Astronomy for Remote and Island Schools (AfRIS) was an STFC funded project that took place between 2017 and 2020. Its aim wasto create and manage a mobile outreach team to deliver astronomy-related workshops and activities to schools located in some of the UK’s more remote and island communities. The driving ethos behind the project was to directly engage with and motivate a hard-to-reach, low science capital community of students and teachers, who would otherwise have very limited opportunities to interact with STFC activities, researchers, and facilities due to the extremely remote nature of their educational environment.

Over the 30-month project, the AfRIS outreach team undertook 32 separate trips, during which they visited a total of 81 schools (our target was 80). The schools visited were as far north as Unst (Shetland), as far west as Benbecula and as far south as Jersey. Of those 81 visits, 55 were to island schools, whilst 26 were on the mainland. In terms of level, 12 were secondary schools and 69 were primary. In total, we worked with 5236 pupils, which is well over our original target of 4000, with an average pupil contact time of around three hours.

In addition to our school visits, we arranged 16 community events (target 20), which attracted a total of 1053 attendees (target 1000). These events ranged from stargazing evenings to wide-ranging talks, to mini-science expos.

The map below shows the locations of all the schools visited by the mobile AfRIS team:

The following schedule provides basic details for each school visit, together with the associated report: