how is Newstead Woods sixth form

Hey!! I'm a year 13 at Newstead and I've been here since year 7. There are definitely mixed feelings. A few of externals regret coming here hahah but I think it depends on what secondary school you went to. What subjects are you thinking of taking?

I take biology, chemistry and maths - the maths department are slightly shambolic icl there are some good teachers but its debatable. Our departments for your subjects are mostly good people get good grades and teachers are all really supportive and there's lots of support available e,g mentoring and lunchtime sessions some teachers will even do 1-1 during free periods. In year 12 you have loads of frees to do independent study which i really liked and honestly on the whole Newstead has been really relaxed. Teachers are pretty down to earth, uniform rules are quite chill but it can be quite competitive and people love their A and A*s lol. It's definitely a much better school than others and pastoral support isn't too bad either but some people regret it because the head teacher is making the school a lot stricter lately and enforcing pointless rules and sometimes there seems to be more of a focus on getting good grades than anything else. If you have any more questions i'd be happy to answer them x

I got into newstead woods sixth form and I'm thinking of going there in September. I was wondering if someone who goes there could tell me what the school is like in general and how the subject departments are and what the people are like

Hi, I'm thinking of taking geography, psychology, spanish and maths. Oh, how come they regret it?

The maths department is really bad here lol they didnt teaching us all the topics, give us easy topic test and the teachers in maths are really bad

Tbh I disagree. I know a load of people ik always say maths is one of our stronger departments and I suppose it can't be completely horrendous if a load of people every year go to do maths at Oxbridge. I suppose it depends on which maths teacher, so maybe that's why we have different experiences. Organisation is not great across the whole school tbh, including timing in teaching the syllabus.

I mean it’s not really a debate if u think that the maths faculty is strong then 💀 💀 having just done a level maths there i know what its really like, the people who go on to go to oxbridge are SMART INDIVIDUALS who work hard by themselves, the teachers honestly don’t care. We weren’t even taught alot of the content and the maths set youre in is determined by how many mymaths tasks you do, the end of year exam for yr12 was A gcse paper, thats how bad it is

Fair enough. Whilst the maths department is definitely stronger than some of the other departments like science (or at least every single year there are always people going on to do maths at oxbridge but never to do any of the sciences at nws), I agree with you on that the maths department is far from perfect. I think there is some degree of support that helps (someone ik who's going on to do maths + philosophy at oxford next year said something she found helpful at newstead was the mentoring sheets and support about extra curricular stuff and ik we get more teaching time for fm than olaves does), but yeah the mymaths thing is pretty annoying, especially the whole ranking thing.
I'm assuming now knowing the many flaws of our school you'd go somewhere else if you could go back to year 11 and choose- what other sixth forms would you consider instead? I'm still not entirely sure I'm going to stay here next year, so knowing other alternatives would be really helpful

Hello, I'm considering going to Newstead.
How have current yr12/13 students found personal statement/UCAS application support at Newstead?
thank you!