Nominee Summary
Forth Valley College identified Rural Skills as something their young people with Additional Support Needs thrived at, and so they liaised with Hawkhill Community Centre, Scottish Land and Estates, and Countryside Learning Scotland to establish a Rural Skills course to take young people with a variety of support needs and introduce them to the skills required for Rural work. Working with local estates, Loch Lomond and Trossachs National park, Falkirk Council, SRUC, LANTRA and TCV, they created a programme of work and opportunities that has seen young people with no rural sector background be taken on into paid Countryside traineeships.
The preservation of skills
FVC and partners have created a sustainable future for rural skills in the area, by embedding partnership working to allow students to take part in activities not formally accessed in mainstream education. By giving young people the opportunities to work with rural employers and volunteer groups, they get a good all round understanding of the countryside for preservation, conservation and employment in a variety of sectors from native tree planting to peat land restoration and forestry. Hawkhill has now become a base for training in this area that can be sued to foster the skills before taking them out into the workplace. LANTRA funding has been utilised for students to obtain brushcutter certification.
Increasing awareness
When Forth Valley College added Rural Skills courses in 2024 to their Alloa and Falkirk campuses, it was key to include opportunities for experience based learning. Brucefield Estate agreed to work with the college to deliver this using the backdrop of their Wildlife Strategy. This has allowed the course to meet weekly at the estate and under the careful guidance of Land Officer, Stephen Alexander students have been able to learn on the ground the work necessary to meet important nature and environmental outcomes in a real life setting. Each course, immediately oversubscribed, recruited 20 students, losing only 4 along the way, the college is approaching completion of its first year with students successfully graduating to employment, apprenticeships and ongoing skills training which LANTRA has fully supported with fully resourced vocational qualifications.
Ethical/environmental standards
Brucefield Estate has embraced an ethos of sustainability across the estate, not just seeking to reduce environmental impacts but ensure to give back. Keen to preserve and support the rich wildlife, arable field margins support several species that are of local and national conservation status and the estate has undertaken a 10-year wildlife plan which aims to protect and enhance the biodiversity on the estate. This provides Forth Valley College with a quality training partner working to best practise and delivering optimum results. The opportunity for students to learn alongside a local working estate on a real time project which will deliver significantly in Biodiversity Net Gain could not be replicated independently by the college making this an outstanding deliverable for the course. It is also noted that Brucefield Estate has long promoted important traditional skills and has previously supported trades in that training necessary to retain these skills so important for the maintenance and repair of heritage property.
Noteworthy improvements
The partnership between Hawkhill Community Association, Forth Valley College and Brucefield Estate has created an opportunity which leads young people in the area from a reintroduction to the natural environment, and farming within their own community, through higher education with the nearby college to real time skills training less than 5 miles away on a rural estate of which many were oblivious previous to its very existence let alone its activity. Countryside Learning Scotland have been invaluable in offering guidance in building this fledgling pathway and it has been this collaboration of willing parties which has brought the confidence for Hawkhill to commit to truly aspirational landscape designs for their outdoor area. However, this is not a project being parachuted into the community. Every opportunity is being built into the design to allow the community to learn, grow and own this landscape. They are creating the vegetable plots and growing the foods, learning how to build fences, dead hedges, even courses in drystone walling. They are planting trees and will be developing wetland areas learning about biodiversity and woodlands. The end result will be a step change from a relatively sterile, uninspiring urban space to a living, breathing oasis filled with growth, wildlife and significantly improved quality of experience offering produce, ongoing skills development and wellbeing.
Overcoming Challenges
Brucefield Estate have been acutely aware that they are a small team but their willingness to give of their time to work with the college and create the important triangle; engagement to progress to experience is applauded and an example to businesses that vision and willingness is all that is needed, not scale. The partnership has brought benefit to the estate, allowing aspects of their work which could be delivered by the course students to reduce delivery costs and provide opportunities to reinvest which has been done immediately with the employment of one of the students. This first year has been a learning experience for all involved but opportunities are developing with the onboarding of additional stakeholders including TCV, LANTRA and Forth Climate Forest, and further development of the project currently being assessed which will further expand the outcomes for the community and the college. Had it not been for Brucefield stepping up as a local landowner, this key aspect of steering group would have been missing, and they are a trailblazer for further local engagement. It should be noted that Alloa, according to Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD), is ranked 13th worst in Scotland out of 7000 data sets. This small steering group seek to change this desperate reality through pathways to employment including a connection to the region's rural landscape with all of the documented benefits deliverable through the natural environment and linked directly to Alloa by the re-imagining of Hawkhill's outside area supporting nature and people.
