Royal Highland Education Trust

The Royal Highland Education Trust (RHET) work with partners to deliver world class learning opportunities for all of Scotland’s young people aged 3 to 18 about, in and through the Scottish agricultural environment. These learning opportunities focus on farming and food production, learning for sustainability, outdoor learning and environmental awareness.

The planned outcome of RHET’s strategic actions is that Scotland’s young people have an enhanced understanding of the rural environment of Scotland, the dynamic nature of food, farming and countryside activities and the vital contribution such activities make to sustaining and enhancing Scotland’s economy and way of life. These outcomes are met with the help of working farmers who open their farms to schools to engage with food production, classroom speakers and teacher engagement.

We offer professional learning opportunities linking food production to STEM (currently supported through Education Scotland funding), Health and Wellbeing and Learning for Sustainability and regularly engage with practitioners to gauge topic interest to feed into course development. The professional learning we deliver involves tackling current issues through providing practitioners with information, together with the opportunities to gain knowledge and expand pedagogies through experiencing industry and/or undertaking classroom activities, utilising both virtual and face to face opportunities. RHET are also a partner in ‘The Good Food Futures programme’: a national food education programme designed to teach children and young people about Scotland’s food industry.

A range of teaching resources is currently available to support teachers’ planning to deliver food related learning via the RHET teaching portal (a Curriculum for Excellence linked resource library). In partnership with a range of organisations, we promote healthy eating, field trips to farms and estates, delivery of sustainability education and outdoor learning. Our input, which is all Curriculum for Excellence linked, provides a starting point for teachers and pupils to understand the connections between food sustainability, biodiversity, and healthy living choices and supports practitioners in providing knowledge and skills to improve confidence in the delivery of good food education.

‘The session was fantastic and could be easily transferred to the classroom’.
‘A very informative CPD session with excellent resources’.
‘Will give us a good starting point for the year ahead’.
Practitioner feedback on training delivered 2019

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