Meeting with Scotland's Colleges team

Me, Caroline and Hilary met with the corresponding team from Scotland's Colleges this morning. Colin and Gerry came through to the SQA offices in Glasgow. The purpose of the meeting was to update each other on our respective plans, and explore ways of working together.



It was a productive meeting, with lots of good ideas coming out of it. One of the things we discussed was teaching and learning materials for the new HNs that will be produced as part of the on-going HN Review. SQA will produce assessments for the mandatory units within these awards, but we recognised that centres may need additional support to implement these new qualifications.

We also discussed the problem of "information fragmentation". One of the findings of the recent satisfaction survey was that you found the different sources of information (the SQA website, this blog, Twitter, etc.) confusing. So we agreed to look at ways of bringing this together (including information provided by Scotland's Colleges).

SQA and Scotland's Colleges already work together in various ways. For example, Colin is a member of the Sector Panel for Computing & IT, and Caroline is a member of the Subject Network for Computing provided by SC. But we agreed to strengthen these links.

Pedagogy is an important part of the SC role, and we spent some time discussing ways that teaching and learning could be improved.

Good meetings have good outcomes, and we agreed lots of actions to be taken after this meeting. Hopefully, you will see some of these actions reported on this blog in the coming months. We also agreed to have future meetings like this one, perhaps including other national agencies, such as the new Education Scotland.