The Scottish Government published the Education (Scotland) Bill on 4 June. The Bill is about establishing a new qualifications body, Qualifications Scotland, to replace SQA, and establishing a separate inspectorate body.

The Education, Children and Young People Committee issued a call for views (closed on Friday 30 August) and US responded to the short call for views on the proposals for Qualifications Scotland and the proposals for a new HM Chief Inspector of Education in Scotland.

On Qualifications Scotland, we included the following points:

• We understand the intention behind creating Qualifications Scotland and are supportive. We support better inclusion of learner views and teaching professionals’ views in the new organisation. We also support the emphasis in the bill on working with other stakeholders.
• We support the intention to review qualifications and to introduce a greater variety of assessment methods.
• It will be critical to have rigour, external moderation and validation of work, particularly where it is teacher-assessed. This is necessary to ensure that the same standards apply across the whole of Scotland, no matter which school someone attends. It will be important that all schools have sufficient resources (and experienced staff) to manage any teacher assessment requirements.
• It is important that Scottish qualifications continue to be understood and recognised in the rest of the UK and beyond and that these qualifications meet professional and regulatory body standards.
• We are pleased to see accreditation will not apply to degrees as there are already robust quality arrangements in place for universities.
• It is imperative that there is no requirement to accredit all non-degree qualifications as universities award a range of credit and qualifications that are not degrees as all university credit-bearing provision is included in QAA’s external quality review.
• We think ongoing evaluation of the new qualifications body, as per the Scottish Government Evaluation Action Plan, will be essential

We also point to our previous responses to the Hayward review and our submission to the call for evidence for the review.

On inspection, we made the following points:

• We welcome the Bill recognising the role and responsibilities of SFC with respect to quality in colleges.
• We think it is important that responsibility for overseeing quality in publicly funded colleges (and universities) should remain with SFC and that it is not necessary to give the new inspection body a duty to inspect colleges.
• We highlight and comment on the development of the new tertiary approach to quality assurance and enhancement.
• We also comment on how Foundation Apprenticeships (FAs) will be assessed on a consistent basis by the inspectorate of education across different providers, incorporating schools, colleges and private training providers.
• We support the approach in the Bill of recognising SFC’s quality duties and the existing quality arrangements in place in universities, including institution-led review and QAA’s external review process, as well as the statutory role of the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTC Scotland) in determining and accrediting programmes of Initial Teacher Education.