Mr Edwards seemed completely sound and kind, and if they'd had more like him around campus I always thought things would have been different. The nasty culture, if it's still there, is fixable if it is identified. But part of the problem was everyone banging on about how 'great' the institution was, and believing they were special, with zero acknowledgement of their problems, which were apparently obvious to outsiders.