After the announcement that Charleston Academy in Inverness will be demolished and rebuilt, former pupil Robert Thorne remembers the good and bad about the school he knew.
Like many former pupils, I was shocked (though not surprised) to hear of Charleston Academy’s planned demolition.
Attending from 2013 to 2019, I suppose I now count as one of the last to walk through its tall, green gates. Even then, there was a general feeling that the place was approaching its end.
I recall a school without English teachers at Higher level, a carousel of head rectors, and floors, ceilings, and light fittings all caving in. We must’ve had the poorest dress code in the Highlands: for all the striped blue ties handed out at assembly, I can’t remember seeing any around pupils’ necks.
Every department seemed to walk the line of underfunding, and, sadly, new council-gifted laptops didn’t solve the school’s heating problems. Nor did the asbestos we were unaware still lined the walls.
After I left, things got so bad that, in November 2021, senior pupils made a YouTube video, begging the Highland Council to green-light renovations. They were running out of buckets to catch leaks in the ceiling.
Yet, once gone, this shouldn’t be our school’s legacy. What Charleston lacked in material, it made up for in heart.
School’s community helped us to thrive
Even with understaffing and underpayment, our teachers worked their hardest and, for them, I will always be grateful. I won’t pretend that I agreed with them all, but I know they had a hard job and did the best they could to help us. If it weren’t for the efforts of my S3 English teacher, I wouldn’t be writing this today.
It wasn’t just the teachers, of course. I recall the dinner ladies, always wearing smiles with their aprons and clued in on the craic: a strong team making meals that broke the old cliche.
I remember the receptionists and librarians who always had the solutions, and the custodians who could always make them happen. They were the people that kept our school alive and thriving for more than 40 years, and, with it, our community.
That same community pushed us to succeed, against the odds. During my time there, my classmates achieved and grew to be the wonderful adults I know today.
We competed and won at the Inverness Music Festival, the Scottish Youth Climbing Championships, and various events with Inverness Rotary Club. We placed second out of Scotland’s state schools at the Enterprising Maths finals, and raised thousands for Scottish charities. We mourned in our kilts at Menin Gate on Armistice Day; saw the African savannah and the skyscrapers of New York.
Saying goodbye to the Charleston we knew
For many, high school is either the best or worst time of life. For former pupils of Charleston, it will certainly be memorable.
When the new school finally stands, brand-new on the wreckage of the old one, we’ll say goodbye to a piece of our collective history
Regardless of whether we envy or resent those teenage years, Charleston is a part of who we are today. Somewhere in each leaver’s attic will be a navy yearbook or a T-shirt with the school logo, or pictures, buried deep in their camera roll, taken in its classrooms and corridors.
In some sense, we were all in it together. Certainly, it wasn’t a school of friends, but I like to think everybody had at least one person there for whom it was worth taking the rickety D&E coach to school every day.
The experience was different for each of us – for many reasons – but, perhaps we can come together to commiserate those awkward years of our lives, as bulldozers tear down our old classrooms.
As for the new school, it’s a long way off. The council has created a three-phase plan to tear down and rebuild the campus, in collaboration with parents, pupils, and staff.
However, when it finally stands, brand-new on the wreckage of the old one, we’ll say goodbye to a piece of our collective history. The Charleston Academy we knew, loved and hated, will be no more than memories, and, for the next generation, the name will mean something very different.
So, from each of its classes – 1978 to today – here’s to our school: lang may yer lum reek.
Robert Thorne is a writer from Kiltarlity and Inverness, studying politics at the University of Edinburgh
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