Employment

Aberlour Community Association is a registered charity (SCO09817) and the Aberlour Heritage Trail group is a sub-committee of the community association which has been creating a free self-guided walking tour of the village for visitors. The trail is marked by plaques with a QR code which leads to the Aberlour Trails website with texts giving information on each significant place. 

Principal Teacher of Modern Languages at Speyside High School met with two members of the community association, to discuss a potential collaboration where the Modern Languages department has been assisting with translations of these texts into French, German and Spanish to make them more accessible to visitors. Senior pupils with an advanced level of language ability were chosen to take part given the complexity of some of the texts. Senior pupils have provided audio recordings of these texts in the 3 languages which will be added to the website. 

The aim of the trail is to promote local history and increase tourist footfall in the village of Aberlour, in turn boosting the local economy. Senior pupils’ contributions to this project have given them an insight into their local history and heritage and allowed them to use their language skills in a practical way benefitting their local community and non-English speaking visitors to the area. This project will hopefully have a lasting impact on the village and once pupils have left school they will see the evidence of how their language learning experience has been used in a practical way close to home. 

The next steps for the project include adding our pupils recordings to the Aberlour Trails website and adding further texts on other local places of significance.

This is an excellent submission from Speyside High School. The verification team want to commend so many areas of this project and to congratulate the school on a very richly deserved SILVER award, and on being the first ever recipients of the SLEA Green Award! 

The Aberlour Heritage Trails was the context for a strong partnership working between Speyside HS and Aberlour Community Association towards a goal related to boosting local tourism. It is a strong example for others to look to for inspiration in this new SLEA category.   

This is a great project making genuine, relevant use of learners’ language skills to contribute to a community project, which focuses on community heritage, local history and outdoor learning. The team felt that this was a really sustainable way to integrate languages into the already established local community heritage trail. The focus on sustainability of the local community, a real concern in rural areas, is a relevant and vital one. The team all commented on, and commended, the strong legacy of the project, and in particular the stated aim of ‘have a lasting impact on the village and once pupils have left school they will see the evidence of how their language learning experience has been used in a practical way close to home.’  

In addition, with the translation of existing texts into three taught languages and the audio recording element, this project meaningfully incorporated language and digital competencies to different degrees for the young language learners involved. As a whole, the project is an inspired and inspiring combination of digital and language skills, global citizenship and outdoor learning, all with a clear employability thread. Congratulations once again! the basis of the number of partners, SDGs and year groups involved this project has been awarded a SILVER award. The team felt that only a small amount of extending of this project, primarily the addition of another partner, would be needed in order to qualify for a Gold award. Please contact us if you would like any advice or information regarding that. We would be delighted to see another submission from Speyside High School

• Aberlour Heritage Trail website
• The Northern Scot article about the heritage trail