Dear Parents and Carers
Some colleagues and I attended the funeral of Keith McRoy yesterday. Keith taught here for around 15 years, retiring only two or three years ago and unfortunately was given precious little time to enjoy his retirement before passing away earlier this month, three weeks short of his 65th birthday. Keith taught in our Computing department and was a bit of a giant, both in stature and in presence. As many do, Keith came to teaching relatively late having had a career previously. His approach to teaching was extremely refreshing, I enjoyed discussing this with him several times, including on his retirement day. He just assumed every student could achieve an A grade or similar and taught them as such, he would say “it’s not for me to tell that child they can’t get that grade”. Many achieved the grade and those who didn’t would often gain a better grade in Keith’s class than many of their other subjects. He was also very matter of fact about behaviour, greeting every child each lesson afresh even if the last lesson had gone wrong. Subsequently he built a great relationship with his classes very quickly – I did a joint observation with an external reviewer of Keith and they just said that’s a teacher who can build a rapport with anybody.
Keith was on the Leadership Team for a period of time, which overlapped a very challenging Ofsted inspection in 2016. We were getting a bit of a battering from the inspection team and one asked about a child they’d seen chewing and sucking on a text book. I was Deputy here at the time and went to explain the context of the lad and that this was a typical coping mechanism for him (which was genuinely the truth, though to be fair he did have better things to use than a school text book) but before I could speak Keith piped up with “I think you’ll find that’s a typical Myton student’s thirst for learning” to this bleak faced Inspector whose stony response Keith just found funnier.
Keith was a family man, a loyal and supportive colleague in school and great company out of school. My colleagues and I were able to share some of our Keith anecdotes with his family yesterday and of course his son, Alex, is carrying on the family tradition of being a Myton teacher – he is in our English department. Our best wishes go to his family and friends.
Best wishes
Andy Perry
