Next Generation

This project aims to excite young people about the heritage on their doorstep, help them reflect on their impact on this heritage, and how they might help conserve, celebrate and champion it now and in the future.

Young people have a natural affinity with the outdoors, nature, and the exciting stories locked in their landscapes. Curriculum pressures in school and restrictions and distractions at home limit their access to the natural world and to the stories from their historic landscape. Without positive experiences at a young age, that can potentially influence the whole family, young people can become detached from the natural and cultural world, and, in the future, they will have no reference point with which to engage with their own cultural heritage, or a basis on which to build an understanding of their environment.

Passionate young people, engaged with their heritage, will become the conservationists of the future for this area and, potentially, its future guardians and residents. Schools and colleges require support to deliver an enriched curriculum and have expressed a desire to use their local area to achieve this. We have identified and programmed various educational opportunities for the local schools in and on the edge of the Fellfoot Forward area.

Eden Rivers Trust will deliver a school’s programme, drawing from the Better Becks project work and focused on the watercourses that flow through the landscape with in-school activity and fieldwork to discover, explore and learn more about the ecology of their streams and rivers and the relationship between their rivers and their communities.

The Community Arts programme will work with schools to help pupils respond to the landscape, history, place names, folklore, and flora and fauna of the Fellfoot  Forward area.

Schools will be encouraged to engage with the Uncovering the Past and Monuments at Risk projects with support to discover, explore and learn more about key sites and stories on their doorstep from volunteers from projects and local history and archaeology groups.

As part of the Future Fair initiative, Cumbria Action for Sustainability will develop and deliver a climate change primary school programme of activities.

The partnership approach of the Fellfoot Forward LPS, offers the capacity for a diverse range of work experiences, training and networking opportunities for young people in education and training, who often struggle to gain relevant field experience and contact time with specialists in the fields of ecology, land management or archaeology.

We will offer travel grants to subsidise the cost of transport for schools, youth groups, colleges and universities travelling to take part in education activity in the Fellfoot Forward area.

Our audiences for these opportunities will be drawn from the following organisations and groups in the region:

• University of Cumbria’s wildlife and media course and the environmental conservation courses
• Young Farmers
• A Focus on Nature, a national organisation with a volunteer coordinator based at Tullie House, Carlisle
• Alston Youth Group
• Carlisle Youth Zone
• Stomping Ground
• Talkin Tarn
• Primary schools within the Fellfoot Forward area