Astronomy Education (Chair: Paul Roche, co-chairs: Andy Newsam, Becky Parker)

There are now many schemes promoting astronomy and space science education in the UK, and a growing number of projects that engage school students and the general public in research. The Institute for Research in Schools launches in March 2016, and will start to gather together examples of such school/public/university links, making this a timely topic for NAM 2016. This session will showcase the current “best practise” in astronomy and space science education available to all audiences (from primary school through to HE and adult education).


Public outreach and engagement (Chair: Edward Gomez, co-chair: Jen Gupta)

Many astronomers put a lot of effort into engaging the public but how can we construct programmes which have REF-returnable “impact”? The driving idea of this session is to help astronomy researchers and educators to not only create really inspiring astronomical outreach activities, but ones which have a structure for evaluating the impact they have and reference specific research. We aim to showcase high quality outreach activities and share best-practices to the community