Does your organisation provide career-long professional learning support in STEM (sciences, technologies, engineering, mathematics) and digital skills to any or all of the following groups and/or sectors?
- Early learning and childcare practitioners
- Primary school practitioners
- Additional support needs practitioners
- Classroom assistants
- Secondary school practitioners
- School-based technical support staff
- College/FE practitioners.
If so, then we’d be very grateful for your support in helping us to recognise the contribution your organisation makes to this.
2.Why are we asking for this data?
In 2017, the Scottish Government published the STEM Education and Training Strategy for Scotland. A key ambition of the strategy is to enhance the provision of high-quality career-long professional learning (CLPL) to the groups listed above.
Education Scotland consulted many of the target groups to find out more about their STEM CLPL needs and the findings are now being used to shape the national offering. A new Enhancing Professional Learning in STEM Grants Programme has recently been launched by Education Scotland to promote innovation in this area and build further delivery capacity.
On an annual basis, we will be gathering data to track progress against the following STEM Strategy Key Performance Indicator: Increase the cumulative hours of STEM professional learning accessed by early years, schools, college and CLD practitioners annually. If your organisation provides STEM CLPL to the target groups listed above, then we’d be very grateful for your support in helping us measure progress against this KPI.
The commitment in the STEM Education and Training Strategy is to enhance the existing provision of professional learning in STEM. As we progress with our plans we want to be sure that there is an equity of provision across all sectors and geographical areas and that the needs of various groups are being met. The tracking process and annual return survey will help us to allocate resources to where they are needed most to address gaps and imbalances.
What will we do with this data?
We will produce an overall analysis of the data provided to us and will be sharing this with key partners such as Scottish Government and Scottish Funding Council to inform decision-making and planning in relation to the STEM strategy. The analysis will also be shared widely with the education system through Education Scotland’s communication channels.
The data provided by your organisation will not be identifiable from the analysis. However, you will be given the option of being listed as one of the participating organisations.
3.About the tracking process
The following two-step process is designed to make the on-going capture of this data as easy as possible. If you already have systems in place to capture the relevant data (as outlined in Appendix 1 in the attached Guidance notes) then please disregard Step 1 and proceed straight to Step 2.
Step 1: Collate your STEM & digital skills CLPL data throughout the year
- We have created a CLPL Tracker Template (attached) to help you track the STEM professional learning your organisation provides. This Excel-based tool automatically tallies data on your CLPL activities; making it easy for you to capture the quantitative information required.
- Instructions on how to use the Tracker are contained within the document itself – see the How to use this tracker worksheet/tab. Further notes have been embedded in the sample table and the Enter Data worksheet. Just hover your mouse over the relevant table heading to reveal the notes.
- We are inviting your organisation to use this Tracker on an on-going basis to capture data on your CLPL activities from 1st August to 31 July each year. If you are willing to support this then we’d be grateful if you could start this process by entering data on your CLPL activity from 01 August 2018.
Step 2: Enter your cumulative CLPL data totals in our annual return survey
- In August each year, we will send you our annual return online survey to complete.
- If you have been using the STEM CLPL Tracker, then you can find the data to be entered into the survey in the My Totals worksheet/tab in the Tracker.
- If you will be using your own internal processes to track the professional learning your organisation provides, then please refer to Appendix 1 in the attached Guidance Notes to see the data that will be required.
- The annual return survey that we will issue will also contain free-text options for you to enter any qualitative data you would like to share.
- Please ensure that you only enter data on the CLPL that your organisation has led on. We are keen to avoid any duplication or double-counting of CLPL activity undertaken.
- We will send you more details about the 2018/19 annual return in due course.
4. Help us to establish a baseline with your retrospective CLPL data
We are also keen to establish a baseline of activity for academic year 2017/18. We, therefore, would be very grateful if you could provide us with retrospective data for STEM CLPL you provided between 1 August 2017 and 31 July 2018. We appreciate that this may be a challenge given the time that has elapsed since then, so we have created a simple survey to capture this data. We are happy to receive estimated figures.
The survey can be accessed at: https://forms.education.gov.scot/s/STEM20172018/
We would be very grateful if you could complete this retrospective survey by the new extended deadkline of Friday 11th January.
This online survey also asks if you would like to be included in this annual data return process so that the contribution your organisation makes to STEM learning in Scotland can be captured on an on-going basis. If you would like to be involved in the coming years, then please complete the relevant section to ensure that we have the most up-to-date contact details.
You may be interested to know that we also have issued a survey to practitioners in early learning and childcare settings and schools to capture information about the professional learning they have accessed and to identify their priorities for the year ahead.
We’d like to take this opportunity to thank you for the support you provide for STEM learning in Scotland. If you have any questions then please get in touch.
Click on the following links to access the Tracker and Guidance notes referred to in this document:
