Our Farm and What we offer for schools, Colleges, and Universities
Lancashire Farm Education Centre is based at Home Farm in Croston, Lancashire, and offers visits to a working dairy farm for schools, further education, higher education, and home-school groups, in addition to course based content for college’s, and universities. All of our school visit activities have been developed around the National Curriculum, and learners will gain a unique experience of a working dairy farm and all it has to offer.
Our sessions are managed and run by resident dairy farmer, Elaine Smith, who has over 20 years’ experience in teaching across a range of ages. Everything is provided for your visit from lesson plans and outcomes to risk assessments and insurance.
At Lancashire Farm Education Centre, we believe every child should meet a cow, smell the fresh countryside air on a real working dairy farm and learn all about farming and agriculture, whilst having lots of fun!
The farm has a fantastic range of learning environments, such as the new-born calf nursery, cow shed, maternity ward, and robotic milking parlour, as well as acres of fields and beautiful private woodlands. This provides many opportunities to cover a wide range of learning across all subjects and all Key Stages.
Feedback from Teachers
The whole experience was fantastic, from initial conversations, booking, risk assessments, the pre visit and the day itself went very smoothly. The staff were amazing and the children all loved the planned activities. The activities were all linked to our curriculum and appropriate for our children. Well worth a visit and we will return again.
A massive thank you for a brilliant day today! The students really enjoyed it and the staff all appreciated how well you and Paul ran the sessions. As both a teacher and farmer you are such a safe pair of hands to book a visit with. For a type B visit there is a higher demand on staffing ratios and paperwork but it is certainly worth it. It was agri-education, not agri-entertainment and I think you have an incredibly strong offer for schools and students for curriculum based visits. For my city dwellers, they now have concrete, visual examples of food production that they otherwise wouldn’t have had, especially the students who find learning harder. I have no doubt you will go from strength to strength with the centre and I would love to book again.
I had the pleasure of bringing my A level Environmental Science students to visit the farm today. We couldn’t have been made to feel more welcome 
The activities organised by Elaine and Paul were really interesting and my students learned so much from their time here. The overall feedback was that they absolutely loved it 
highly recommend this to any other school/college.
- A complete modern working dairy farm with robotic milking equipment.
- Curriculum based lessons for Key Stages 1-4 with lesson plans & resources.
- Further and Higher educational visits in a wide variety of subjects.
- Essential Learning Experiences in a wide variety of curriculum areas.
- Sessions are run by Elaine Smith – a dairy farmer with over 20 years teaching experience.
- Fully Insured for school visits with all necessary documents from lesson plans to risk assessments.
