‘Highest percentage of pupils in care’ at Morgan

As head teacher at Morgan Academy, the vision Helen Gray has for the school is that every pupil should be employable.

So when DC Thomson Publishing chief executive Ellis Watson approached her last December to sound her out on the project which aims to support some of the school’s most vulnerable pupils, she was “extremely keen” to get involved.

“Ellis identified Morgan because he’d spoken to the then Dundee City Council director of education Michael Wood and Morgan had the highest percentage of pupils in care of all Dundee schools at the time,” said Ms Gray.

“I was new to the school and was extremely keen because one of the areas that we had identified early on since I came was pupil aspiration and how we wanted to build that.”

Ms Gray and the school’s depute head teacher in charge of pupil support, Fiona Low, worked closely with Susan Duncan, the newly appointed chief executive of BREAKTHROUGH Dundee, to move the project forward.

Meanwhile, Rosie Ivins was recruited to coordinate the venture in school with groups of pupils identified who might benefit.

Ms Low said: “When Helen spoke to me about this initially I knew of the MCR Pathways project in Glasgow, just having been at a couple of conferences, and read things about it. So it was quite exciting to think that something like that could come to Morgan.”