Madras Head Ken Currie

The speaker was Mr Ken Currie, Rector of Madras College. Introducing Mr Currie, President Frank Quinault highlighted the close links the Club enjoys with the school through the Schools’ Forum, the Young Chef Competition and much else including the Club’s recent tour of the new school. Mr Currie began by pinpointing some salient facts about the school- it cost approximately £55m, is owned wholly by Fife Council, is, at long last, on a single site and has a school roll of 1446 pupils. The current roll contrasted with a roll of 1839 pupils in 2000 and a projected roll of 1345 pupils in 2035 (even although 2428 new houses are projected for the school’ s catchment area during that period.) To service the school requires 105 teachers and 45 support staff; annual budget £6.5m of which all but £450k is spent on salaries. The Rector explained how the school is only now recovering from the trauma of covid. The unprecedented closure of schools in 2019/20 caused significant detriment to pupils’ education and mental health. There were no public examinations and pupils’  results were determined on course work and ‘expectations’. Even when the school began to operate normally in 2021/22, pupils who had had no public examination experience found these more testing than in normal circumstances. Mr Currie also stressed that covid caused considerable harm to many pupils through increased anxiety, family breakdown, bereavement, addiction to social media platforms and other adverse effects which continue to manifest themselves, especially through significantly higher absenteeism. Throughout this difficult period the teaching staff have displayed leadership and considerable resilience. Despite these travails Madras College continues to do well academically -31st in last year’s Scottish state schools league tables - and every effort is being made to improve this in coming years. Mr Jimmy MacGregor  concluded with a generous vote of thanks to the speaker.

Ken has had Covid challenges as well as the new building to cope with.

With all Madras pupils now in one building for the first time for generations, this is a new challenge for a new man at the helm.