As Scottish school pupils head back to the classroom, various sports clubs and extracurricular activities are also set to kick off, providing young people with a variety of ways to get active. This means a busy period for High Life Highland’s Active Schools Coordinators as they juggle activity schedules and volunteers to ensure there’s opportunities for everyone.
Being an Active Schools Coordinator in the Highlands is different here compared with more urban locations. While barriers of all descriptions can exist right across Scotland, in rural areas there are many challenges when delivering sports and physical activity sessions to young people in the local community. Transport, access to suitable venues, fewer volunteers, and lower participant numbers all dictate what can and cannot be done.
But High Life Highland’s Active Schools Coordinators, supported by a team of volunteers and Young Leaders, are experts in ‘thinking outside of the box’! They go above and beyond to make sure that, however rural the school – pupils have every opportunity to take part in sport and physical activity.
Active Schools was set up by sportscotland more than 20 years ago with the mission of making more children more active more often. The Highlands of Scotland covers an area the size of Belgium, with some very remote schools and island communities, so delivering this national initiative was always going to take some creativity.
Pam Macdonald, Active Schools Coordinator for Mallaig explained: “Take the Small Isles – Muck, Eigg and Rum – and Inverie Primary School on the Knoydart peninsula. We’ve been working with these schools online for the best part of a decade, before it became the norm. With ferries regularly disrupted, especially in winter, online activities are vital. I would visit early in the term to train Junior Leaders who would then lead the sessions and we would meet regularly online thereafter,” she explained.
“I’ve had to be quite creative and avoid being too prescriptive over the years to ensure that as many children are getting access to a variety of opportunities. Our most recent success with these particular schools has been online TaeKwon Do with an instructor from Inverness. We now have pupils taking their TaeKwon Do gradings, which is amazing. Living in a rural location is certainly not holding back these enthusiastic pupils, who are resilient and willing to give anything a go.”
Alan Gray is the Active Schools Coordinator for Ardnamurchan. One of his primary schools – Kilchoan – is the most westerly mainland school in the UK. It’s a two hour drive to the nearest large town (Fort William). The geography of this part of the Highlands means they often collaborate across county lines.
“Transport – both cost and availability – is probably our biggest issue. It’s something that our counterparts in towns and cities simply don’t have to overcome to the same degree. Working with my colleagues in the other three Lochaber clusters we try to bring our schools together regularly for events such as rugby, swimming and the dance platform.
“But I’m not just collaborating with my fellow Active Schools Coordinators in Highland but also our counterparts in Argyll & the Islands. Ardnamurchan High School for example, has had some brilliant sporting events with the likes of Oban and Tobermory, with the latter being a short ferry trip across the Sound of Mull – this all helps to take away some of the isolation when covering a large, rural cluster.”
Teaming up with other High Life Highland services or independent sports clubs also helps to tackle the isolation that Active Schools Coordinators in rural locations might feel. There’s been joint events with the likes of the sailing club on Skye for pupils in the Portree High School cluster, Lochaber Rugby Club have been instrumental in helping deliver school tournaments in the area and there is regular cross service working with the likes of the High Life Highland Countryside Ranger Service and local libraries.
In East Sutherland, Elissa Stevenson, the local Active Schools coordinator there, recently hooked up with Davochfin Farm and the Kyle of Sutherland Fisheries to deliver fishing sessions to all primary school pupils within her catchment. 
Elissa said: “This event was organised after a series of lunchtime sessions at Lairg, Rosehall, Bonar Bridge and Dornoch. Local river ghillies and fishing instructors volunteered their time to deliver casting sessions in the playground so children had the opportunity to practice before coming along to try the real thing. We’re hoping these sessions encourage children to try fishing again. We’re fortunate to have lots of local fishing clubs in our area who have access to rivers and lochs as well as the great facilities at Davochfin Farm.
“School pupils in East Sutherland are generally a very sporty bunch and we bring these rural primary schools together frequently for more mainstream sports such as basketball tournaments and cross country running so it’s great to be able to take advantage of the other offerings on our doorstep – like fishing – and introduce an activity that’s a bit different.”
High Life Highland, in partnership with sportscotland also delivers funding to talented athletes from across the region through the Highland Athlete Travel Award Scheme (ATAS). This scheme is designed to help performance level athletes living within the Highland area who face considerable travel costs for training and competitions, often out with the region. Recent recipients include gymnast Miguel Alexander Reis-Forrester from Lochaber who has represented Scotland at national competitions and five times Scottish Women’s Surfing Champion Pheobe Strachan from Caithness.
Darren Reid, Head of Sports Development at High Life Highland explained: “Our team are fully focussed on removing barriers to participation and ensuring there is opportunities for everyone in Highland to be active. Our unique setting does pose some challenges but also a wealth of opportunities to use our landscape and be creative with what we are delivering. Initiatives such as the Highland ATAS programme designed to help our future sports stars and the innovation with our Active Schools programme will ensure our rural location does not hamper our young peoples’ ability to enjoy sport and physical activity from grassroots level and beyond.”
Applications for the next round of ATAS funding are open, with the deadline being 5th September. For more information, please go here: https://www.highlifehighland.com/sport/hatas/
