Skills for Work Courses – a new approach to quality assurance

Innovative delivery and assessment approaches have presented an exciting opportunity to review our thinking about the internal and external quality assurance of the new Skills for Work Courses.

In these courses it is the practical experiential processes that are important .... not always the end products.

This seminar explores a partnership approach to delivery and quality assurance - a partnership between SQA and regionally supported centres - working together to agree appropriate standards and interpretation of candidate performance.

In many respects the best people to quality assure experiential assessment processes are the people closest to them - i.e. regional practitioners working collaboratively in (regionally) supported networks.

Local practitioners are best placed to form that important consensus of opinion that appropriate standards are being applied, and consistently met.

Local internal verifiers can be present during the experiential delivery of Skills for Work courses, observing the important practical candidate experiences at the centre of all Skills for Work courses.

The seminar provides opportunities to discuss new partnership approaches to understanding standards, and the concept of shared responsibility for the quality assurance of National Courses without external assessment.

Further information about Skills for Work courses can be found on SQA's website - www.sqa.org.uk/skillsforwork.

Donald Paterson is a Project Manager within SQA's National Qualification Product Development team.

Over the past two years, he has been responsible for managing the implementation of Skills for Work courses in Scotland, during their pilot phases.

He has considerable teaching experience in schools and has held a number of quality assurance related posts within SQA – including Systems Verifier and Quality Auditor.

He has supported the design and development of educational quality assurance systems both in the UK and internationally.