The Roar - Issue 19 Term 2 2026

Rod Fraser – Focusing on Change

John Hunter advised his intention to retire from Scots in plenty of time in 1990 to allow a suitable successor to be found. At the assembly where he announced his resignation to the boys, he predicted the new Head would be a younger man with some different ideas on how the school should be run. In the Deputy Head of Launceston Grammar, Rod Fraser, the Council of The Scots School found such a man. Focusing on a particular issue was one of his characteristic turns of phrase.

Rod Fraser was very much a product of the management revolution of the 1980s. He established very early that the world was changing, that Scots had to change with it, and that people needed to get used to change. Rod Fraser introduced many changes. In his first year, he announced that the future of the school lay very much with the growth of day boys from the local Bathurst area. During his time, town bus services began to come in and out of the School.

There were also changes in boarding. There were changes in parental expectations with boarding. It was, by 1991, going out of fashion. Parents were also expecting to have a much greater involvement with the upbringing of their children than had been the case in the past. Many boarding rules were relaxed. The boys were allowed to wear casual clothes to dinner each night instead of their school uniforms. The old ban on them being in their dormitories out of school time was lifted, and each boy was able to have their own space in the boarding house. He maintained that they spent more time in the boarding house during the year than at home, and the boarding houses should reflect this. Although boarding numbers fell, they continued to be a higher proportion of the enrolment at Scots than at most other similar schools. He was assisted in his reforms of boarding by the arrival of a number of younger Housemasters who had different ideas about how boarding houses should be run.

Use of the cane as a form of punishment in New South Wales Government schools came to an end in 1987. Its use in Independent Schools continued for a few more years, but Rod Fraser was not generally in favour of it, and caning at Scots during his time was rare. The use of the cane in NSW was brought to a complete end in 1995.

Academic standards were important to Rod Fraser. He was a great believer that students did best when they took responsibility for their own learning.

Another change that Rod Fraser took on during his time as Headmaster was the introduction of computers into schools. John Hunter had already appointed the first Computer Studies Teacher/IT Manager, Julie Walter, in 1990. Rod Fraser set up a committee of staff to investigate the direction this should go. Some progress was made with the purchase of a number of new computers and the beginnings of a network. However, computer technology at the time was expensive. Before wireless technology was as fully developed as it is now, to link all the buildings on campus to a central server would have required cables to be laid, and that was out of the question in the early 1990s. However, the vision for a school computer network that was put forward in Rod’s time has now been realised.

The year after Rod Fraser left, his successor, Graeme Renney, announced that the school was in financial difficulty. There has been much discussion over the years as to why this happened. There is no one particular reason, and no one should be blamed. The cause seemed to lie more in a combination of factors, and the documents from the time show that the Headmaster and Council were well aware of the difficulties and took various steps to counter them.

The difficulties included:

• The national economy was buffeted by the stock market collapse of 1987, which adversely affected enrolments from Sydney.
• In 1990, Treasurer Paul Keating announced: “the recession we had to have”. John Hunter’s last year saw a drop in Year 7 enrolments and the departure of a large Year 12 cohort. There were staff retrenchments in anticipation of this.
• Whilst many of the School’s feeder areas were not drought-declared during Rod Fraser’s Headmastership, some of the northern areas around Moree, Narrabri and the Upper Darling River were very dry. The Millennium Drought was in its early stages when he left the school.
• At a time when enrolments were falling, there was a tendency to keep some badly behaved students who would normally be asked to leave. The cost of this approach was that the School’s reputation suffered adversely.
• The State High Schools in Bathurst, especially Kelso High School, both had strong Principals who made their schools an attractive proposition.

Some of the measures that were brought in to counter the difficulties included:

• The Scots School Foundation, which was a legacy of John Hunter’s time, was encouraged and developed further to try to put the school on a sounder financial footing.
• Independent schools had traditionally considered marketing and advertising to be “common” and not something that they needed to do. During Rod Fraser’s time, this idea underwent dramatic changes, and marketing programs were undertaken to promote the school.
• Mention has already been made of changes to what the school focused on. It became more of a day school, and the atmosphere in the boarding house moved more towards making it more homely. Gas was connected to the boarding houses, heating was installed, and other steps were taken to make them more comfortable.
• In the 1990s, there was a growth in international students coming to Australia for their education. Scots rapidly developed its international student program at this time. The international students were a notable part of the Scots community until changes to the conscription laws in Korea and the COVID pandemic brought an end to it.
• Broadened the school’s offering of subjects, notably Japanese.

Rod Fraser left Scots at the end of 1995. He moved on to become Headmaster of Ivanhoe Grammar in Melbourne until his retirement in 2015. He died in 2021.

Mr Andrew Maher
Archives

Photo 1: Rod Fraser as the new Headmaster in 1991.

Photo 2: 1993. The Fraser family at dinner put on for the whole school by the international students.

Photo 3: 1994. Presentation to Laurie O’Neill who was one of the groundsmen at Scots, and was one of the school’s characters.

Photo 4: 1994. International Dinner. The international students program took off during Rod Fraser’s time at Scots. Each year, the international boys (before Scots went co-educational) would put on a dinner for the whole school. This dish was Korean Bulgogi Beef.

Photo 5: 1994. Some mothers made some teddy bears that were auctioned off to raise money for the Highland Gathering. This example sets a high academic tone!

Photo 6: 1995. Rod Fraser was an advocate for computers and modern information technology. The school’s network and facilities grew in his time. These units were in the Library, but they were also to be found in the Music Centre and the CAD computers in the Design and Technology block.

Photo 7: 1995. As a son of the far southern states, Rod Fraser was probably focused more on Australian Rules than he was on Rugby. One of the highlights for him of his time at Scots was when AFL great Ron Barassi visited the school. By this time, Ron Barassi had retired from AFL and taken up a new career as a motivational speaker.