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Professional Development Conference 2019

From 27 – 29 August 2019, SQA welcomed our centres in China to our CPD conference. The theme for this year’s conference in Beijing was Continuous Improvement.

The aim of the conference was to provide staff who work with SQA programmes in centres with a wide range of tools and techniques that they can use to support an ethos of continuous improvement within their centres. Sharing the learning from this event and the materials available from the CPD materials section of the website with your colleagues in your centre is crucial to getting the best value from the conference.

The conference included several presentations, including:

  • A model for continuous improvement – Delivering SQA Qualifications: Circle of Success
  • An update on the new Tutor Resources section of the SQA China website.
  • A consultation on the planned review for the Advanced Diploma in Business.
  • Sharing good practice from Wuhan University of Technology and Renmin University of China.
  • An update from SQA’s China Manager – Jimmy Zhang.
  • An update on verification activity.
  • Guidance on Prior Verification.

There were also several delegate workshops, including:

  • Professional Judgement - Economics 2: The World Economy
  • Professional Judgement – Managing People and Organisations
  • Using Qualification Verification Summary Reports to improve quality
  • Quality Review Reporting
  • SQA Academy – an introduction
  • Research Skills Guide update
  • SQA Coordinators – Making Internal Verification Work for You
  • SQA Coordinators – Making Induction Work for Your Learners
  • SQA Coordinators – Focus Group

For more information, please view the conference programme.

Key action points were agreed with the delegates for each day of the conference:

Day one

  1. Access the latest Qualification Summary Reports (2019) with your team and discuss the reports’ content as part of your course review and planning process. Choose two or three areas of good practice identified within the report that you will set as a target for adoption in the coming academic session.

    Prior Verification
  2. a) Collate the materials from the two sessions on prior verification and make them available to all staff.
    b) Review all prior verification processes currently in place within your centre and adapt these, as necessary, based on the learning form these sessions.
    c) Think about how you should coordinate your centre’s prior verification requests. How do you avoid the Feb – May peak?
  3. Summarise Assessment Summary reports for each qualification you deliver and create a Course Report for each qualification evaluating the delivery, assessment, resources and outcomes.
  4. SQA Coordinators – If your centre is consistently getting ‘High Confidence’ start to think less about compliance and more about adding value – how do you make the QA criteria work for you rather than the other way round?

Day two

1. Collate and review the materials from the Professional Judgement workshops – Economics 2: The World Economy and/or Managing People and Organisations. Use these in your centre for a standardisation training activity with staff who were not able to attend the PDC event.

2. SQA China website – review this prior to the start of the new semester. Familiarise yourself with the new layout and identify materials that you can use in your role. Share the updates with colleagues.

3. SQA Coordinators

a) think about how your IVs and assessors interact with each other. Are they acting as members of the same team or are they a collection of individuals? What can you do to help build a culture of teamwork and collaboration?
b) how does your work fit into the circle of success? Can you adopt the same approach – plan/prepare/deliver/assess/review? Can you support the teams in their approach?

Day three

  1. Share the information about the SQA Academy courses with your colleagues and liaise with the appropriate colleagues to have these embedded within the induction process for all new staff. Include SQA Academy courses as refresher CPD for all staff.
  2. SQA Coordinators to ensure that all content in SQA newsletters (and any ad hoc update letters) are shared with all centre staff.
  3. Inform all relevant colleagues about the new Research Skills Unit and the new guide. As part of your course review access the guide and discuss with the course team the best approach to delivering and assessing the Research Skills Unit and Graded Unit 2 project.
  4. SQA Coordinators: think about how you can you work collaboratively with other coordinators. What can you achieve as a community of specialists?

Conference questions and answers