As a small one form entry school, I took up a 2 month free trial of the big classroom to explore links to our school values, citizenship targets and endeavours to raise cultural capital among ou... Vis mer
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Really aggressive company who send emails to spam then tie you in to subscribe. Criminal. This company should not be associated with education. Lee especially is incredibly rude but well- scripted (j... Vis mer
Selskapet har svart
Another headteacher who fell for the scam. Companies should NOT be able to automatically subscribe you once the free trial expires. Free trials should be just and that school's should have to opt in... Vis mer
An absolutely awful company. We felt ‘entrapped’ by their approach and had no choice but to pay. They collect data about IP addresses, read receipts etc and word emails in a way that makes you m... Vis mer
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ZERO STARS - SCAMMED!
As a small one form entry school, I took up a 2 month free trial of the big classroom to explore links to our school values, citizenship targets and endeavours to raise cultural capital among our pupils.
However, we were stung with an auto renewal invoice at the end of this period and then aggressively chased for payment with interest added. Be warned - Big Classroom do not clearly signpost their payment terms and intentionally make their Ts&Cs inaccessible.
When we raised concerns, we were told a reminder email about cancelling the trial to avoid renewal had been sent 2 weeks before, however this email was not received, nor did it go into a spam folder as they suggested and the persistent demands for payment continued.
With school budgets already stretched and with funds allocated for the year ahead, paying an invoice for hundreds of pounds for a platform that wasn’t something we wished to purchase has directly impacted the enrichment and outcomes for all our pupils.
1. juli 2025
Anmeldelse skrevet uten oppfordring
Svar fra Big Classroom
Dear LRW, i'm not sure which school you are from so i cannot comment on specifics. However, our T&C's are clearly marked and very accessible. There is a link to them on our join page when you registered, another in the Membership confirmation sent immediately after you joined (which contained your log in details) and another link in the reminder email, which we sent and i am able to provide you with a delivery receipt which proves it was sent. The cost and auto renewal is very clearly marked right next to the button your school clicked to join and confirmed they are again in the following two emails.
Another headteacher who fell for the…
Another headteacher who fell for the scam. Companies should NOT be able to automatically subscribe you once the free trial expires. Free trials should be just and that school's should have to opt in once the trial expires. Personally I feel this is a complete con beware. They target busy headteachers who receive hundreds of emails every day and therefore miss the opt out deadline email.
17. juli 2025
Anmeldelse skrevet uten oppfordring
I concur with all previous comments
I concur with all previous comments. No respect for schools and deficit budgets. In my view, a scam.
20. juni 2025
Anmeldelse skrevet uten oppfordring
Svar fra Big Classroom
We only supply our service to schools that request it and their budgets are not our responsibility. We would absolutely prefer it if schools with a deficit budget did not register for our service.
Crooks
A total scam. A shameful way for a company to operate. How can they say you owe £500 for setting up an email address? The are zero stars not one star.
13. juni 2025
Anmeldelse skrevet uten oppfordring
Svar fra Big Classroom
I'm not sure you understand what we do. Firstly we only charge £400 and we don't set up any email addresses for anyone. We create a profile on our site for you and all the staff you register and we then link your school with 4-6 contrasting schools every half term. This is the basic outline of what we do, although there are other benefits to having the service. Of course we only do this after someone has completed a 2 page registration to request our service and we only charge £400 after you have had at least 2 months free of charge in which to trial our service. If it's not for you, all you have to do is email us before the renewal and request cancellation. We even send a reminder email 2 weeks before any payment is required. It is your responsibility to use the service, we cannot do this for you.
Outrageous Business Etiquette
Shameful bullying, harassment, menacing behaviour and should be ashamed of themselves. Supposed to be professional and support educational establishments. Maybe it is they who need to go back to school and be educated in manners and politeness. Previous reviews fully support this. Maybe think about where your wages come from, clearly scamming money that should be used for our children's education.
29. mai 2025
Anmeldelse skrevet uten oppfordring
Svar fra Big Classroom
Dear Rob,
Thank you for your review. If you could provide me more information regarding any bullying, harassment or menacing behaviour we will investigate immediately. Apologies if you have been treated with anything other than respect and politeness.
We aim to provide a good service, which we feel is very worthwhile and when utilised by schools is very valuable.
I couldn't give no stars unfortunately…
I couldn't give no stars unfortunately - very poor customer service, emails not clear and 100% a trap for any school. When schools are already having cuts to budgets maybe a change in their approach would be a better advert.
11. juni 2025
Anmeldelse skrevet uten oppfordring
Svar fra Big Classroom
If you could give me more information regarding the particulars of your school we would be happy to investigate. We make the cost and cancellation requirement clear in writing on 3 separate occasions and do not agree that it is a trap in anyway. As long as schools engage with what they have registered for they will get good value for money.
Yeehaw
An extra star, because you've got to respect the dedication that these guys reply to every single review. But it is proper cowboy stuff this!
10. juni 2025
Anmeldelse skrevet uten oppfordring
Fraudsters
This company are what they call bottom feeders. It is a scam - they are fraudsters.
They allege you have signed up to their service but provide no proof. They simply mention a staff name who registered, but the name is readily available on our website anyway, and then charge you for a "subscription" that you have not signed up for. They show no tangible evidence where we have actively communicated with them and asked to be signed up.
They also lie about the number of schools that sign up to their service in order to entice you in their spam emails. How do we know it is a lie? Because they happened to mention several of our schools in our trust, and we know for a fact our other schools had not signed up.
They can pretend. They can deny all they like on here, but the number of reviews on here speak for themselves.
Shameless bottom feeders.
27. september 2024
Anmeldelse skrevet uten oppfordring
Svar fra Big Classroom
This is simply untrue. If you tell me the name of your school I will show on here the evidence of the registration. But I doubt you will because you will have already been sent the evidence of the registration and know it to be accurate. Also if you provide me the names of the other schools in your trust I would be happy to provide on here the evidence of their registrations, with their permission of course.
"The Big Classroom: Misleading Schools for Profit"
The Big Classroom's actions reflect a company that prioritises profit over genuine support for schools. Their dismissive responses to criticism and lack of recent positive reviews only highlight the growing disconnect between their promises and reality.
Exhausted, overworked teachers—already stretched to their limits—are falling into this trap, believing they are the only ones who haven’t signed up. In reality, every school in the local area has already pulled out, yet The Big Classroom continues bombarding staff with misleading emails. These emails repeatedly imply that a school is the only one yet to join, exploiting teachers' goodwill and pressure to do the ‘right thing’ for their pupils.
Retrospectively, the entire operation feels like a hoax—poorly formatted emails in red text, mismatched fonts, and varying sizes, reminiscent of something a 14-year-old might cobble together. However, the presentation cleverly mimics small local charities or even official organisations like TfL, making it easy to mistake for something genuine.
But businesses built on dishonesty and manipulation rarely stand the test of time. As the saying goes, "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time."
9. mars 2025
Anmeldelse skrevet uten oppfordring
Svar fra Big Classroom
Hi Sophi,
We have tried to provide support for your school, but you haven't used our service so it is impossible for us. You have signed up for a service and then never used it, this makes it very difficult for us to provide good value. Unfortunately, we are reliant on people to actually use the service we provide.
All we did is send an email offering you our service, which you obviously thought was a good idea.
I don't quite understand how you can say our email looks like it was sent by a 14 year old on the one hand, but also sent from an official organisation on the other.
A joke, makes me laugh.
You sent us an email that we have a court action for not paying up to £700. This was 2 years ago. Surely, if you really felt you were in your rights to receive your rightful money, shouldn't you be protesting for it till this very day and actually do something about it? The fact that you dropped your case so easily, just shows how nonchalant you are about the whole thing and that it really is a scam.
29. januar 2024
Anmeldelse skrevet uten oppfordring
Svar fra Big Classroom
Dear Sou Sou,
Thank you for your review, if you could let me know which school you are from i would be happy to investigate. I'm not aware of us dropping any court action we had instigated, but would be happy to look into it further for you.
Very unethical company...AVOID.
Very unethical company...AVOID.
16. januar 2025
Anmeldelse skrevet uten oppfordring
Unethical scam
Unethical scam
It is an entirely unethical company that uses legal loopholes to take much-needed funds from vulnerable children, families, schools, and communities. Do not engage with them in any way!
Please keep sharing these warnings with colleagues in different schools.
9. januar 2025
Anmeldelse skrevet uten oppfordring
Svar fra Big Classroom
Unfortunately, you haven't given any specific reason as to why you think it is unethical or a scam so it is difficult for me to respond. I would be happy to investigate further if you could give me more detail.
I don't seem to be able to give a zero.
I don't seem to be able to give a zero.
An unethical and immoral organisation with a marketing approach designed to pressure, mislead and entrap. Do not touch with a bargepole.
9. januar 2025
Anmeldelse skrevet uten oppfordring
Svar fra Big Classroom
We are very sorry you feel this way. All we did was send you an email with an offer to try our service, apologies if this put you under pressure. It is not our intention to mislead or entrap, the cost and cancellation are made clear in writing on several occasions and we only provide our service when it is explicitly requested by completing a 2 page registration form.
Parasitic company grabbing school funds
Our schools are part of a large disability charity and provide education for vulnerable young people with limited resources.
As people say, and you can see plainly from the endless patronising responses, they operate a system where schools may not spot a subscription trap. Legal? Yes. Ethical? Absolutely not. Check out the schoolsweek article on these lot.
Refusing to end subs that have only just renewed and acting in the manner they plainly do from reviews and media coverage is a disgrace.
Clearly the owners of this company think it's OK to parasitise school children's educational resources. Great job guys.....
11. november 2024
Anmeldelse skrevet uten oppfordring
Svar fra Big Classroom
Dear Joshua, I'm not sure which school you're from, if you could let me know and then i can investigate further. In your review you don't mention if you're actually a customer or not.
We do have strict procedures for renewal and make the renewal date and cost very clear when schools register. It is an expensive service for us to provide and we want schools to take it seriously and use the service we provide.
The automatic renewal is extremely clear and a common marketing practice and if people don't approve they can simply not sign up.
An absolutely awful company
An absolutely awful company. We felt ‘entrapped’ by their approach and had no choice but to pay. They collect data about IP addresses, read receipts etc and word emails in a way that makes you misunderstand what they’re offering.
Whilst their approach may be legal, and they have this information in emails, it’s not as obvious as it should be.
It’s interesting that they send emails from different addresses so auto renewal notices go to junk.
Avoid them at all costs in my opinion!
4. oktober 2024
Anmeldelse skrevet uten oppfordring
Svar fra Big Classroom
I feel your review is disingenuous and contains several untruths and omissions, like the majority on Trustpilot. Firstly, I'd like to point out that initially you insisted that nobody at your school registered for our service. We explained to you who had registered and provided basic evidence. You continued to insist that was not true and suggested we were operating a scam and were going to your LA's fraud dept. We then provided further detailed evidence which proved it was actually you that had instructed one of your staff to register for our service. At this point you relented and admitted that your staff member did register.
Since you were unable to get out of paying for our service by accusing us of fraud, you are only now claiming that our emails were misleading.
You also know it is untrue that we send emails from different email addresses. All our emails end @bigclassroom.co.uk. Of course, the beginnings of the email addresses are different for different departments as is the case in all companies (and schools). As I pointed out to you, I was able to receive emails from several people (with different email addresses) in your school and reply to them without confusion, because they all have the same ending. To suggest everyone in our organisation should share one email address is quite frankly ridiculous.
You also know it is untrue that all our emails go to junk, because i sent you our audit logs showing usage on the website. These logs showed that your colleague did indeed log in to our website (and accept the T&C's again) and so therefore must have received our email with the login details.
You have now paid, as you were advised to by your LA legal team once they became aware of the full facts. We are of course sorry that you are not satisfied with your experience, but we make a very simple offer of a free trail with a subscription at the end if not cancelled. You knew exactly what you were getting into and were happy to engage on that basis. I feel your behaviour has been dishonest, unprofessional and misleading from the start and when you didn't get your own way, you have resorted to mudslinging and baseless accusations.
A company that was not prepared to…
A company that was not prepared to compromise or offer a solution to a school that signed up for a free trial and then sent emails alerting us of the end period using another email that was then spam filtered. It was our fault initially for not being hotter on this but i suspect as most schools are very busy with next to no admin, an easy mistake, especially when they used a different email to let us know! At the time I demonstrated that we had not used the system at all and apologised for not getting in touch to cancel. It was their attitude after this that was in my mind disappointing. there was no compromise or understanding, just demands for the whole years subscription for the school. Having read other reviews regarding this company I can see that despite many complaints, they are still operating uder the same premise, which makes me wonder if this is a practice that they endorse. Surely a reputable Education company (and I deal with loads) would see that this is not a good business plan and would change the way they operate, but not Big Classrom!
11. desember 2023
Anmeldelse skrevet uten oppfordring
Really aggressive company: AVOID
Really aggressive company who
send emails to spam then tie you in to subscribe. Criminal. This company should not be associated with education. Lee especially is incredibly rude but well- scripted (judging by all these awful reviews he has had lots of experience!). Hopefully, word of mouth will ensure people do not subscribe. They also need to work on their telephone manner.
22. juli 2024
Anmeldelse skrevet uten oppfordring
Svar fra Big Classroom
Dear Joe, I don't understand how you can accuse us of being aggressive when it is you that keeps calling us to demand a refund. All our calls are recorded and I have reviewed both of the calls which you made to Lee. In both instances you were rude and aggressive to Lee and verbally insulting to Lee personally. You have admitted that you registered for our service, but then never bothered to use it. You claim our emails go into spam when it suits you, but strangely you received our sales email and you also received the email Lee sent you 2 days ago whilst you were on the phone with him. I would be happy to provide recordings of the calls for your Trust's Leadership team and School governors, for them to take a view on who was aggressive and needs work on their telephone manner and in my opinion was resorting to bullying tactics because they weren't getting their own way. I don't expect you would tolerate such behaviour from your own pupils. If you had spent half as much time using our service as you have harassing Lee, then I feel you may have got good value for money.
a Legal scam
My school has also fallen foul to their scam albeit legal.
Clearly all the reviews on here are saying the same thing about their subscription money maker.
If big classroom want better reviews then clearly they need to to do the right thing and not auto sign up schools and simply do the opposite which is to charge the schools upfront after a trial rather than the unethical thing they do now.
26. juni 2024
Anmeldelse skrevet uten oppfordring
Svar fra Big Classroom
It is not a scam, because as you say it is legal. It is also not unethical, many, many companies use this same business model, such as Netflix, Amazon, Go Fresh, magazine subscriptions, etc. These companies (ourselves included) do this to ensure that people registering take the free trial seriously. If you don't like auto renewal free trials then you have the very simple option of not signing up. Apologies if i come sound sarcastic, i just don't know what else to say, you didn't have to register and the cost and auto renewal was confirmed at every stage (4 times in writing).
They operate just within the law.....
This company just operates within the limits of the law/regulations. To warn possible customers this is how they operate:
1. They send out a circular email to all schools in a certain area / local authority.
This advert is made to look like something that the Local Authority would send out itself. A list of schools that have apparently signed up is provided though it turns out that not all of the schools have actually signed up. They send out repeated reminders if you do not sign up and also target other staff members from the same school.
2. They offer a free start period of a few months and clearly hope that whoever signed up will forget.
3. The actual website/service is very poor and is basically just a social network for schools.
4. They make their money because schools do not read the small print and they forget to cancel in the allotted time.
5. When challenged on this they are very unhelpful and show no interest in providing a refund to schools. Their whole tone quickly changes and it also becomes clear that this is a very small company.
A reputable company would not allow an auto-renewal option to be a possibility, They would only renew after receiving an official school email confirming that the school is now happy to pay over £400 for an annual subscription.
They did cancel the late payment charges but this was hardly a victory as we had to pay for a service that we did not use or need.
It is also interesting to note that they spend a lot of time on Trust Pilot defending the dubious practice of getting payments through auto-renewals. However they spend no time trying to actually claim or prove that their website provide a service that is value for money or useful for schools.
I have rarely seen a company with a lower rating on trust pilot and that includes firms covered on the BBC Rogue Traders Programme.
It shows the importance / value of checking websites like trust pilot as a quick check would have made me aware of this dodgy outfit.
I have added this review (even though it is 9 months after our experience) after I became aware of the sheer volume of customers who have had a similar experience to my school and feel strongly that all UK schools need to be aware of this company.
13. september 2023
Anmeldelse skrevet uten oppfordring
Svar fra Big Classroom
To respond to your points:
1. We do send an email out, but it in no way looks like it is from the Local Authority. It comes from @bigclassroom.co.uk and in no way insinuates or say it is from anywhere else, nor does it include any other company/Local Authority logo. Every single school listed has registered on our website. We only sent you 4 emails over a 2 month period and we only sent them to members of the school's senior leadership team.
2. We do offer a free trial period, but we hope that you will use it and not that you will forget and that is why we send you a reminder email 2 weeks before the end of the trial encouraging you to use it or cancel.
3. A social network for schools is exactly what it is and exactly what we state it is on the website and it is absolutely useless if you don't bother to use it, but very useful if you do take the time to use the service you registered for. We have been running for 9 years now and have clients that are still with us since registering in 2016, so we must be doing something right.
4. You don't need to read the small print. The cost and cancellation requirements are front and centre on the Join page of our website, right next to the button you have to click to join.
5. We are a small company working very hard to provide a service which we feel is increasingly important, especially given the current state of world affairs and the alarming divisions across our country. The tone of the phone call we had with you did change very quickly when you threatened us with legal action and then hung up on us. You called us back the same day and apologised and admitted you were in the wrong. You then made payment shortly after. All our calls are recorded if you would like a copy of these calls.
Unfortunately, we do have to defend ourselves on Trustpilot (we would be criticised if we ignored them) because people don't give all the facts, just the ones that suit their narrative.
If you don't think it is unethical for companies to use auto renewal subscriptions, there is a simple solution - don't sign up to them. However, many people like them because it gives you an opportunity to try a service at no cost, but we ask one thing in return and that is that you pay it some attention. Companies do it to stop people signing up on a whim and wasting their resources because they don't take it seriously. Many companies do this from Netflix and Amazon, Go fresh, magazine subscriptions etc. If you don't like this business model, don't get involved, but when you do, you have to take responsibility for your actions.
Do not sign up to look at this company…
Do not sign up to look at this company - They sting you by trying to auto renew, do not send invoice in time to cancel and refuse to except they are in the wrong. They hide the renewal in a marketing emails so you miss it then threaten legal action when they have not even got a purchase order.
4. juni 2024
Anmeldelse skrevet uten oppfordring
Svar fra Big Classroom
It is very clear when registering on our website that the subscription auto renews the following text is displayed right next to the Confirmation button:
By clicking the Confirm button you agree to our Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy, and confirm you are authorised to register your school. You will receive 2 months free membership before your annual subscription starts (at a cost of £400 + VAT per annum) and you can cancel your subscription at any point during the promotional 2 months.
We do not send an invoice until it becomes due, but we send a reminder email 2 weeks before.
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