4.1. Learning, teaching, assessment and planning
Curriculum for Excellence provides the framework for learning, teaching and assessment in Scottish education. It is designed to achieve a transformation in education in Scotland by providing a coherent, more flexible and enriched curriculum for learners from 3 to 18 years old.
The term curriculum is understood to mean everything that is planned for children and young people throughout their education, not just what happens in the classroom.
Curriculum for Excellence includes four contexts for learning:
- Curriculum areas and subjects
- Interdisciplinary learning
- Ethos and life of the school
- Opportunities for personal achievement.
The Building the Curriculum document series [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] provides advice, guidance and policy for different aspects of Curriculum for Excellence.
Select here for the attributes and capabilities of the four capacities.
Select here for further information on Curriculum for Excellence and the 2020 Refreshed Narrative.
Activity 28 Word cloud
Inclusive, exclusive, flexible, rigid, exploiting, developed, better, poorer, learners, teachers, parents, additional, normal, usual, included, excluded, lessons, appropriate, planning, early intervention, appropriate support, support, curriculum, timely
Select the appropriate word from the list above to complete the paragraph correctly
Curriculum for Excellence is an ___________curriculum and is designed to be________. Schools and local authorities should be ________fully the flexibility of Curriculum for Excellence to _________meet the needs of all___________. Schools must ensure that the needs of all learners, including those who have ___________support needs are incorporated and __________from the start of any curriculum planning to ensure timely and ___________ which will enable learners to participate in well planned experiences and achieve positive outcomes.
Answer
Curriculum for Excellence is an inclusive curriculum and is designed to be flexible. Schools and Local authorities should be exploiting fully the flexibility of Curriculum for Excellence to better meet the needs of all learners. Schools must ensure that the needs of all learners, including those who have additional support needs are incorporated and included from the start of any curriculum planning to ensure timely and appropriate support, which will enable learners to participate in well planned experiences and achieve positive outcomes.
What makes effective and inclusive learning and teaching?
A range of factors will determine how effective and inclusive the provision and experience of learning and teaching is. HGIOS? 4 Quality Indicator 2.3 focuses on four important themes below.
Learning and engagement
- Ensuring that the optimal conditions for learning are created
- Ensuring that learners are at the centre, and are motivated and engaged
Quality of teaching
- Building on existing strengths and prior learning to ensure progression
- Breadth, challenge and application
- Effective pedagogy
Effective use of assessment
- Breadth, challenge and application
- Agreed assessment approaches
Planning, tracking and monitoring
- Collegiate and collaborative working to support consistency
- Effective use of data
The Moderation Cycle in Figure 22 outlines each stage of effective learning and teaching. It enables practitioners to develop a shared understanding of standards and expectations in the broad general education.
Engaging in the moderation process with colleagues will assist practitioners in arriving at valid and reliable decisions on learners’ progress towards, and achievement of, a level.
Assessment within Curriculum for Excellence
Principles of assessment
Assessment is a dynamic process, with the child or young person at the centre. As a result, it should not be divorced from other aspects of the child’s life, whether at school, home or in the community as illustrated in the My World Triangle below in Figure 23.
The My World Triangle can be used to gather more information from a range of sources (some of it possibly specialist), to identify the strengths or wellbeing concerns in the child or young person’s world.
The Code of Practice (Third Edition) 2017, highlighted in section 1.1, states that:
‘assessment is seen as an ongoing process of gathering, structuring and making sense of information about a child or young person, and his/her circumstances. The ultimate purpose of assessment under the Act is to help identify the actions required to maximise development and learning. Assessment plays a key role in the authority’s arrangements for identifying children and young people who have additional support needs and who, of those, require a coordinated support plan. Assessment is a process supported by professionals and parents in most circumstances. It identifies and builds on strengths, whilst taking account of needs and risks. The assessment process also assumes the negotiated sharing of information by relevant persons and agencies.’
The principles of Curriculum for Excellence apply to assessment in a way that achieves coherence across experiences and outcomes, learning and teaching and assessment practice. Assessment is an integral part of learning and teaching. It helps to provide a picture of a child’s or young person's progress and achievements and to identify next steps in learning. Assessment approaches need to promote learner engagement and ensure appropriate support so that all learners can achieve their aspirational goals and maximise their potential.
The purposes of assessment are to:
- Support learning that develops the knowledge and understanding, skills, attributes and capabilities which contribute to the four capacities
- Give assurance to parents, children themselves, and others, that children and young people are progressing in their learning and developing in line with expectations
- Provide a summary of what learners have achieved, including through qualifications and awards
- Contribute to planning the next stages of learning and help learners progress to further education, higher education and employment
- Inform future improvements in learning and teaching.
High quality interactions between learners and staff lie at the heart of assessment as part of learning and teaching. Section 1.1 highlighted that ‘pupil support’ begins with the classroom teacher and not the support for learning teacher. Class teachers assess constantly, as part of daily learning and teaching and are involved and responsible for the continuing assessment, monitoring and planning for their pupils, following the principles and purpose of assessment information. They do this, for example, by watching and listening to learners carrying out tasks, by looking at what they write and make and by considering how they answer questions. They get to know their learners well, build up a profile of their progress, strengths and needs and involve them in planning what they need to learn next. Effective ongoing assessment is about establishing where children and young people are in their learning, where they are going and how best to get there. It is important that teachers use and share the evidence about learning to provide useful feedback to learners, to adapt learning and teaching approaches to meet their needs and to revisit areas where learning is not yet secure.
Sources of assessment evidence that class teachers can share with support staff include:
- Observations of learners carrying out tasks and activities, including practical investigations, performances, oral presentations and discussions
- Records (oral, written, audio-visual) created by children and young people which may include self-assessment and/or peer assessment or may be assessed by the teacher
- Information obtained through questioning in high quality interactions and dialogue
- Written responses
- A product, for example, a piece of artwork, report, project
- Accounts provided by others (parents, other children or young people, or other staff) about what learners have done
Ongoing assessment, including in the senior phase, will include assessing progress across the breadth of learning, in challenging aspects and when applying learning in different and unfamiliar contexts. A class teacher’s valuable insight and observations contribute significantly to the provision of appropriate curriculum planning, assessment and supporting learners with additional support needs. Assessment within the context of Curriculum for Excellence is also assessment for additional support needs. They are not two different types of assessment.
Assessment within the classroom
Within Curriculum for Excellence, assessment is used to support individual learning and to provide reliable information to learners, parents, employers and further and higher education about the standards that have been achieved.
‘Building the Curriculum 5 (2011) A Framework for Assessment’ provides guidance on the main areas of the assessment strategy for Curriculum for Excellence. Reflecting the values and principles of Curriculum for Excellence ‘A Framework for Assessment’ is designed to support the purposes of Curriculum for Excellence.
There is no expectation that class teachers will or need to be ‘experts’ in any area of additional support. They must be able to access specialist advice and guidance from support for learning/pupil support /specialist teachers or inclusion officers. (Local authorities use different terminology for staff). This advice or consultation can be either through face-to-face meetings or by phone, email or a medium such as Skype. Section 6 outlines in further detail the roles of staff within the school community.
Ensuring appropriate support
Building the Curriculum 3 details the entitlement of all children and young people to,
‘personal support to enable them to gain as much as possible from the opportunities which Curriculum for Excellence can provide.’
Assessment has to be fair and inclusive and must allow every learner to show what they have achieved and how well they are progressing. Staff can ensure that assessment meets all learners’ needs by providing each child and young person with the most appropriate support. In doing so, they will ensure that every learner has the best chance of success. For monitoring and tracking to be successful, records of children’s and young people’s achievements and progress need to be manageable. Staff should use assessment information from a wide range of sources to monitor learners’ progress and plan next steps in learning. Assessment information should be shared and discussed with the learner, parents, other staff as appropriate and partners involved in supporting learning. All can contribute at appropriate times to setting targets for learning and ensuring appropriate support for each child and young person.
Select here to download ‘A framework for Assessment’
Activity 29 Reflective task
‘A Framework for Assessment’ is part of a series of Building the Curriculum publications and is intended to further support planning, design and putting into practice the curriculum and approaches to assessment in schools and colleges. Although written in 2011, it is still a relevant and useful guidance document to read when evaluating approaches to assessment.
Read pages 49–51 which focus on the ‘Roles and responsibilities in assessment’ for:
- Learners
- Teachers and other practitioners
- Parents
- Curriculum planners and managers in pre-school, school, community, college and other settings (including headteachers, depute headteachers, faculty heads/principal teachers, curriculum leaders and service managers)
- Education authorities
In your Reflective Log, use the table to reflect and evaluate assessment in relation to inclusive practice.
You can share this activity and your reflections with colleagues and/or your line manager to discuss current practice and approaches for assessment of additional support needs used by class teachers and support for learning staff.
Activity 30 Reflective task
In you Reflective Log, consider the following questions:
- What might be the issues that you need to address in planning assessment opportunities, recognising “that learners will progress in different ways” and can “demonstrate their achievement in different ways”?
- How will you address the challenges of assessing the broad range of learning across all contexts and settings in which the curriculum is experienced?
Learning English as an Additional Language (EAL) and dyslexia
Speakers of any language can have dyslexic difficulties but these may be different in the ways they manifest themselves. It will be more obvious in some languages than others depending on the spelling rules and writing structures.
For children who speak languages other than English at home, the assessment process will require very careful consideration. Consideration will require to be given to the child’s first language, as well as English and this may require assistance from a professional who shares the same language as the child. It must be remembered that the phonology of the child’s first language is likely to be different from English and written scripts (eg alphabetic/logographic) may also be different. As an example, Polish children who have wholly developed literacy skills will have experience of decoding in alphabetic script whilst for children who have experience of decoding in logographic scripts such as Chinese scripts, the relationship between sounds and symbols will be markedly different for each child. Even though children may not have learned to read in their first language they will have been exposed to environmental print. The issue for teachers is to consider whether the child’s difficulties with language extend beyond them having English as another language.
Cline and Hall (1995) advise avoiding the use of standardised assessments, particularly with those new to English, as the English and cultural content may give false information. It is more useful to build a profile of the learner’s strengths, including what they can do in their first language, as well as information about their educational background. To support EAL learners with possible dyslexia, the focus needs to be on support for the first language involving parents. Many of the strategies that support dyslexic learners will work well with EAL learners, but, in addition, it is important to focus on building vocabulary in a meaningful context, taking account of cultural factors.
Research (Ganschow and Sparks, 2000) confirms that strengths and weaknesses in the linguistic codes of phonology/orthography (sounds/letter patterns), syntax and semantics are transferred between languages. So learning a second language challenges dyslexic students because it requires those skills that are frequently compromised in dyslexia - sequencing ability, phonological knowledge and both short and long-term memory (Wolf, 2008). The processing differences associated with the specific learning difficulty (SpLD)/dyslexia can also cause listening difficulties (Crombie & McColl, 2001), making a second language as complex, inconsistent and challenging as English and more difficult for dyslexic children to acquire (Ziegler et al, 2003).
Planning
Module 1, Recap
Staged intervention is used as a means of identification, assessment, planning, recording and review to meet the learning needs of children and young people. All local authorities have a staged intervention and assessment process in place, which enables practitioners to assess and meet learners’ needs, including dyslexia. Staged intervention:
- Provides a solution-focused approach to meeting needs at the earliest opportunity and with the least intrusive level of intervention.
- Involves the child, parents/carers, school staff and, at some levels, other professionals. All are working in partnership to get it right for every child.
Staged intervention is designed to be flexible and allows for movement between stages depending on progress. There are variations between local authorities regarding the number of stages within their process. The diagram below highlights 3 stages. The majority of learners with dyslexia will be supported within Universal support. Further details can be found on the Addressing Dyslexia Toolkit within the Supporting Learners section.
In Scottish schools the staged intervention is used as a means of identification, assessment, planning, recording and review to meet the learning needs of children and young people, including dyslexic learners. Staged intervention:
- Provides a solution-focused approach to meeting needs at the earliest opportunity and with the least intrusive level of intervention
- Involves the child, parents/carers, school staff and, at some levels, other professionals. All are working in partnership to get it right for every child.
Staged intervention is designed to be flexible and allows for movement between stages depending on progress. There are variations between local authorities regarding the number of stages within their process. The Dyslexia identification Pathway has been developed to support the Staged intervention process.
Universal support
Universal support starts with the ethos, climate and relationships within every learning environment. It is the responsibility of all practitioners to take a child-centred approach that promotes and supports wellbeing, inclusion equality and fairness. The entitlement to universal support for all children and young people is provided from within the existing pre-school and school settings.
An environment which is caring, inclusive, fair and focused on delivering learning to meet individual needs will encourage all children and young people to strive to meet their learning potential. Every child and young person is entitled to support to enable them to gain as much as possible from the opportunities which Curriculum for Excellence can provide. When a child or young person may require some additional support, this is initially the responsibility of the classroom teacher. The majority of children and young people’s needs are met through universal support.
Some examples of universal support are below. This list is not exhaustive.
- Personalised learning plans
- Literacy, numeracy or health and wellbeing support
- Enhanced transition
- Use of ICT e.g. digital learning and teaching resources such as digital course material and SQA exams
- Quiet spaces
- Visual timetables and supports
Targeted support
Children and young people can benefit from additional or targeted support, tailored to their individual circumstances. This could be at any point on their learning journey or throughout the journey.
This targeted support is any focused support that children or young people may require for short or longer periods of time, to help them overcome barriers to learning or to ensure progress in learning.
Targeted support is usually, but not exclusively, co-ordinated and provided by staff with additional training and expertise through a staged intervention process. This may be by staff other than the class teacher and outwith the pre-school or school setting but within education services
Some examples of targeted support are below. This list is not exhaustive:
- Higher attaining children (ensuring progression)
- Bereavement peer support group
- Input from Allied Health Professionals e.g. Speech and Language Therapist
- Trauma-informed interventions designed for a care experienced child/young person
- Complex needs e.g. sessions in a sensory room
All children and young people should have frequent and regular opportunities to discuss their learning and development with an adult who knows them well and with whom they have a mutually trusting relationship. This key member of staff has the holistic overview of the child's or young person’s learning and personal development.
There are variations between local authorities regarding the number of stages within their process and their terminology used to describe planning documents. An overview using common terms is provided in the table below.
| Universal | Targeted | ||
Stages/levels Examples | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| Examples of plans | Class planning. Personal Learning Plan (PLP). | Individualised Education Plan (IEP). | Coordinated Support Plan (CSP). Child's Plan. |
Personal Learning Planning (PLP)
Personalised learning is at the heart of supporting learning in which the learning environment is a crucial factor. Conversations about learning, reviewing progress and planning next steps are central to this process. All children and young people should be involved in personal learning planning (PLP).
All are entitled to have opportunities for achievement that focus on learning and progress made through activities across the full range of contexts and settings in which the curriculum is experienced. The 2017 Code of Practice says that children with additional support needs should be involved in their personal learning planning. It also says that, for many, this will be enough to meet their needs.
Individualised Educational Programme (IEP)
If a PLP does not enable sufficient planning to support a child or young person who has dyslexia or literacy difficulties, their PLP can be supported by an individualised educational programme (IEP). An IEP is a non-statutory document used to plan specific aspects of education for learners who need some of or their entire curriculum to be individualised. IEPs are usually provided when the curriculum planning required is to be ‘significantly’ different from the class curriculum. Involvement with group work or extraction for a number of sessions a week does not normally meet the criteria for an IEP.
Co-ordinated Support Plan (CSP) – targeted support
A CSP is the only statutory educational plan in Scotland. It is a legal document and aims to ensure that all the professionals, the child/young person and the parents/carers work together and are fully involved in the support. It was developed to help coordinate services for children or young people, whose additional support needs:
- Arise from complex, or multiple factors, which
- Have a significant adverse effect on their school education; and
- Are likely to last at least a year, and which require support to be provided by an education authority and at least one other non-education service or agency.
Dyslexia on its own as an additional support need would not commonly trigger the opening of a CSP.
Child Plan – targeted support
In line with the 2014 Children and Young People Act and the ‘Getting it right for every child’ approach, many children and young will now have a Child’s Plan. Child’s Plans are created if a child or young person needs some extra support to meet their wellbeing needs such as access to mental health services or respite care or help from a range of different agencies. The Child’s Plan will contain information about:
- Why a child or young person needs support
- The type of support they will need
- How long they will need support and who should provide it.
All professionals working with the child would use the plan, which may include an IEP or a CSP. Where there is a Child’s Plan and targeted interventions to support a child or young person and parents, there will be a Lead Professional to co-ordinate that help.
Reporting
Educational Reporting
'Reporting provides clear, positive and constructive feedback on learning and progress to parents and learners and creates an agenda for discussions about next steps in learning.' (Building the Curriculum 5)
Staff supporting learners who require additional support are familiar with this kind of reporting, whether for review meetings, evaluating plans and targets with learners or as a report for parents or carers.
4. Assessing and monitoring