Curriculum for Excellence – Universities’ response
Curriculum for Excellence affords Scotland with a generational opportunity to transform teaching and learning, to prepare learners for the challenges of life and work in the twenty first century; to provide learning for all that has both breadth and depth, set in contexts that excite and encourage the development of a broad range of skills and competencies.
Breadth and choice are key principles in CfE. There will be more than one pathway to the same goal and greater flexibility in the way learners obtain qualifications with S4- S6 being tailored around the individual, with the pattern of uptake of qualifications being more varied than today.
This flexibility provides opportunity and challenge for all; decisions for educators and learners around patterns of uptake of qualifications; decisions for universities around course entrance criteria; opportunities afforded to learners and employers, and to further and higher education from a broader range of qualifications and awards beyond those experienced to date.
Universities setting entrance criteria currently often look for students to have taken 4 or 5 Highers at one sitting. What does this signify? What are Universities using this as a proxy for? Do they see this as demonstrating an ability to successfully manage a heavy workload across a broad portfolio of learning, to show a breadth and depth of knowledge & skills, to prove students can successfully handle a high level of challenge?
Universities already use different entrance criteria for students from the US, from France, from Australia or from the rest of the UK. They use other proxies to signify students’ abilities. This must increasingly apply to students from Scotland. We must engage together as a community, to understand what universities are seeking from their entrance criteria and look at how different patterns of uptake of qualifications will satisfy those requirements.
Dr Janet Brown,
Chief Executive,
Scottish Qualifications Authority
SQA website.
4 comments
A response from Universities about CfE? Excellent! Except it wasn’t. Unsurprisingly the confusion was the result of another missive from the SQA, an organisation with a long and continuing history of confusion.
If the universities have any sense they will wait until the full range of courses is completely worked on eg national 4s STILL only at the (very vague) Unit Specification level.
Having read Dr Brown’s missive repeatedly it looks as though she is asking for special consideration for SQA’s CfE qualifications due to their confused, cumbersome and cryptic nature. The universities have certainly heard feedback from teachers who attended the national Curriculum events run by the SQA where questions were not answered and staff were almost begged for ideas on how to put the National 4s together and assess them.
SQA- fit for purpose? No!!! and a at least one whole cohort of Scottish children are and will suffer as a result.
As East rRnfrewshire has decided not to deliver your incomplete and poorly thought out National qualifications in part because of the SQA’s failure to engage promptly enough with HE providers I think you have answered your own question.
My comments refer to secondary education.
As a retired maths teacher, I sense a dilution of the skills base which secondary pupils are offered.
They spend less time in school compared to previous generations. (My reckoning is that I spent 90+ more hours per year in school than current pupils.)
I am also aware, having recently done supply cover, that the knowledge base for Higher and Advanced higher maths is significantly less that when I first taught in the early 1970s.
I am also aware that the new CfE may offer electives to junior pupils in secondary schools but at the expense of foreign language teaching.
I am therefore left with an uneasy feeling that the new curriculum may offer a wider variety of skills, not all of which are relevant to all pupil. This in turn may reduce the opportunity for some pupils to study maths, english, science and foreign language in depth and to acquire the highest level of skills in these areas.
Perhaps it is possible to allay my concerns?
Fewer choices of subject more confusion over what anything’s going to be worth for both universities and employers. I just wish politicians would waken up to the fact that our children can’t stop and mark time until they get it right!!