Colegio Mas Camarena Reviews (6)

Awful experience This is about the school's international IB programme delivered in English. The larger Spanish language section may be different. We started the 23/24 year in Mas Camarena but took our child out because the experience was just so bad, emotionally and academically. Too many of the teachers have a very poor level of English, lacking basic correct grammar (e.g. instructions saying ‘does the homework’ not ‘do the…’) or correct vocabulary (e.g. not knowing English place names in Geography and instead using the Spanish ones, such as writing ‘Terranova’ in place of ‘Newfoundland’ etc.) for the subject they are teaching. So, the students are learning mistakes, from people teaching in a language they do not themselves speak, read or write correctly. Our child found many of them quite hard to understand and had to ask them to clarify or repeat; some (insecure) teachers attacked this as impertinence. Too many of the teachers find it difficult to understand their own students, particularly the native ones; in some cases, they try to blame this on the students themselves, saying the student’s accent is bad, they speak abnormally somehow, etc. In other words, the instructors put the blame on (i.e. ‘gaslight’) the students, for the teachers’ own inadequacies. Where to start on why this is the wrong approach to education? To be fair, the teaching of the Spanish language is good; this was a bright spot. Effectively, a lot of the students seem to transfer quickly to classes in Spanish. Initially I thought this was because they taught Spanish so well (great right?). Then I realised it was also because the classes in English were so bad it encouraged the students to make the effort to switch over to Spanish-delivered courses. There is a constant turnover of teachers, as they leave with great frequency (presumably the conditions are unattractive to them). In two months, we had a number of teachers leave and be replaced. This is very disruptive. The staff on the bus were very nice, the bus was well maintained and had a useful app for tracking it. The facilities are quite nice.

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The school has awful rules that make no sense and the children have to pay for it even though they don't know what they did wrong. Almost all the teachers here don't care about the students and don't help them out, only if you pay more of course. I recommend you don't send your children here the food and education here is just awful. Hopefully this school improves even though I don't think it ever will.

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