Parent
Our son attended Nobel Almancil campus at the secondary school. We were given promises of engaging teaching, excursions, focus on EQ, critical thinking, etc. None of these came to fruition. Class sizes are rather large at 22 or 23 maximum.
Kids in my son's classes throw paper airplanes, are disruptive, talk while the teacher is teaching. Their discipline includes: writing names on the board, having kids write sentences "I will not....", sending kids into the halls for bad behavior. No seeming interest in the underlying causes of the bad behavior, much of which likely has to do with extremely poor teaching and bored kids. Kids behave well when they are interested and engaged.
Teaching is outdated: teachers lecture, students take notes. The heads will tell you otherwise, but they only visit the classes for short 10-minute intervals. There is no united methodology that all teachers follow, very little teacher training to get them all on the same page regarding discipline or engagement strategies.
The heads very attentively and kindly listen to parent complaints, but then nothing changes. This school year alone, 5 students have left my son's class for other schools in the area. An additional student returned to her home country, so I'm not counting her, because that is common to happen in international schools. Those 5 other students left because they were unhappy with the school. That says a lot.
There were zero excursions in the time my son was there. Zero. Very few projects aside from writing assignments in a couple of classes. No group work. Rarely any discussions. This is not teaching; it is very low level on the critical thinking scale. These teachers are not trained in current teaching methods that aim to actively involve students. I do think the heads want there to be more engaging teaching, but they aren't taking the steps necessary to make this happen and aren't including enough staff training days/hours in this particular area. Maybe someday they'll get there, but I think it will honestly be years. They just state that they are a relatively new school and it will take time to get where they want to be. We didn't want to wait for them to get these changes implemented while our son's learning and interest in school was waning.
One language teacher in particular only lecturers, writes on the board, kids copy. Not even any discussing things with partners. No practice speaking. In a LANGUAGE class. The school knows this is an issue, but they cannot find a good replacement, so they have another teacher teaching the class once a week, so the students can at least learn something, however, the other half of the lessons, no learning takes place.
No communication from teachers regarding grades. None. Poor response time from a two of the teachers when I did reach out about our son's grade.
This has me questioning how teachers are trained here because it is like nothing I've ever seen in my home country, at least not in the past 40 years. They are SO behind, so outdated.
The parent company doesn't get involved either. If you email them, they simply direct you back to the school, nevermind that you've already been talking to the school about concerns. They do not get involved.
The facilities at the school are new and nice and there are several varied after school activities which our son really enjoyed, but that's really the only positive. While the food is much improved from last school year, it is still quite terrible. There is little sense of community or warmth, in my experience. No relevance in the teaching, no engaging activities for students.
We found a different school where we are much happier with the quality of education on all accounts.