British School - Muscat, The - Oman

If you are not white, you should seriously think thrice about sending your children to this place. Behind the glitzy PR spin lies a school where discrimination, nepotism and bullying (especially if your children have to join senior school) are rife. I was posted in our company's Muscat office a few years ago and coming from the UK, BSM seemed a natural choice for my children. Unfortunately we didn't know anybody out there with children in the school nor is there much in terms of frank and impartial reviews about the place on the web.

Luckily my younger child was in primary school and settling in was relatively easier. Unlucky for us, my older child was senior school age and had an experience which can only be described as nasty. From the very first week, the older one faced a barrage of bullying and intimidation from mainly white
students in form class as well as lessons. Some of the aggressive behaviour was clearly racist in nature and on a few occasions the staff present turned a blind eye towards it. It wouldn't be unfair to say that some of the white staff themselves encourage white pupils in senior school to behave in a colonial/supremacist like manner towards non-white pupils.

Many of the staff in the place act like they are on vacation and in some cases you really wonder how qualified they are or how they were selected. Some geriatrics even doze off in lessons e.g. science. Then you have the way abnormal ratio of staff couples where the husband teaches in one Dept and the wife in the other, never seen anything like it in the UK. And to add injury to insult, the few non-white teaching staff employed seem part of PR rather than good intentions, the most obnoxious being a Mr 'Al' Farooq a disgraceful UK Asian coconut constantly trying to prove his worth by ridiculing coloured students in front of whites.

Last but not least, signs of nepotism are visible all over the place with the children of school staff being head boy/head girl, in most if not all top sets and receiving awards etc. Very peculiar how the last Ofsted inspection team missed many of the above aspects.