Highlands and Islands STEM Partnership

The Highlands and Islands Strategic STEM Partnership (HISP) is chaired by UHI (Dean of the Science, Health and Environment Faculty). It was established as one of the thirteen regional partnerships across Scotland overseeing the ambition of the Scottish Government STEM Education and Training Strategy (2017), which aims to enhance STEM learning and skills across the education system, fostering a highly educated workforce to support economic growth.

This membership of this group includes regional and national representative involved STEM, skills development and education and provides the regional infrastructure and the strategic context for influencing STEM education and skills development pipelines. HISP is represented on the national STEM Leads partnership group (chaired by ESP) by the UHI Head of STEM Development.

Using the HISP as a strategic regional group enabled the UHI STEM outreach programme to establish (or support existing) local STEM networks/partnerships groups around the region based around our academic partners.

Local STEM partnerships have emerged at different rate reflecting local context and identified needs. As a result, we have identified that the benefits of this approach are:

• Coordinate & plan STEM engagement facilitated by the support of events within the local network.
• Building capacity, capability, knowledge, and understanding to build knowledge of STEM education and linking the national, regional and local collaborative opportunities.
• Sharing data to support evidence-based decision making for community events and STEM initiatives and supporting the transition between primary and secondary education.

If you would like to know more, please contact us at STEM@uhi.ac.uk