Education reform consultation on behalf of Professor Ken Muir, University of the West of Scotland and Independent Advisor to the Scottish Government

3rd Years should be rolled into a new 2 year certificated and STANDARDISED course.

Consistency. Courses across school are greatly varied and too much emphasis is placed upon teaching staff to develop courses fr BGE which are completely inconsistent with those at other schools. As such progress and achievement are wildly incoherent.

Many courses have levels which are not consistent. Therefore N4 and N5 are not directly comparable when each course should mirror and support the other.

Remove S3 from BGE and add to new 2 year courses.

All courses should follow on. Higher, N5 and N4 should cover the same areas with only depth and anaysis being different levels of difficulty.

Nil

Any agency should not just be SQA Mrk 2. Any new agency should provide robust and COMPLETE courses and supporting materials on which teachers can build their lessons for delivery. Too much responsibility is being placed upon teachers with the result that much of the materials and assessments are variable across schools, authorities and Scotland. Teachers should be provided with all materials needed to teach their subjects. Only then can they change and adapt those materials. But this would ensure consistency.

it will be SQA part 2 which abdicates responsibility for development of courses and assessment and offloads this onto teachers and schools.

The range of qualifications is fine. The service provided by the SQA is not.

Course should be fully developed centrally, with fully developed supporting materials provided on which schools and teachers can develop and adapt these to their needs.

Funding is required. This includes funding for equipment but also funding for training staff. Staff training during lockdown appeared to be non existent and training that was provided was piecemeal and amateurish. Piecemeal training of some member of staff taking teachers through something in an hour or two is frankly not good enough for the modern world.T eachers should be offered and able to gain
real world qualifications in the use of different technologies as part of their professional development. Paid for by government.

Standardisation of materials, courses and assessment across Scotland.

Government and new authority. The development of all courses should be standardised and centralised. With the ability of teachers to adapt materials to their lessons but materials, assessments and courses should be directly comparable across schools. Therefore it must be undertake by any new organisation.

No information on what is replacing SQA.

What is to exist after the SQA. What will its remit be. What responsibilities will it have. How will it develop courses and materials to standardise courses across the country. Who will be assessing. What is happening to BGE?

What clarity. There has been nothing intimated about where things are going.

Less emphasis on offloading onto schools and teachers and having a consistent approach across Scotland.

The inspection system is fine as it is.

The Government and SQA offloaded responsibilities onto individual schools and teachers as a result there is a wide variety of teaching, subject teaching and quality of teaching across the country and no consistency.

Any Qualifications Authority should take full control of assessment. Including providing proper assessment materials with proper marking schemes. Unit assessments seem to have no real value and were onerous from the beginning for teachers and pupils. They were wishy washy. With no real marking schemes.



Exams should be externally assessed.

Consistency of approach in ALL schools is important.

They should be tasked with creating and maintaining ALL school learning materials for subjects at all levels. ALL course notes, tasks and assessment materials at levels should be developed centrally (teachers can adapt) and should support each other and follow on in terms of depth and difficulty. at the moment too many different course levels do not slot together.

Consistency of approach in ALL schools is important.

Centralise all subject development, including courses, course materials and assessment materials. Provide these to the schools and let teachers build on these but be expected to follow them too. Consistency Consistency Consistency.

Don't just make an SQA mkII. The Sqa needs to be more responsible for subjects, subject materials and assessment material provision. Including externally assessed elements.