Getting Google to stop reviews of our School

[PieMan]

Hi,

I work at a UK secondary school and have been tasked with 'turning off' google reviews for the school.

We have control of the business on Google, but as I'm sure you are aware there is no 'turn off reviews' button.

Has anyone had a luck either by reaching out to Google or by selecting the correct business categories in your profile to get Google to turn it off. Currently we are listed primarily as a College, with additional categories of School, Secondary School, Training Provider (causing issues?) and Sixth Form College.

Of the 10 or so closest schools one has reviews turned off but all the others do. Interestingly the one with reviews turned off doesn't appear to manage their listing.

thanks in advance

[Kim_Nilsson]

@hi @PieMan - here's feedback from a pro 😎 (a Product Expert of the product you are referring to).

"Guide them to the Google Business Profile Help Community support.google.com/business/community. For the record Reviews have been disabled for schools in 2019 then enabled for some schools, so it's not clear what their status is. They would better contact Google support via their Google Business Profile Manager profile since they have been verified. They can meanwhile flag negative reviews

https://support.google.com/business/answer/4596773

[NielsBrockmeier]

I can only agree with what Kim posted, we have control of our schools profiles as well and I haven't found a way to turn reviews off. Together with our PR department we have set some guidelines as to what reviews we do or don't allow. We flag any review including names, positive or negative. We also flag reviews that are just "School sucks" or "Lol". Any other review we don't flag, mainly because we have had an instance where Google seemed to think we were only flagging negative reviews to up our score and at the time none of our flags seemed to go through the system. 

When we did have reviews that called someone out or just said Lol etc. most of the times the names of the students would be posted with them (because apparently they don't think about that) and we would inform the mentor/counceler of said student to maybe have a talk with the student about online behaviour.

[PieMan]

Thank you both. I'll feed back to the powers that be.

[Rick2025]

We have been fighting this as well. There is no way you can turn off school reviews and google business will not turn them off. If you look them up on maps, you likely can leave a review by scrolling down the left side when you are on that page. It is not always obvious like when at the top it shows the words Reviews. I don't know anywhere in the world that you can not leave a review.  We are a k-12 district and google business should allow this by choice as a district.