Good morning, everyone. As the national awarding and accreditation body for Scotland, the SQA is responsible for the quality, validity and maintenance of the credibility of qualifications that are offered to learners. Given the size of the accreditation function, compared with that of the awarding body, we fully understand that the committee’s focus will be on the SQA’s role as an awarding body. In that capacity, the SQA develops qualifications to support the education and skills system. Our remit is to ensure that learners’ are able to progress successfully through learning, with qualifications, by building on their previous learning and by preparing the individual to be successful in the next phase of learning or going into work. SQA qualifications must therefore be set at the correct level, and course content must reflect the knowledge, understanding and skills that are necessary for achievement of a successful destination for that learner.
In the case of curriculum for excellence qualifications, the SQA was asked to develop a suite of qualifications that built on the learning level that candidates would have achieved during their broad general education.
The CFE management board approved the design and structure of those qualifications. The course content and the associated guidance were developed in consultation with stakeholders from across the sector, including teachers, colleges, universities and employers, in addition to professional associations and, in particular, subject specialists.
It should be noted that the assessments reflected the desire to provide through CFE opportunities for personalisation and choice for candidates, and for teachers to set assessments in the associated personalisation areas.
The SQA plays a significant role, and it is important to understand that role in the education system as a whole. The structure of curriculum models and the nature and number of subjects that are taken by an individual learner or group of learners are determined in a school or a college, and the qualifications that individual candidates undertake is a matter for those centres, in consultation with learners, parents and carers, to support the best interests of that young person. That does not fall within the SQA’s remit.
Development and delivery of qualifications is a complex process, and the SQA’s approach is to try to ensure the inclusion of teaching and learning professionals, subject specialists and those who will receive the learners once they have undertaken and achieved the qualification—namely, colleges, universities and employers.
We have a strong working relationship with teachers and lecturers across Scotland. Indeed, more than 15,000 of them work with us in partnership every year to develop and deliver the qualifications system as a whole.
As the national awarding body, the SQA is responsible for ensuring the standards, credibility and sustainability of the education system over time and has, in doing so, to balance the needs of a variety of stakeholders.
The introduction of CFE has been one of the biggest educational changes in Scotland, and that change continues with the Deputy First Minister and Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills’s recently announced decision to ask the SQA to redesign the assessments that are associated with national qualifications.
As the new nationals have been implemented, the SQA has provided additional support and has listened to and responded to teachers’ needs. In the past few years, it has taken significant time through implementation and adjustment for that significant change to become embedded.
During development, it has been essential that the SQA communicate as much as possible with those who have been involved in the delivery, and in the learning and teaching of candidates who complete qualifications. That engagement has continued as the qualifications have been put in place over the past three to four years.
Our responsibility to understand and to address issues is well understood. We solicit and receive regular feedback from teachers and other interested stakeholders. However, the nature of our work means that we sometimes receive different advice from different sectors and people, which reflects the approaches of respondents to their subjects, their different opinions of course content and the approach that they would like us to take.
The SQA sees as being its responsibility the need to understand fully how our qualifications and assessments operate in schools and to identify issues that need to be addressed. It was in that vein that, at the end of 2015, the SQA undertook a review of qualifications design and detailed field studies in order to develop a research and evidence base that allows us to understand what needs to be strengthened and what has worked well as the qualifications were implemented. The field study involved talking to teachers, senior management teams in schools and learners, so that we could get a full understanding of how the qualifications were operating.
It is our responsibility to publish our findings, so that others in the system can understand the results. The committee may be aware that in May, the SQA published two research reports—one on the fieldwork and one on the detailed study of the nature and design of assessments. As a result of the evidence, the SQA made changes—again, in May 2016—to unit assessments for the current session and we communicated those and planned future changes through the subject review reports for each subject.
Currently, the SQA is undertaking further study and fieldwork—again, that involves senior management teams, teachers and pupils—not only to understand how the changes have worked to improve aspects of assessment, but to take further the discussion in order that we can understand the nature and experience of implementation of, particularly, national 4 and national 5 in the school and college sectors.
We are fully aware of our responsibility to provide value for money for the public purse, and we are focused on safe and secure delivery of our remit within a decreasing public purse. We regularly review our processes and procedures in order to identify how we can improve and how we can provide value for the public purse. We welcome the opportunity today to discuss our activities with the committee.