Sharing standards and expectations

Quality assurance helps to support teachers and build expertise and capacity in the education system to deliver positive outcomes for children and young people. Through sharing, understanding and applying standards and expectations, quality assurance helps to raise standards and expectations, and levels of consistency across teachers and schools. It is important in the planning and coordination of professional development activities that a partnership and inter-establishment approach is adopted to ensure cross-service and cross-sector working on standards and expectations.

Quality assurance in education is part of the day-to-day work of pre-school centres, primary, special and secondary schools, services and local authorities. Staff use a wide range of activities to ensure that high standards are maintained and outcomes improved for children and young people. These include monitoring, self-evaluation and planning for improvement. Since assessment is integral to learning, teaching and the curriculum, these quality assurance approaches apply equally to assessment.

Rigorous and robust quality assurance gives confidence in teachers' judgements and provides assurance to parents and others that all learners receive appropriate recognition for their achievements in line with agreed national standards and are progressing in line with expectations.

Where assessment is for high stakes qualifications and certification, particular safeguards are required to guarantee fairness to all young people and to provide confidence to parents, colleges, universities and employers. SQA has a range of well-established quality assurance procedures in place for its qualifications. Rigorous and robust procedures will also be important as part of the broad general education and in particular at points of transition in order to ensure the reliability of information shared about progress and achievements.

Moderation is the term used to describe approaches for arriving at a shared understanding of standards and expectations for the broad general education. It involves teachers and other professionals as appropriate, working together, drawing on guidance and exemplification and building on existing standards and expectations to:

• plan learning, teaching and assessment
• check that assessment tasks and activities provide learners with fair and valid opportunities to meet the standards and expectations before assessments are used
• sample evidence from learners' work and review teachers' judgements
• agree strengths in learners' performances and next steps in learning
• provide feedback on teachers' judgements to inform improvements in practices

Moderation helps to raise standards and expectations and levels of consistency across teachers and schools. This ensures that there is an appropriate focus on outcomes for learners, that learning is at the appropriate level and that learners develop the skills for learning, skills for life and skills for work, including higher order thinking skills, which will allow them to be successful in the future.

Teachers being involved in developing their assessment approaches through participation in moderation activities is a highly effective form of professional development.