School Guide Reviews 57

Update- doesn’t feel like a genuine site coming from a good place. Following my posting this review - today I received a number of emails (including from the CEO mentioning that I could change my trust pilot review lol) refunding my subscription and offering an apology that the normal person was out of the office this week - as I have read the other reviews I know this is not true and feels off. So I have changed my review from 2 to 1 stars. A business either comes from a place of right action or it doesn’t…….

I sent an email to cancel this subscription a few days ago with no response. I have sent an email again today. I really dont like sites that dont allow you to unsubscribe on the website - always seems like a scam/way of keeping customers paying for a website they are not using - not impressed with the lack of response!!!!

Thank you to Victoria for promptly resolving my issue when cancelling the subscription, other than this minor mishap I found the website extremely useful and simply to use.

Fantastic resource for researching schools in a new area prior to moving home. It was so helpful to have all the different information collated into one place so we could compare schools and make an informed decision on the right school for my daughter.

I posted a review about my children's school almost two weeks ago. The review was neither positive nor negative specifically - it had elements of both and so was a mixed review. As far as I can see the review has not been posted to the site - I have not received an email rejecting it, it just hasn't appeared. The web site says allow 24 hours, so we are way past this! No doubt if it was a glowing report, the review would have appeared the same day!
Before the guide writes back and preaches their rules at me, yes I did follow them to the letter and had my review checked by someone who deals with these sorts of reviews quite a bit. They seemed to think it was balanced and fair!
I am aware that some of these web sites receive subscriptions or fees from schools, and some run reviews past the schools before they are posted. Therefore, I am assuming this is another biased review site! I cannot see any other reason why they did not post my review. No one was named, there were no harsh comments, no strong words, and so forth. I just wrote about what was good and what was not.
I would not consider a web site like this to be reliable!

I originally looked at this web site as I was looking for reviews and information on schools for the next stage of my child's journey.

Update:
The review I wrote gave the school 3 stars with a mixture of pros and cons. I received an email from School Guide on 1st Oct as follows relating to this review on Trustpilot and the one I wrote about my children's school on their web site:

"We do not consult schools or share reviews before publication unless there is any question mark for our moderators around any element of content which can include comments about senior management.

Your review was shared 100% anonymously with the school and we are unable to publish the review at this time due to information provided by the school."

My comment referring to senior management:
"The second issue (in my opinion) is senior management's inability to listen or take on board issues that parents raise. I have found that points I have raised are met with a defensive response or total denial. "

In my conclusion I wrote why I have rated the school positively and then wrote:
"but marked the school down due to the poor attitude of senior management".

Senior management is a group of people, not one individual.

So basically they do consult the school and it would seem that the school said no! I sent an email back on the same day asking them to elaborate on this and they ignored me! This confirms my original theory to be as I thought!

The school I reviewed currently has nine reviews all with 5 stars. A few years ago the school went through a dark chapter with the head teacher suddenly leaving after numerous parents removed their children from the school! A new head came in temporarily and the school improved. Two years ago the current head joined and things have started going down hill again. I notice that there are no negative reviews for this school on School Guide during this dark period or the recent issues, yet there were negative reviews left on other web sites during the dark chapter. Interesting, hey!

I will never use this web site as they are clearly checking reviews (presumably not 5 star reviews though) with the schools and I fail to see how they can consider themselves to be unbiased, reliable and trustworthy with this being the case. £30ish per month is a lot of money to pay for a web site that is allowing input from schools in this way. A friend of mine has an account with them and from what I can see, much of the information they hold is available from other sources for free anyway, so I just don't see any reason to subscribe.

I misunderstood a response that they were simply rejecting a request. The timing meant that they had a influx of requests due to school application deadlines, and so were just advising of this. They promptly responded very well to the initial request with professionalism and accuracy. Much appreciated.

Lots of available data all in one place. You could (I imagine) find all this info on each individual school but here you can easily compare whatever metric you decide.

Took a while but my children have finally found a great school. Honestly I do not think we would have aimed for this one without all the information here.

Comprehensive school guide. Very helpful in selecting schools.

School Guide has been an invaluable source of information and advice at each stage of my children's education. Having all the relevant data in one place made comparing and choosing schools a lot easier.
My youngest is just about to leave school and I'll miss going to your website for the latest educational news and parenting tips.

**UPDATE**
The day after my review here, I got refunded and got 3 replies from 2 people as well.
Victoria, the founder & CEO of schoolguide, had sent me a nice informative email about why cancelling my subscription got delayed, and how she is trying to sort out this problem currently to avoid such cases in future.
Hence, I updated my review & upgraded the rating to 4 stars.

**Original post**
Again the same issue as with the latest 2 customers here, Mathi & yt.S. I AM NOT ABLE TO CANCEL THE SUBSCRIPTION.

I had sent an email to contact @schoolguide.co.uk asking to cancel my subscription, as per their own instructions on the website. Only to be surprised the other day that they took the renewal fees from me. I tried calling their number, only to find someone answering who was run out of vocabulary and kept saying "Sorry, I don't deal with subscription, and can't help you" in a very cold way, as if she was used to such calls. I tried to explain that nobody is replying to my emails, and she kept repeating her sentence again and again in a monotonous voice!
I sent them another email with all the details and asked them again to cancel the subscription and refund me the new month fees they took from me after my email, and again NO ANSWER.

As I mentioned earlier, it seems like I am not the only one who is going through this.
Please avoid them, till they sort out this situation!

And in case they see my post, and reply here.
My email is aboelella2005 and it is gmail, and I had sent you cancellation email on 20/05/24 at 12:56, then another one same day at 15:24. Then another email on 21/05/24 at 15:12.

[Latest update]
It turned out their previous reply was filtered by Yahoo. The Apple Pay pre-authorized merchant list could be misleading, still shows the monthly subscription. I will remove it manually in this case. It would be good if they could introduce self service UI for subscribe/unsubscribe, so no email is required.

[Update on 25th March 2024]
It's promising that they responded swiftly to the Trustpilot case. However, they've also requested genuine experience verification from Trustpilot. Trustpilot's system notified me that if I don't act on the verification within 3 days, my post will be removed. I already completed the verification process and also reached out via email to Victoria from School Guide. Now, we wait to see their next move.

[Original]
I found myself in the exact same situation as Mathi. I attempted to cancel my subscription two weeks ago, only to discover there was no readily available method to do so. I've been making monthly payments through Apple Pay, assuming it would be straightforward to request cancellation through them. However, Apple Pay informed me that revoking payment for pre-authorized merchants isn't possible, and I would need to contact the merchant directly.

Upon visiting the website, I attempted to reach out to their customer service via phone, only to find that they do not handle cancellations over the phone. The only avenue for unsubscribing is through email. I promptly sent an email to contactAtschoolguide.co.uk but have yet to receive any response after two weeks.

With another charge looming, it's highly probable that I will be billed again soon. I'll continue to monitor the situation and provide updates here. If the issue remains unresolved, I'll have no choice but to involve legal counsel to rectify the matter.

I would recommend School Guide to any parent to help with the decision making process of choosing a school. The website makes all the information very clear and easier to make comparisons between schools.

Thank you very much. You’ve helped us to choose school for our daughter.
The website provided all info we needed. Moreover the customer service team was very professional, responsive and helpful. Sure I’ll use it again for the next school choice 😀

The school really helps all students and is the best environment for learning I really think you should choose this school.

The information and comparisons are all very useful and comprehensive which has helped me a lot in selecting the best school for my child. Thank you so much to School Guide.

I found the app really useful when reviewing local schools as part of my daughter’s primary application. I’m not originally from the area where I live and didn’t have any anecdotal experiences from others to draw on. The app helped me understand the various catchment areas, parent feedback, and how each school is performing, as well as allowing me to create comparative reports.
I have recommended this app to other parents and won’t hesitant to do to others in the future.

This website has been incredibly helpful, well worth the money we spent on our subscription. We are relocating and had very little local knowledge. We were able to base all the house viewings we did on the comparison results we could access through School Guide and have now bought a house near a very good secondary school as a result.

This house choice and move would have been much more difficult without it - thank you for giving us more confidence in our move.

the information they have on this site was invaluable when it came to choosing a school for our daughters. we were moving to a new area so their catchment maps took all the head ache out if choosing where we needed to live to be sure if getting the primary place we wanted

We weren’t sure where to start when our daughter was going to secondary school and came across School Guide, we found school websites all sounded the same and couldn’t really compare schools like for like without digging around for it, this really helped us compare everything all in one place and gave us a good flavour of what was available in our area, it was an excellent starting place and found the parent reviews super helpful.

I have found Schoolguide so helpful when looking for the right school for our son in our new home. It has really detailed info about all the schools in the area and is right up to date. Highly recommended.

Valuable information which was up-to-date and very helpful when researching schools