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Shrewsbury School

School rating 4 / 5 by

The Schools Shrewsbury Shropshire SY3 7BA United Kingdom
Boarding
6th to 12th
Day
6th to 12th
Gender
Boys only

Academic

Shrewsbury School review by .

Overall, I couldn't have asked for much more from my school (Shrewsbury School), except that some teachers were very clearly not qualified to teach at such a level; many had no actual teaching qualifications whatsoever. Although many were perfectly competent, others were disorganized, lazy, and downright incompetent. Usually, teachers and students were able to have good personal relations, especially as students matured; many are keeping in touch now. I was generally a humanities student, and the workload was perfectly reasonable, increasing normally over five years without any massive peaks or troughs. We were particularly well followed for coursework; for example, I had regular and helpful meetings for my A2 History coursework with a teacher who had been assigned to me on the basis of her knowledge on the subject which I took on (the Russian post-revolutionary Civil War). Generally, I was satisfied with the teaching; class sized were around 20 at the highest, which was rare. The GCSE and A level system en England drives students to specialize early, and as such teachers and tutors had to be able to spot which pupils would be able to cope with the subjects and find them enjoyable. I was always bad with numbers, and this was spotted early on!

College Counseling

College counselling at Shrewsbury School was excellent, with a large, dedicated careers library, and several....

Sample insights on college counseling

  • They have contacts at most of the major universities and feel perfectly comfortable picking up the phone and advocating for a student to get accepted somewhere they feel is a good fit for that student. However, these counselors are certainly not magic bullets. They cannot guarantee that a student will get into an Ivy League university...
  • For those wishing to move on to Oxford or Cambridge, the provision is second-to-none. In the months running up to application and interview, every subject faculty offers classes (often run by former Oxbridge tutors) exploring further areas of their subject as well as offering advice on personal statements, interview technique and more...

Admissions - Getting Accepted

There was a Common Entrance exam, which in principle should have sorted the proverbial wheat....

Sample insights on admissions

  • For the interview, dress conservatively. Try to be very clean and put together. Also, I was a tour guide for two years and at the end of every tour, we were asked to evaluate the candidate so if you think the tour is not apart of the process, you are very wrong. Ask questions and be interested. Also, tip for the parents: the kids speak on the tour. Do not ask their questions for them...
  • Most younger siblings have an easy time in the admissions process. I can only think of one case of a younger sibling not being admitted. About half of the students who entered with me had come from public schools. The remainder came from private K-6 schools, or had transferred from other New York private schools The Elizabeth Morrow School and St. Bernard were two of the larger feeder schools...

School Life

Generally, the standard of living was acceptable, although the food was generally held to be terrible. At one point, half of the school went down with food poisoning for a weekend, courtesy of some interesting burgers on a Friday night. The food did improve when the catering company was changed in my fourth year. Boarding conditions were also acceptable; isolated showers, enough sinks to go around and so on. There was, on the other hand, a generally overlooked problem of what many people would call constant bullying of some people. There was a lot of exclusion, belittlement and occasional outright physical....

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