Parent
The school has many wonderful, dedicated teachers, and our child was fortunate to be taught by some truly caring and committed professionals.
Unfortunately, our experience with the school leadership, especially the new leadership, was very different. Over the last school year, we increasingly felt that parents’ concerns were not genuinely listened to, questions were often met defensively, and there seemed to be little willingness to engage in meaningful dialogue or reconsider decisions.
We experienced the leadership style as rather rigid and lacking in empathy. Mistakes can happen in any school, but what concerned us was the leadership’s difficulty — and at times seeming inability — to acknowledge mistakes, take responsibility for them, and address them openly.
We also felt that financial and operational considerations were given far greater weight than the needs of the children. Children seemed to be treated more as numbers within a system than as individuals. One particularly concerning example was seeing classes of very young children merged, separated and later reorganised again as circumstances changed, in ways that appeared to be driven primarily by financial and operational considerations, with seemingly little regard for the relationships and sense of security the children had already developed.
More broadly, in our experience, the leadership had a tendency to make significant decisions affecting students suddenly, without introducing changes gradually, and with little apparent consideration of their wider impact. As parents, this created a sense of unpredictability: it became difficult to trust that important aspects of our child’s school life would remain stable, or that major changes would be approached with sufficient care and sensitivity.
What made this especially disappointing was the stark contrast between our experience with the leadership and the dedication and care shown by many individual teachers.
Ultimately, we no longer had sufficient confidence in the school’s leadership to continue our child’s education there.
1 other review for International School of Budapest - (Reviews aren't verified )
Parent
One of the strengths of ISB is its genuinely international environment. Children come from many different countries and backgrounds, which gives students the opportunity to grow up around different cultures and perspectives.
Our main concern was the way the school leadership handled difficult situations. In our experience, there appeared to be a tendency to interpret conflicts between children of different racial or ethnic backgrounds through the lens of racism very quickly, even when the situation was more complex. Issues involving children require careful investigation and proportionate responses, and we did not always feel that this happened.
We also found the leadership style very top-down. Parents may be given the opportunity to express their concerns, but in our experience this often felt more like a formality than genuine consultation. Once the leadership had decided wha... read full review
