Northern Beaches Secondary College Manly Campus

Been at the school since Year 7. Seniors are taught by multiple incompetent teachers. Facilities are poor and executive staff have no care for anything apart from results.

Teachers don't care about students and constantly complain about their pay (majority don't do this but students have realised that this is almost exclusive to the English staff). Maybe if they did their jobs instead of complaining then they would get paid more for a job that already isn't very difficult. I have realised that the majority of the HSIE teachers are not like this and are helpful and genuinely caring when it comes to students' learning and education. Teachers also express their political views in class which I believe should be kept away from a secondary education space as they are not relevant to the majority of subjects that are taught at the school. Overall, the school doesn't place an emphasis on the practical education of students and the facilities are old and broken. The school's solution to this was building a 4.5 million dollar hall that is completely unnecessary instead of fixing fans in rooms or cleaning the bathrooms so there isn't fecal matter in the flooded urinals

Excellent school, big grounds, friendly environment

NBSC Manly is very highly regarded among Sydneysiders as an academically excellent school due to the fact that it is an academically selective school, which for the most part, is true. However, there is more to the school than meets the eye. I have been at the school since Year 7 and am now a senior, so I have interacted with almost all of the faculty, and I think it’s fair to say that some of them are fairly incompetent. There are certainly some excellent teachers, particularly in the humanities factulties, however, many of my peers end up teaching themselves the courses for many other subjects as the teachers just read from textbooks or powerpoints. Despite this though, students are encountering to excel academically and advanced courses are always taken meaning that teachers are expected to know the content of higher standards which is a lot to ask. Until senior years, all courses (apart from Maths) are not streamed meaning that the whole year cohort undertakes the same courses. This can be extremely helpful for collaboration and group studying, however, it comes with one very unfortunate downside. The school is EXTREMELY competitive, despite what the faculty will tell you, students at the school are always competing for the best marks (and the margins are usually extremely slim due to the fact that all students are of similar intellect). This creates a very unhealthy and impractical mentality that you must be outperforming your peers to do well in school, when in actual fact, everyone at the school is gifted and talented, you have to be to get in. The facilities at Manly are also extremely poor, the buildings in the school are all falling apart (literally) and the classrooms are ill-equipped, only about half the rooms have working fans and none of the classrooms have air conditioning which make summer classes in some areas literally unbearable - the school is entirely made from dark red bricks so the whole school and especially 2nd and 3rd story rooms get extraordinarily hot. The bathrooms are horrendous, I personally avoid them entirely but this is to be expected at any government school. Allocation of funding is also a frustrating issue, student bodies such as the SRC are extremely rarely consulted on matters of funding meaning that you end up spending money on things students don’t want. Just recently, the school has built a new gymnasium for $4.5 million which the student body overwhelmingly opposes. Despite this reckless allocation of taxpayer money, classrooms still lack basic equipment and air conditioning and teachers across the state are still payed miserably low wages. Overall, Manly could be an excellent school but due to poor management, an overall lack of adequately qualified teachers and the competitive environment, it unfortunately cannot meet its potential.