We are organising visits for P7 and S1 pupils from local state schools to our King’s Buildings campus to take part in science workshops developed and led by our PhD students. Widening participation The schools that we work with are schools located in the lower SIMD quintiles areas of Edinburgh, within four miles of our campus. The University Widening Participation team already has well established working relationships with the primary schools. The high schools are categorised in groups 1 and 1+ of the Lothian Equal Access Programme for Schools (LEAPS). This is a local widening participation programme which encourages and advises students who are traditionally under-represented in higher education. Schools in LEAPS groups 1 and 1+ typically have rates of progression to higher education that are “some way below” or “below” the national average. Through these schools, we can reach out to pupils from a variety of under-represented groups, including low socio-economic background, ethnic minorities or pupils for whom English is an additional language and/or with additional needs. “Thank you for having us at your amazing university. When I am older I would love to attend your university. My favourite thing we did was looking at the pond water under the microscope. I found so many different creatures.” Primary school pupil, Edinburgh Inspiring and nurturing talent The aim of the visits is to inspire and nurture talent for environmental sciences from an early age and before pupils have chosen their subjects in secondary school. We hope that this will provide fun and good memories, but will also spark interest in environmental sciences and potentially influence young people’s subject choices in S2 and, later on, their higher education choices and university applications. “The post-grads communicated well with our kids, and had devised activities that were genuinely interesting and could be appreciated on different levels. For example, the sunspot counting was fun in its own right (and more interesting than the kids thought at first!) because it is very difficult to count them. But the statistical treatment of using a mean of several counts to allow a fair comparison was genuinely cool and just the sort of thing I think the kids need to be familiar with in all the sciences.” High school teacher, Edinburgh Science workshops All the science workshop have been created by our PHD students and carefully developed to meet the Curriculum of Excellence’s Experiences and Outcomes. We offer nine different workshops and pupils are able to take part in at least three during their visits: Counting endangered leopards Global warming Mini earthquakes Building mini wind turbines Looking for parasites Finding bugs in soil Pond creatures Types of ground and flooding What on Earth is a space storm This article was published on 2024-06-21
