Grange Academy celebrates success at Scottish Mathematical Council 2025 Maths Challenge

The competition, which has been running for 49 years, is not for the faint-hearted with young people having to solve, and meticulously write up their solutions, to ten exceptionally difficult problems.

Just to give you an idea of how difficult it is - S1/2 had to answer the following puzzle: Three types of item, A, B and C, are for sale. Items of type A sell at 8 for £1. Items of type B sell for £1 each. Items of type C sell for £10 each. A selection of 100 items of all three types costs £100. How many items of type B were there in the selection?

While S5/6 had to answer: Four cards with integers on are placed face down on a table. Five people in succession each take two cards and state the total value of the two cards, but do not reveal the individual values. These totals are 8, 13, 14, 17 and 11. Determine the numbers on each of the four individual cards.

The Grange Academy mathletes rose to the challenge scooping 11 Gold Awards, 11 Silver Awards and eight Bronze Awards. The whole team performed extremely well however special mention goes to Ethan who earned a gold award at the senior level and to Kate and Rebecca who earned silver; to Charlotte, Eilidh and Harriet who performed very well for the fourth year in a row and to Callum from S1 who earned a perfect score.

Councillor Elaine Cowan, Spokesperson for Education and, Children and Young People said: “Grange Academy attended the prize giving ceremony at Strathclyde University and received more awards than any other school from South and Central Scotland! What an achievement. I am delighted to offer congratulations to the whole team, they thoroughly deserve this recognition.

“I have also been reliably informed that the young people got an ice cream from a popular local ice cream parlour, as a wee treat from Maths teacher Chris Smith on the way back to school, and he didn’t even make them calculate the volume of a cone.”