'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.
Positive learning environment
The Education Additional Support for Learning (Scotland) Act 2004 and the Education Additional Support for Learning (Scotland) Act 2009 provide a framework of support for children and young people who are facing barriers to learning.
Barriers can arise from the learning environment, family circumstances, disability or health needs and social or emotional factors. Where such circumstances arise, children and young people are entitled to have their additional support needs identified and addressed at the earliest possible stage. Planning mechanisms such as personal learning planning, individualised educational programmes (IEPs) and coordinated support plans (CSPs), can help to ensure that each child or young person with additional support needs can achieve positive and sustained educational outcomes.
The Early Years Framework and Getting it Right for Every Child (GIRFEC) highlight the importance of effective and sustained early intervention practices. These practices help to ensure that appropriate action is taken to provide the right level of support for children who are at risk of not achieving their full potential.
Teachers shape the learning environment to meet the needs of learners. To do this, they need to know their learners well – as learners. This means that teachers need to consider whether the repertoire of learning and teaching approaches they use will deliver the aims and purposes of Curriculum for Excellence.
Health, social work, police and education partners need to ensure that effective multi-agency information-sharing is in place and that full and relevant information about children's and young people's circumstances is used to inform the planning and delivery of appropriate support. The resilience framework and the e-Care framework are useful mechanisms to help ensure that effective steps are taken to remove any barriers to learning in relation to family circumstances. Schools need to adopt approaches that help to remove barriers to learning resulting from social and emotional circumstances including, for example, challenging behaviour.
Assessment arrangements
Arrangements for assessment should ensure that all children and young people have an equal opportunity to show what they can achieve.
Pre-school establishments, schools and colleges are required to identify and deliver 'reasonable adjustments' to assessment approaches for disabled children and young people and those with additional support needs, for example, by using assistive technologies.
Since assessment is integral to learning and teaching, approaches used to help in assessing an individual child's or young person's progress should be consistent as far as possible with those used in learning. Practice is most effective where teachers use a range of assessment approaches flexibly to identify strengths, learning needs and appropriate support for vulnerable, disengaged and hard-to-reach learners.
In line with disability discrimination legislation, the Scottish Qualifications Authority will as far as possible ensure that barriers to internal and external assessment are avoided in the specifications for qualifications, and will make adjustments to assessment arrangements for disabled candidates and those identified as having additional support needs. These assessment arrangements are adjustments to the published assessment arrangements and are intended for young people who can achieve the national standards, but cannot do so by the published assessment arrangements – the reason for this might be a physical disability, a sensory impairment, a learning difficulty or a temporary problem at the time of the assessment.
16+ Learning Choices
16+ Learning Choices aims to ensure that all young people have an offer of appropriate post-16 learning along with the necessary support to enable them to move into positive and sustained destinations.
Ensuring appropriate information, advice and guidance along with the necessary support and more choices and more chances for those learners who need them, will be an important part of providing an inclusive approach to learning, teaching and assessment in the senior phase.
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