Situated less than 300 metres from the cottage, the school is one of three local primaries preparing for their very own Burns Supper this week. The primary 7 participants from Alloway, Grammar and Doonfoot schools may be much younger than the afficionados normally associated with the excesses of the Bard’s annual commemoration, but they take it no less seriously, according to Richard Hunter, the head at Alloway.

“We have a proper, formal evening function in the Brig o’ Doon hotel,” Mr Hunter said, “with the traditional speeches, toasts and invited guests, including members of the local Burns Federation. The focus is very much on the children and they spend weeks beforehand preparing recitations and songs.”

Alloway holds its own Burns Day event in the school for pupils from primaries 4-7. Each class puts on three “turns” which could be a song or recitation and the best performances are awarded certificates by the Burns Federation. Mr Hunter said that the celebration “is very healthy and adds colour and flavour to the life of the school. The children are very good at listening to each other and they help to celebrate each others’ achievement.”

When Alloway’s young singers and reciters reach Belmont Academy, their associated secondary, there are further opportunities to celebrate the local hero. As part of their English course, second-year pupils undertake a unit study of Tam o’Shanter, not only because the Burns classic is set in their locality but because it is “a great poem”, said Joan Duncan, principal teacher of English.

Further up the school the honest men and bonnie lasses of the staff and the fifth and sixth years have a traditional supper, where topers have to settle for inspiring bold Irn-Bru instead of John Barleycorn.

Further east in “Scotia’s darling seat”, the pupils of Pilrig Park school for moderate learning difficulties commemorate Burns’s Edinburgh connection with a lunch rather than a supper. All 80 pupils take part in an event that “always goes with a great swing”, Joyce Mudie, the head, says.

The Rev Ian Dunn, the school’s former chaplain, gives Holy Willie’s Prayer a body swerve and instead addresses the chieftain o’ the pudding-race, “with great gusto”, Ms Duncan said. Pupils and guests then participate in a musical entertainment which culminates, in deference to modernity, with Flower of Scotland taking its place alongside Auld Lang Syne in the customary circular finale.

The nearest Glasgow comes to a mention in The Complete Poems, Songs and Ballads of Burns, is the Lea-Rig, the name of a pub in the Dennistoun area. But the members of Bridgeton Burns Club do their best to ensure that the city’s children are made aware of the ploughman poet.

Every year since 1876, the club has organised a competition for primary and secondary pupils from east end schools. In December, more than 700 participated in competitions in singing and verse speaking in St Mungo’s Academy.

There was also a “newsdesk” competition in which pupils had to write an article based on a Burns poem in the style of an 18th century newspaper. The winners in the junior category were members of a lunchtime writing club in Whitehill Secondary with their treatment of Auld Mailie.

Iain Loudon, principal teacher of English at Whitehill, said that the competition introduced pupils to an area of Scottish culture of which they might be unaware. The group is due to visit Burns’s birthplace in the next few weeks. Maybe they should pop into Alloway primary for their own mini Burnsfest