Living in the UK, most of the TV shows I watch are British. However, pretty much all the movies we get are American. What always fascinated me and many others in the UK about "High School" movies (eg. American Pie, Dazed and Confused etc.) is how different it seems to the UK.

I was therefore wondering if, based on your experiences, "High School" movies are a fair portrayal of real High School life in America or a Hollywood dramatisation?

For me, they're not accurate. My school was generally in control, listened to the teachers and even the band was full of the 'cool' kids. We also didn't have that much freedom, and (at least with my friends!) didn't really have any guy friends.

Hmmm. That's been along time ago, but I still think of high school fondly. Who could've known some 30 years ago that my teenage daughter would end up wearing basically the same ragged jeans and Doors tee shirts I did in ninth grade? [ circa 1972]
I think the closest portrayal of a Stateside HS during my era would be a VERY tame cross between Carrie or Fast Times At Ridgemont High , We had the jocks, the socials, the dopers and the band geeks. I was one of the bookish ones who was too eccentric to be in with the Brady Bunch types, but didn't smoke dope so I wasn't 'cool' enough for that crowd, either.

Basically, we were the kids who dreamed, talked politics at lunch and wrote short stories and poetry. My best friends were a guy who looked just like Satguru as a teenager and had a passion for silent films - which we often went to see on Friday nights at a local theatre. Another good buddy was a girl who thought of herself as a Vulcan changeling - a child of Starfleet officers off on a deep space mission. Sigh* What amazing times those were. We made films, wrote whiney emo poetry by the bushel and tried to be inscrutible [ as far as our parents would let us, anyway].

Growing up in Australia, High School was a bit different to what we saw on the silver screen.
At public (Government) schools, we all wore uniforms (for the most part, still do), so to stand out you had to do somthing a bit more obvious.
The popular girls all wore short skirts, and often stuffed their bras! There was always the differences in our school shoes, but back in the 80's there wasn't a whole lot of range in the footwear dept in our local shoe shops (Rural Australia!). So we pretty much all looked similar.
Attitudes - attitudes are all about being teenagers. The popular girls looked down their noses at pretty much everyone, except when they needed help to do their homework (and I mean do it for them, not with them), the jocks usually hung out with the popular girls, the smokers pretty much hung out together, there were the bookish ones, and the losers. It doesn't matter how many kids there are (or aren't) in a school, there is always a group that are considered losers, whose job is seems is to be tortured mercilessly by the jocks and the popular girls (I used to call them Barbies - equivalent of "the Plastics") and hopefully not go postal.
There was always a group of males known as "Sniffers", because they used to prey on younger girls (Skirt Sniffers) to encourage them to have sex (You know, the guy is 17/18, and has 14/15 year old girls just hanging off him) with him and then dump them.
Me - I was a bookish loser. My grades were good (I was always in the top 3 or 4 students in ALL my classes), but being mildly autistic I was a loser. I played sport well (represented my state in 2 different sports) but was waaaaaay to sharp for the jocks and not nearly plastic enough for the popular girls, whose idea of having a good time was getting drunk and throwing up in the vice-principals office while he called their parents..... Hmmmm, they weren't so bright.
We didn't have a Ferris Bueller type existence, nor Pretty in Pink, Breakfast Club, or even American Pie, but then again, it could have been a lot worse.
We had a couple of criminal types, but not too many, and it was usually pretty obvious what they were up to. One guy almost killed himself with a pipe-bomb he made in his own back shed (lost a hand, 50% of his vision in one eye, and now poops into a bag on his tummy), and a couple of students at different times tried to burn down the school. One was sheer stupidity (he stuffed a lit cigarette into a heating duct filled with straw so he couldn't be busted for smoking), and the other was malicious (burnt down the library because the librarian had a go at him over something trivial). He was a nasty piece of work.
I'm rambling (no surprise), but all in all, it was WAAAAY different to the movies. Probably a good thing too. Just my luck, my movie would have been "Final Destination"!!!

I think the universal themes are still present. Hollywood just over does them a little for shock value to sell tickets.

I went to a public Highschool in New Jersey years ago. It was very racially diverse but the stereotypes were blurred a little. We had stoners and band geeks and kids who thought they were popular.. but everyone was pretty much average. It was also a pretty small high school (I graduated with 89 others). I was in the honors classes, ran track, and always in detention. In the end, they voted me class clown. My best friends were a drama star, a baseball player, and my own twin was student coucil president.

My movie would probably be "Breakfast Club."