A CURRICULUM FOR EXCELLENCE!

We need to develop a curriculum for excellence and where best to look but Scotland. The Scottish Government education strategy, and the curriculum frameworks that deliver it, recognise that learning is lifelong, and are designed to help learners develop the skills they need for learning, life and work. The Curriculum for Excellence aims to achieve a transformation in education in Scotland by providing a coherent, more flexible and enriched curriculum from 3 to 18.
The starting point for learning is a positive ethos and climate of respect and trust based upon shared values across the school community, including parents of children and young people. Importantly personal achievement provides children and young people with a sense of satisfaction and helps to build motivation, resilience and confidence. The Curriculum for Excellence includes the experiences planned for children and young people through their education, wherever they are being educated. This includes the curriculum areas and subjects, the school community and interdisciplinary projects. By recognising and planning learning around different contexts and experiences, the curriculum aims to make better connections across learning. The curriculum has been designed on the basis of the following principles: challenge and enjoyment, breadth, progression, depth, personalisation and choice, coherence and relevance. The experiences and outcomes are organised into the eight curriculum areas: expressive arts, health and wellbeing, languages, mathematics, religious and moral education, sciences, social studies and technologies. These curriculum areas are not structures for timetabling because establishments and partnerships have the freedom to think imaginatively about how the experiences and outcomes might be organised and planned for in creative ways which encourage deep, sustained learning and which meet the needs of their children and young people. The curriculum also includes space for learning beyond subject boundaries, so that children and young people can make connections between different areas of learning. These interdisciplinary studies, based upon groupings of experiences and outcomes from within and across curriculum areas, provide relevant, challenging and enjoyable learning experiences and stimulating contexts to meet the varied needs of children and young people.

Perhaps we should all simply move to Scotland! You can find out more about the Curriculum for Excellence at www.ltscotland.org.uk/.
Chris