Welcome back

Many lecturers and teachers return to school and college today to commence academic session 2011/12. Welcome back! We hope you have a good year.

If you scroll through this blog, you'll see what the team has been doing over the summer months. The main development has been the HN Review, which is reviewing five popular Higher National Qualifications. There was a little slippage in assigning unit writers but we are now pushing ahead. Internet Safety has went into a review phase. And we took the opportunity, during the relative quiet of the summer months, to update a number of units. There was a particularly good meeting with Scotland's Colleges, when we agreed a number of actions that should improve the service that we provide to you. In fact, it was so successful that we plan to hold similar meetings, between SQA and Scotland's Colleges, every summer.

It's that time of the year when I remind you who we are and what we do. Please download and print the team organisation chart and keep it handy. You will get a much faster response if you contact the right person.

Just before you left for holiday, we carried out a satisfaction survey and although the results were very positive, there are a couple of areas we plan to concentrate on during the coming year. One of these areas is communications. We've been using social media to keep you up-to-date for some time, and we plan to work on this during the coming year. I'll post something about this later this week.

The results of the survey were good, but the most pleasing aspect, for me, was that you consider the team friendly, visible and approachable.

We're living through a revolution in teaching and learning, caused by the Internet, mobile technology, and social media. It's a great time to be involved with education.