Schools Dundee/North Fife area

[Indecisivity]

Hi

Looking at the possibility of moving to Dundee or North Fife. What is the school situation like there right now, does anyone know?

Would be starting half way through primary but obviously interested in secondary as it would come round quick.

Thanks

Don't know the area to be able to advise - but just wanted to check (since it wasn't clear in your post) whether you are moving within Scotland (and therefore understand catchment areas and the age cut offs) or from England, where there aren't defined catchments and the age cut-off is different.

Hopefully, this will also bump your post and get some more responses.

Fife has been slowly re-building/improving secondary schools but no cash left so if you were to move to an area in Bell Baxter (Cupar) catchment you'd get a relatively modern school with reasonable results & reputation. If you moved to an area in Madras College (St Andrews & my old school) you'd get a split site secondary with both buildings in poor repair (eg asbestos problems) because all the nimbys have blocked & fought every proposed new site. That said still has good rep & results. Haven't heard any horror stories about any primaries or anything that makes any stand out from the rest either

Thanks @prettybird. From England. Have some understanding of how it works up there though. Main concern is picking a decent primary that feeds into a decent secondary, though I think the differences aren't as wide as where we currently are.

I know there are differences in the curriculum but guess they don't vary from school to school?

I think private schools are way out of our budget but any info is good info as deciding which side of the river to live will most likely depend on schools.

Broughty Ferry is a lovely place to live on the Dundee side of the river, with a great Secondary School. If you're going to be working in Dundee, I'd live there rather than commute across the bridge.

NE fife just has the 2 secondary schools, Bell Baxter and Madras and both are ok so no worries about catchment really. Though as ppp says above madras is suffering from poor infrastructure at the moment. And the local paper said that both BellBaxter and Madras have had £200,000 cut from their annual budgets this year which considering they are cut to the bone already I don’t know how they will cope. The cuts are a Fife (nation?) wide thing but probably exacerbated in NE Fife as they tend to vote Lib Dem and the council is predominantly labour snp so the councillors never bother investing in NE Fife.

Dundee schools i’m Not sure about, but I suspect are much more mixed so catchment is more of an issue probably.
I had a brief look at private last year ( and can’t afford it) but primary is about 6-8k per annum for Dundee high or st Leonard’s. Rises to more like 15k per annum by the end of secondary though.

Are you looking for State school or Private OP?

High School of Dundee is fee paying, and is fantastic. IMO there are only 3 Secondary schools you would want to be looking at: Grove Academy, Harris Academy & Monifieth High. The rest really are pretty bad.

More than happy to give you any info you need.

Thank you! Will digest replies over the weekend.

The rest are pretty bad? Bit harsh. St John’s High Dundee is a fab school.

What are the feeder primaries for Grove and Harris? Is there much change of getting a space at them?

Feeders for Grove are Barnhill, Forthill and Eastern Primary (which is literally next door to Grove, I’m not sure if they share dining facilities etc. though).
Monifieth feeders are Grange, seaview and I think Liff/ Auchterhouse (depends where you actually live as monifieth bus from other side of Dundee too; absolutely crazy!). You can make placing requests, and as far as I know, even if the specific class is full if there is space across the whole school they have to take you DC.
Don’t know about feeder primaries for Harris but I’ve heard mixed things since they recently merged with another secondary. In my personal experience I would say that most schools in the angus/Dundee area are very similar, you hear good and bad things all the time and I would take everything with a pinch of salt. Like everywhere in the country lot of parents can employ tutors to give that extra help and bring up results.
My children have just left secondary and S5 now so no doubt it will all change again by the time your children reach that stage.

I haven't heard good things at all about Harris recently. Lots of bad behaviour. I can't see it improving much in the near future.

Thanks. Still looking at options and deciding.

I will come back with more questions when I have them

@BigGlasses For completeness sake, NE Fife actually has 3 secondary schools - Madras, Bell Baxter AND Waid Academy in Anstruther. Waid is less than half the size of the other two but now has a brand new building which just opened last year.

All three schools in NE Fife get good results and are all true comprehensive schools, with large catchment areas. Yes, there may be schools in bigger towns in Fife with better results, but feel that a lot of that is due to catchment demographics and placing requests gradually widening the differences between adjacent schools.

I think Anstruther is further than we'd want to be. Bell Baxter looks good but not sure the cluster covers the potential living areas.

Bell Baxter is fine and has around 19 feeder primaries so covers a large geographical area. It covers as far north as Dairsie, Balmullo, Ceres and Dunbog. Leuchars, Guardbridge, Tayport, Wormit, Newport are in the catchment for Madras.

I wouldn't move to Broughty Ferry specifically for the schools, Groves exam results should be a lot better than they are when you look at the demographic of the catchment area. Forthill is far too big for a primary school in my opinion, same as the other large primaries in Dundee, it's a hard job to keep a school of that size running.

Its worth taking the time to find an area that suits you, chances are the catchment schools will be fine.

@Notthisnotthat I totally agree with you about Grove’s results-and I say that as a parent of a previous and a current Grove pupil. Furthermore a lot of grove’s good results are as a result of a lot of parents paying a lot of money for tutors.
I’ve a lot of time for the rector of Grove, but a large number of the older teaching staff are needing a large kick up the backside. Obviously there are exceptions though!
Grove has also suffered very much from the council’s policy of moving maths/English teachers to other schools to bolster their numeracy & literacy results, leaving Grove with class sizes of 30+ in these subjects, which has been extremely detrimental in the maths dept in particular.
I agree about how large Forthill has got too, when my dd started school in 2002 there were about 400 on the roll, including nursery and by the time my ds left in 2013 this had almost doubled, and it was not an improvement-head teachers were barely lasting a couple of years before “early retirement”.

Hi, we are new to north east fife (from NZ) and are trying to decide between Madras and Bell Baxter. We are able to live in either the St Andrews area or Cupar so really just keen to hear a few opinions. We have 4 children so 3 at primary and 1 starting high school in August.

Madras is getting a shiny new school building opening after summer 2021 so the building issue (currently terrible) is improving. Both are good. Madras probably has the edge but not by much.

Here’s the Dundee high schools ranked by the % that got 5 highers.

And that table tells you very little. How many folk actually have 5 highers? Where are the trends of data? I would be more concerned about % of kids going into positive destinations, DYW information, a lot more than one performance indicator. I would want to see how the school performed against comparator schools, you can't compare the demographic of Grove Academy to the demographic of Baldragon Academy. There is amazing work going on in all of the cities schools.