Hope you and your families are all keeping well. It has been a turbulent few weeks to say the least! However, as always, I am very grateful to my staff at Braidhurst who have been working extremely hard to ensure there are resources online for your child to access during this period. There is plenty of work to keep them busy! Please encourage your child to participate and use them appropriately.

Staff have also volunteered, in great numbers, to help with the Motherwell Hub to look after the children of key workers to enable them to get to their work – I am humbled, but not surprised, by the response I have received.

I appreciate these are worrying times but, as a community, we will get through this by looking after each other. Before the school temporarily closed we managed to deliver approximately 50 boxes of supplies to families. North Lanarkshire have just announced that the families of those pupils in receipt of free school meals will be sent vouchers twice a week with a voucher code. If you know of anyone in our school family who you are concerned about please contact us and we will do our very best to support them.

Please encourage your child to stay in touch with each other and the staff through the contact details they have been given.

In the meantime stay safe – we are thinking of you and miss you.

Mrs Rooney

Head Teacher

Tuesday 24 March 2020

Following the announcement by the First Minister on Sunday, that no young person with SQA coursework to complete should attend school to do so, we continue to work hard on how we should take coursework evidence into account, in determining young people’s final grades.

Everyone here at SQA will do their utmost, given the current situation, and with the support of the education system, to ensure that learners’ hard work is rightly and fairly recognised and allows them to proceed to further learning or work.

The current public health advice has meant that we have had to make some really difficult decisions about coursework. This means that for this year, schools and colleges are not required to submit learner coursework for marking, in Higher and Advanced Higher courses.

We have taken this difficult decision to be as fair as possible to all Higher and Advanced Higher candidates, whilst taking on board the current public health advice, the many varied coursework requirements across different subjects, and how these are managed in schools and colleges across the country.

I appreciate that some learners may have already completed their coursework for Higher and Advanced Higher courses. This work can still be used as part of the suite of evidence for teachers and lecturers to draw on as they consider estimated grades.

We have received coursework for a range of National 5 subjects and have contacted National 5 coursework markers to confirm marking arrangements. All National 5 coursework, due to be uplifted in April and May, will not be submitted for marking.

We will provide further details on the estimation of grades, that we will need from teachers and lecturers to inform certification, and fuller details of our approach to certification, as soon as possible.

This is an unprecedented situation for us all, and circumstances are rapidly changing. With every change in circumstances, we continue to consider how best to recognise learner achievement in as fair a way as possible.

Please be assured that everyone here at SQA is fully committed to working with you to deliver for Scotland’s young people. Thank you for your patience and continued co-operation.
Fiona Robertson
SQA Chief Executive and Scotland’s Chief Examiner

Original post: https://www.sqa.org.uk/sqa/93658.html

Dear colleague

I am writing to provide you with an update on the activities that UCAS is undertaking in response COVID-19, and assure you that UCAS has the flexibility and expertise to support all audiences during this time.

UCAS set up a cross-business coronavirus working group in early February to identify and understand risks and issues relating to our services, review contingency planning, and coordinate communications and risk mitigation activities – this group now meets daily to ensure we are responding to the fast evolving environment, and are well positioned to support the universities, colleges, schools and students.

Most undergraduate applicants are already in the UCAS system. There are currently nearly 600,000 undergraduate applicants, and just under half are UK 18 year olds. The majority of these applicants will be holding an offer and have pending qualifications, such as A levels or Highers.

We continue to operate the admissions process as normal – we are continuing to support customers via our Customer Experience Centre and will continue to keep students informed of the latest developments via our established communication channels.For our customers, we are publishing the latest updates online in three main places:

[ https://www.ucas.com/undergraduate/after-you-apply/coronavirus-covid-19-latest-updates ] for students, also linked to from the homepage of UCAS.com

[ https://www.ucas.com/advisers/guides-and-resources/adviser-news/news/coronavirus-update ] for advisers in the relevant area of ucas.com

[ https://www.ucas.com/providers/coronavirus-update ] and for universities and colleges, in an open-access area of the providers section of our site.

However, with the cancellation of examinations across the UK, we recognise that the way in which students are accepted to higher education this year will be different to previous years. We are working extensively with the relevant government departments, regulators and sector bodies, such as Department for Education, UUK Ofqual, Scottish Government and Office for Students, to ensure that there is shared information and understanding as the situation developments.

I am confident UCAS has the flexibility to accommodate any changes to the examination awarding process. We will be providing further information about this once there is clarity regarding the awarding process and timeline. However, when reviewing how we can flex the cycle to accommodate the cycle, our paramount consideration will be fairness to students.

We’re also currently undertaking modelling exercises to understand how potential changes to the application cycle could alter behaviour in both the 2020 and 2021 admissions cycle. We will be able to share some of this intelligence in due course in order to support their sector with their own planning.

UCAS is ready to play a key role in supporting the sector to reduce the impact of the pandemic on admissions to higher education. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or would like to discuss further, particularly if you feel UCAS can offer you support.

Yours faithfully

Clare

Clare Marchant

Chief Executive

If you need support with GLOW (username or password reset), Office 365, Teams etc please contact us here: GLOW support 

We would ask that parents/carers please bear with us at this very difficult time. Every department is currently focused on our S4-S6 pupils and the requirements that may be required for SQA assessment (we are currently waiting on an update from SQA and will provide more information as soon as we can).

In due course we will be providing online learning materials and resources for our BGE pupils (S1-S3). Some departments have already started to use school websites, GLOW, MS Teams, Twitter or a combination to get the info to our pupils.

You child may have been added to a MS team however there may not currently be any materials or tasks posted. This is very much a work in progress and again we ask for our parents/carers understanding at this time.

NEW: How-to guides for GLOW

We will keep our school website (www.braidhurst.org) up to date with the most recent information about online learning opportunities as well as advice from the North Lanarkshire, the Scottish Government and the SQA.

We would also encourage everyone to follow us on Twitter (@braidhurst) and sign up for our school app.