Review of the National Certificate

As readers will know, we are currently reviewing the National Certificate in Digital Media Computing at Levels 4, 5 and 6. We recently selected Lead Developers (LDs) for each Level and there was a meeting today involving the LDs and the SQA team.

The Lead Developers are:

Liz Allum of Cathkin HS for Level 4
David Renton of Reid Kerr College for Level 5
Gillian Dobry of Adam Smith College for Level 6.

Today's meeting was a brain-storming session, when we discussed the ideas that came from the first meeting of the QDT and tried to turn these ideas into a qualification structure. It was a good meeting. We discussed many things including:

• the title of the award
• the mandatory and optional split
• the inclusion of the new National Courses in Computing Science
• the inclusion of PC Passport (or its successor)
• core skills
• the inclusion of a project unit in all of the awards.
• the role of programming.

There was a lot of agreement about these things, and some good ideas came out of the meeting. For example, we discussed embedding [the new] PC Passport into the awards; we also discussed including the new National Courses within structure; and the possibility of including a project in all three awards. We intend to use NC Computing as a working title for the new awards.

The LDs were asked to turn these ideas into frameworks, which we will share with the wider QDT (and then all stakeholders) once they have been firmed-up.

Please use the comment facility if you want to provide feedback to the team, or contact Hilary directly if you want to know more about this development.