Learning resources
Health and wellbeing
St Andrews First Aid offers free talks and demonstrations on first aid for schools, community groups and charities. British Red Cross also offer free educational workshops to build life skills and resilience.
First aid talks and demonstrations for your community from St Andrews First Aid.
Free educational workshops from British Red Cross.
Mental health for volunteer responders
Lifelines Scotland provides advice and learning resources on how to stay well and support your colleagues, through all stages of volunteering. They have created the Staying Well Road Trip, a free online course for volunteers covering the factors that protect or threaten wellbeing, how to recognise the warning signs of injury and what we can do to look after our physical and mental health. This module can also be run in a group session.
Staying Well Road Trip from Lifelines Scotland.
Public Health Scotland's Learning Zone
Community groups can access free online self-directed learning from Public Health Scotland which covers a wide range of subjects including health inequalities, making services inclusive, and British Sign Language awareness.
Free online learning from Public Health Scotland.
For younger people
National Centre for Resilience
Are you prepared? is a game for children developed by The National Centre for Resilience (NCR).
It aims to promote learning around simple steps to prepare, stay safe and recover from hazardous weather events. A free printable version of the game is available on the NCR website.
Find out more about NCR's Are you prepared? game.
St Andrews First Aid
St Andrew’s First Aid offers a free-to-access Scottish Primary School First Aid Programme to enable teachers to confidently deliver life-saving first aid lessons to pupils from Primary 1 to Primary 7.
Find out more about the St Andrew’s Scottish Primary School First Aid Programme.
Education Scotland
Education Scotland has created a bank of learning resources to support formal and informal education for young people on topics including:
- Community resilience (in English and Gaelic)
- Community resilience as a context for learning – COVID-19
- Water safety and the Scottish curriculum
You can search for these resources and find more topics on the Education Scotland website.
Learning resources from Education Scotland.
Staywise
The Staywise website has educational resources and interactive online activities from the emergency services and safety-focused organisations to help support learning opportunities for younger people.
Educational resources from Staywise.
UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction
Stop Disasters is a free game from the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. It allows young people to explore the risks posed by natural hazards, build defences to protect the population and play out realistic disaster scenarios.
Weather warnings and impacts
The Met Office
The Met Office has information and videos on understanding weather warnings. It also offers training to voluntary sector and coordinated community groups who are working closely with local emergency responders.
Community resilience information from the Met Office.
Open University
You can access free online learning courses on The Open University’s OpenLearn platform, including Watching the Weather. This course describes how meteorological observations are made and the results which impact on everyone's daily activities. It also offers a free online course which explores the basic science that underpins climate change and global warming.
Watching the Weather course by the Open University.
Safety and security
ProtectUK gives free advice, guidance and learning to help businesses and communities understand protective security and improve their response to the risk of terrorism. Its Action Counters Terrorism (ACT) course would be useful for anyone involved in community venues.
ACT Awareness elearning on ProtectUK.
For professional responders
Scottish Government
Working within the Scottish Government, the Civil Contingencies Development team strengthen Scotland’s resilience through high-quality learning and development. Their focus is on supporting organisations involved in emergency response, ensuring they are equipped to meet the challenges of emergency preparedness, response, and recovery.
Information about the team's free offline and online learning is available through their Resilience Learning Hub.
UK Resilience Academy
The UK Resilience Academy, formerly the Emergency Planning College, provides resilience training and education, expertise and resources (costs apply).
ProtectUK
The National Counter Terrorism Security Office (NaCTSO) works in partnership to deliver free eLearning, guidance, digital toolkits and exercise resources through ProtectUK.