Qualifications Consultation

Day 115/366 - CfE Seminar
Originally uploaded by Gordon McKinlay

I was at the Highland Resort on Thursday this week for the curriculum for excellence EA contacts meeting. A long way to travel but that's not the point. We considered a wide range of issues but the one which our secondary schools have been champing at the bit for is the announcement of consultation on qualifications. The newspapers have covered this quite a lot but I thought it would be worth summarising for my own benefit as much as anyone else.

1. New qualifications in literacy and numeracy will be developed at SCQF levels 3, 4 and 5. Pupils will take these in S4 or later and will include a mixture of internal and external assessment.

2. Standard Grade and Intermediate 1 and 2 qualifications will be replaced by a new set of qualifications at SCQF levels 4 and 5. Standard Grade foundation level (SCQF level 3) will be replaced by Access 3.

3. Highers are seen as the "gold standard" of Scottish education. All national qualifications, including Higher and Advanced Higher will, however be reviewed to ensure consistency with curriculum for excellence.

4. More flexibility will be embedded in the system. This is likely to include a winter diet of examinations and the most able pupils bypassing lower levels.

There was a very clear indication that pupils would not take qualifications until S4 at the earliest except for exceptional circumstances. It was also noted that new qualifications would be likely to be implemented in 2012/2013, ie for those pupils currently in P6.

The consultation paper is likely to be published in early June with the consultation period running to the end of September.

There is a lot that I could say but it is not for this forum. We all welcome the publication of the consultation and look forward to reading and thinking about the issues which arise from it.

Office for Mac

I have just got hold of the disc for the new version of MS Office 2008 for Mac and installed it on my Apple Powerbook. Within education we get this for a pretty good price and schools are looking for a set of tools like this that can allow files to be transferred between Mac and PC. Apple Works was always the tool that was used on Macs in school for many years but it hasn't developed at all for years now. I suppose I was hoping for as big a change as there was with MS Office 2007 for PC when we got it at first. Now, I am only going by first impressions here so I may change my mind over coming weeks and months but my initial impressions are:

• why does it look so different from the PC version? You really don't get the impression that these are the same thing.
• Why have they never developed a version of Access for the Mac. I can here you say "why use Access when you have got FileMaker?" and I understand that but I want to use Access for some things.
• Going back to my roots in software development, there is still no scripting. I have always loved the way you can add a Visual Basic script to a file in Office but no can do on the Mac.

Ah, well, maybe I am asking too much and maybe I will grow to love the Mac version, but I am not convinced yet.

Computing & ICT

Back to my roots on this one. There was an article in the paper yesterday and another on the radio on Thursday about difficulties in getting people to take computer science courses and taking up posts as programmers, etc. The claim was made that not enough programming is done in schools and that there is far too much focus on ICT skills such as word processing, etc. Software development has always been my favourite bit of any computing curriculum and one of the main things that makes computing a worthwhile area of study worthy of undertaking in school. A lot of skills based ICT courses are actually incredibly dull because they focus on learning a set of skills for a particular software package such as MS Office. That package will almost definitely be out of date by the time the young people actually need to use the skills in the real world. Software development is about problem solving, analytical thinking, creativity and so much more. When it is taught well it can be exciting and highly fulfilling. It feels a little bit like the debate between a highly utilitarian view of education and one which focusses on learning for life. It is certainly worthy of debate as the technology outcomes for curriculum for excellence are published tomorrow.

Brain Gym?

When I cam back from holiday and went in to work on Friday I spent a fair amount of time ploughing through the email and papers which had gathered over the week. I had only been away a week and the schools were off for most of that time! Anyway a letter from Sense about Science caught my eye. A number of schools have used brain gym over the years to help kids get ready to learn by doing some physical activity. I had read some of the material about it and never really thought much more about it. We certainly never endorsed it but we didn't say it was rubbish either. I guess we were just fairly agnostic about it. The material that has come in from Sense about Science does not sit on the fence, however. They take quotes from a number of neuro-scientists, etc and debunk all of the claims of brain gym as having any basis in fact. The article is well worth reading and thinking about. Our principal psychologist made the point that this is why we need to do research so that we can make valid judgements about what is worth investing in. I now have to decide whether the article should be issued to all our schools or not.