Considering Roedean – Looking for Insights

[ilsenyw]

Hello everyone,
We’re planning to move from Surrey to the Brighton area and are considering Roedean for our daughter. She’s our only child, so we want to ensure she has opportunities to make local friends.
We’re aware that Roedean offers both day and boarding options, and we’d love to hear from families with daughters currently attending. How has your experience been? Does the school foster a strong local community for day students?
We know opinions on schools can vary, but we attended an open day and liked the location and ethos. Our daughter has been in all-girls education so far, so we hope the transition will be smooth.
Any insights or advice would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance.

DD started as a day girl in year 7 and I can’t recommend the school highly enough. Plenty of opportunities to make local friends as the school builds social activities into the curriculum. DD has been and remains incredibly happy at school, everyone is supported in all aspects of school life.

Have a look at Brighton College. It’s extremely good. Much better than Roedean academically so kind of depends what your DD is like.

Better academic outcomes in league tables but this doesn’t make it academically better as this is contextual.

I thought Brighton college is known to fiddle with their stats? Not saying it isn't more academic but the two schools seem like chalk and cheese anyway

My daughter is at Roedean and we are disappointed with both the academic and sports provision. They have been recruiting a lot of kids from local state schools to sort out the 'Chinese issue'. Work and study ethos is very different at state schools, so a lot of kids and parents from state schools were complaining about the amount of homework, deadlines, long days etc. I guess that resulted in the first two years (year 7 and year 8) being very relaxed and lots of kids just coasted. Then they started putting pressure on them, but a little too late...They have some great teachers but also some very mediocre ones who are not able to spark the interest in the subject, not interested in supporting the kids etc. Leadership is aware of the issues but seems to do very little, if anything, to address the concerns.

Sport provision is also lacking focus and direction. Unless your DD is a great netballer or cricketer, she will be quickly disappointed. Tennis is very basic unless you take private lessons; swimming has been run by a good coach until she went on mat leave for 2 years, since then it's been random teachers. In Brighton college they have an Olympian running a programme. Art is good at school, though it is very time-consuming. Language provision is poor in my opinion.

On a positive side, they don't weed kids out in run-up to GCSE as Brighton college does but they don't offer support to improve the grades either. They say they do but in reality teachers are always busy or it's a quick 5 mins to answer a question during the break. No focus groups to support in specific subjects. They also have a lot of 'independent study periods' - meaning kids are left to their own devices to revise with one teacher supervising the class. You can imagine how the revision goes...not. Bullying is very quickly addressed here, so I guess it's a positive as well.

So, I see Roedean to be a great school only if your child is keen on drama, art or netball. I would also consider Hurst and Ardingly, though a little further from Brighton.

@lazymaysy
"Work and study ethos is very different at state schools"- this must be geographically dependent because our experience was opposite. We moved DD to private from state and it felt like their expectations were below ground level. She was lucky to get any HW and their expectations on independent study were insane. No one is that self motivated.
We moved back to state and never complained about it again!

Both my DDs attended Roedean as day girls, y7-13, my youngest left last year.
Girls are nurtured and supported to reach their potential, communication and pastoral is excellent, 1-1 support and clinics offered to help outside of lessons, if needed. There are many day girls, my DDs had boarder friends; it’s a community.
Both stayed on through 6th form and are now at top unis. Not only did Roedean provide an excellent education, my DDs are happy & confident individuals as a result.
I could not recommend this school more, do visit or enrol on an open day.

At uni, I knew quite a few girls who had been at Rodean. They often spoke wistfully.about the lesbian sex they had enjoyed at school.

I had heard about Roedean’s “Chinese issue” as you put it on another thread about Harrow which was expressing concerns about the large number of chinese at Harrow school impacting culture, social bonds within boarding houses and sports team performance.

please may you provide extra detail about the impact having more Chinese has had on Roedean and why it needed addressing by the school.

Thanks!

Roedean no longer has a “Chinese issue,” as in recent years the school has enrolled a larger number of girls from local Brighton schools. However, this has created a slightly different challenge. Many girls now join in Year 7 from Brighton-area schools and already know one another, which leads to close-knit friendship groups and make it harder for new students from elsewhere to integrate socially.
As for the Chinese students, they generally form their own circles and keep to themselves, they speak Chinese between them. Most boarders are Chinese or from Africa with very few from the UK or Europe. Majority of Chinese girls are not sporty but great in sciences and art — which has contributed to Roedean’s strong performance in STEM subjects. Following the introduction of VAT on school fees, the school massively under-recruited in Year 7 this year and is now undertaking an extensive marketing and recruitment drive across Asia, which is likely to increase the number of Chinese students again. That if they consider UK education over much cheaper alternatives in Italy or Switzerland.

Are those same girls now speaking wistfully about the lesbian sex they enjoyed at university?

You must have been very lucky as there is not such a thing as 1-2-1 support, it's like 5 mins over the break and only if the teacher has the time. There are no clinics to support academically either until you are in year 11 which is a bit too late. Some teachers can't teach at all (or pre-occupied with admin/ other stuff) but still remain with the school when some great teachers were made redundant last year. If they put as much passion and effort into teaching as they do in their uniform patrol, that would be much appreciated.

I’m sorry to hear of your experience. My friend’s dd is currently in y10 and attends science & maths clinics. Head of Years and pastoral managers there are helpful, if your dd would benefit from additional support, then I recommend reaching out to them.

What is the "Chinese issue"? Could someone clarify please?
Is it just that a lot of the students are Chinese? Why would that be an issue?

A friend of mine has 2 girls there and highly recommended it to me for DD. We would have had to board though and with VAT that wasn't an option for us financially. She was saying the 'clinics' were the strong point as well as the extras like First Aid and Sign Language built into their wellbeing classes.

I think it is about boarding being a bit isolating if you don't speak the most predominant language.

Oh I see. Most of the boarders aren't English speaking - thanks.