Focus on Scotland
The Scottish Borders is a rural area and to travel east to west across the region takes about two hours. We have towns not cities: Hawick, Galashiels, Peebles, Kelso, Jedburgh and Selkirk so planning local services is difficult. Like most places, we have an ageing population and we're going to have issues in the next few years of not having enough young people to support the community. We wanted to do something about student engagement and aspiration.
Some of our young people and their parents like living in the small communities they came from but they don't always see the opportunities that are available around them. The issues that we wanted to focus on were the migration of young people to cities for work and for study, and teacher recruitment and retention.
We have nine secondary and over 60 primary schools. Around 40% of our young people move away. We have Borders College for further education. but we don't have access at the minute to higher education. Rural poverty and a lack of digital skills meant young people were not prepared for the new world they were going into.
The Inspire Project
The Council thought about the problems we were looking to solve but the other question we asked ourselves was, what did we want learning to look like.? Inspire Learning is a 10 year education transformation programme looking at the way we deliver learning, teaching, assessment, digital skills and wider abilities for young people.