Big Classroom レビュー 

I would have given this ZERO stars if it was an option! This company is a scam please DO NOT sign up to a FREE trial. If you do this then you will probably end up paying then £300 for a service that you do not want! A Bremen of staff signed up for a FREE trial then a couple of months later our school received an invoice for £300.00. At no point did our school want this service or receive the emails that they said they had sent telling us about the payment. I am taking legal advice as i think a lot of schools have had the same problem and we do not want this service and will not be using it!

Awful. This school preys on busy People. They lure you in with the idea of a free trial. I downloaded 1 resource then thought I’d never use it. Didn’t notice emails saying they were going to renew after free trial at a cost of £300. No order number. No credit card number. No written or email by reply confirmation. Can any other schools who have also been scammed please contact me as I’d like to take this to Rip Off Britain. Thanks

I recommend that anyone who reads these reviews emails their school staff and advises them of the danger of signing up to this service and services like it. At our school a member of staff (not a budget holder, it could be anyone!) signed up for a trial after hearing about it at a meeting somewhere. As is so normal these days they hit the accept button and thought it wouldn’t matter as it was just a trial.

They then only send correspondence by email, email which is easily overlooked by extremely busy staff. Emails that are not from the same email address used during sign up.

Sadly we have had to pay despite approaching legal services. It is immoral that this firm use aggressive marketing techniques and charge schools for a service that we have not used at all since signing up for the free trial.

There is no cooling off period, despite cancelling immediately after receiving a paper invoice (which only arrived after the cancellation date) arrived, we were still held to a full years cost. To take money from schools for a service that has not been used at all is nothing short of taking money straight away from children. I am appalled by this company.

Do not use this company.

This is another review from a school who has been conned out of £360 following a "free trial" of the service. You are unable to see content without signing up for this trial. I call it a con because it's an opt-out service which is very poor practice.

Replies here to poor reviews saying that you get 4 reminders are not true. You get one reminder, and that is from an email address that is not immediately identifiable as Big Classroom and is different from the registration email address.

I spoke with one of their account managers for some time. He was uninterested in any discussion and refused to consider cancelling our subscription. They are unconcerned about schools' funding shortages : the account manager I spoke with said "Yeah, and we're a small business and you cost us money as we provided you with a service". They treat schools as fellow businesses and do not have issues taking money from increasingly tight budgets.

I wouldn't trust the 5 star reviews posted here - 5 stars is a very high rating for the luke warm reviews that accompany them.

This is an unethical company with an aggressive marketing model which relies on trapping busy school employees into spending money.

They are well aware that their business model is unethical; they do not care.

Another school tricked into paying to a service that has not been accessed. Most inflexible and unsympathetic approach.

Sales team completely uninterested in the fact that no one has accessed the materials during the free trial period. When challenged about the fact that this seems to be a pattern of 'catching schools out' and relying on busy people with 100s of e mails a day to respond they were not having any of it. BIg Classroom also claimed only a few reviews were poor.
This being the case I will endeavor to share my concerns as a school leader as widely as possible through educational channels and social media. In the first instance I will ensure that all schools in our local area are e mailed with information and also ensure that the local authority bulletin to Primary and Secondary schools has an alert to schools. Most companies working in education have a moral purpose balanced with their business ethic and this one clearly does not.

Been using Big Classroom for a while now, I really like it as it’s easy to use to help the pupils communicate directly with different communities all over the country. It’s good value as long as you actually use it. We dip in and out of it with different classes throughout the year. You get out of it as much as you put into it. The more proactive you are with other members the better, ideally you need to be asking other members to work with you on different projects.

Overall I would recommend if you can spare time to use it.

I am the the head of a small primary school, and received a marketing email from The Big Classroom offering me a free trial of the system.

I signed up for a trial via their website which was a quick and easy process.

The service didn't look that useful so it was put to one side and forgot about it.

A big mistake!

At the end of the trial I received an email saying the trial had expired and £300 + VAT was now due.

Under their terms and conditions payments must be made within within 7 days with penalties for "late" payment. Most suppliers give 15 or 30 days grace for payment to be made. 7 days is quite short.

The following is copied direct from their terms and conditions:

"...all amounts due from the Member to Big Classroom shall be paid within 7 days of the date of Big Classroom’s invoice..."

"If the Member fails to make a Payment due to Big Classroom under the terms of the agreement by the due date then....Big Classroom may charge the Member (i) an admin fee of £40.00... and (ii) interest on the overdue sum from the due date until payment of the overdue sum... Interest under this clause will accrue each day at 8% a year above the Bank of England’s base rate..."

Note the interest rate is 8 percent ABOVE the BoE base rate - currently low but if it was to rise to 5 percent, the interest charged by The Big Classroom would be 13 percent!

I contacted the company and explained I hadn't used nor did I want to use the product and that I'd simply forgotten about the trial. I explained that as a busy head teacher its easy for things to get missed.

I also explained we are a small village school on a very tight budget and £360 was something we could ill afford to waste. Given I'd not used the account I hope they might be understanding.

However they wouldn't budge - I'd left it too late to cancel ( you must cancel 7 days BEFORE the trial ends ) and so the monies were owed.

A good product shouldn't need such heavy handed sales techniques. Their marketing technique is reliant on people forgetting about the trial and failing to cancel sufficient time in advance.

If you do sign up for a free trial with them, its important to be aware of the consequences of failing to cancel with 7 days notice before the trial expires. And also be aware of the quite harsh, in my opinion, penalties for being more than 7 days late with your payment.

And if you have signed up for a free trial and locked in their cancellation policy, be aware its a rolling contract - so unless you cancel with sufficient notice, you'll be forced in to a second year of payments.

I note the company has had a lot of negative reviews over the last 4 months. Suddenly a flood of 5 star reviews have appeared within 10 days of each other....

The company, asked me to write a quick comment. We took out a free trial a little while ago , sadly we did it get to utilise and cancelled the free trial. Which was really easy to do, I will be looking at this again when I have some more time as it seems a nice easy site to use.

Took a free trial with big classroom, used it, liked it but could not afford at the moment so cancelled, no problems

I have been asked to do this review as we have just had a free trial with Big Classroom. Unfortunately time got away from us and we never managed to give it our full attention so we just emailed them to cancel. No problems, they were really helpful and everything was made clear from the start.

1 Star is too much for this company. The product is virtually non-existent and offers very little in the way of value. You would find better quality information with a 5 second search online. It appears this company bombard schools with messages of an amazing product and push them to take part in a free trial, however failure to serve notice equals a hefty bill to which they don't budge on. We are currently working with our legal team as the company are far from ethical and should not play any role in the education sector. With my experience of dealing with Big Classroom, their level of customer service is extremely poor and unethical. They do not demonstrate any compassion and their business model appears to be tailored to tricking schools into parting with public money.

Nice little resource. Just got this couple of weeks ago for the student council to use in an after school club. They really like seeing what other schools are doing. Good fun little site and simple to use.

Do not touch this product!
This company is taking advantage of busy schools. I notice the replies to the negative feedback is 'blame the school, we sent you an email, we're just a small company'.
Like many others, signing up for the 'free trial' has left us feeling like we have been 'conned'. Now billed with no get out, for a product which we won't use.
Let's wait for the 'it's your fault' reply.

I really like the product, we’ve been using it for a couple of years and it’s a really easy way to communicate with other schools. The nice thing is that they suggest 4 or 5 new schools a term for us to speak to and they are usually different to our school.

Did not meet our expectations. Big Classroom obviously know their product isn't up to scratch - they do not make it easy for their customers to end their subscription.

I do not recommend this product.

Awful. The Big Classroom makes money by taking advantage of busy, unaware schools. This money is then taking away from the resources that go towards children’s learning. Avoid.

I thought i had better leave a review to balance things out a bit. I had a free trial with them last year, but never found the time to use it. They sent me a reminder email towards the end of the trial, which I just replied to saying I wished to cancel as I hadn’t found the time to use it. They replied immediately thanking me for trying it and saying I would be welcome to have another free trial in the future. I’ve just signed up again, which is why I stumbled across these reviews. In my opinion they make the cost and the auto renewal very clear several times throughout the process. Hopefully I’ll have time to use it this half term and give another review about the actual product, as I think it is a great idea, so I hope it lives up to it’s potential.

This organisation are signing schools up for a trial with no service offered at the end. This is happening all over the UK. Do not sign up for a free trial!They do not provide sufficient answers to emails and pressure schools into paying the invoice. Preying on teacher/schools who are short of time and money. Threatening legal proceedings etc. I will be spreading the word across our local authority and to all my education contacts on twitter.

Disgraceful company, please avoid. Colleague received an email invite for a free trial, signed up but ultimately never even logged in due to workload. School was invoiced for a full year membership after the trial finished. Emails from the company were very vague and terms and conditions would be easily missed.

Company refused to cancel order and continually demanded payment. Shame on them for attempting to take money from schools whose budgets are already stretched. If their product was good enough they wouldn't need a business model that relied on 'tricking' hard working schools into signing up for their expensive service.

An utterly awful company - avoid them like the plague!!! As with others, aggressively chased payment for an unauthorized person signing in, not realising what she was committing to. The Big Classroom threatened legal action if we did not pay in full, despite the service never being used, as the person immediately realised the site is of no use. Incredibly poor customer-relations skills, an awful bullying attitude, and on top if it all - they offer nothing of value to schools. Avoid avoid avoid - they won't last much longer, I hope!!