Curriculum for Excellence
What is Curriculum for Excellence?
Curriculum for Excellence is Scotland’s curriculum for children and young people aged 3-18.
It’s an approach designed to provide young people with the knowledge, skills and attributes they need for learning, life and work in the 21st century.
It aims to enable every child or young person to be a:
- Successful learner
- Confident individual
- Responsible citizen
- Effective contributor.
Stages and levels
The curriculum is broken into two broad stages:
- a broad general education, providing a rounded education from the early years until the end of S3
- a senior phase, which will include studying for qualifications (from S4-S6).
The broad general education is divided into five curriculum levels (Early, First, Second, Third and Fourth) across eight curriculum areas.
What are the curriculum areas in Curriculum for Excellence?
There are eight curriculum areas:-
Languages (literacy) Social Studies
Mathematics (numeracy) Technologies
Expressive Arts Religious and Moral Education
Health and Well Being Sciences
Importantly, literacy and numeracy, Health & Wellbeing are given added importance because these skills are so vital in everyday life. All practitioners will have responsibility to teach literacy and numeracy.
Parent guides to the curriculum (Nutshell guides for parents)
can be found by clicking this link below
https://www.npfs.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/edd/2019/09/cfe_layout_1909_E.pdf.
Realising the Ambition: Being Me and Pre-birth to Three
Realising the Ambition: Being Me (2020) is the national practice guidance for early years education in Scotland. It covers the period from birth, through early childhood, and into primary education.
Realising the Ambition: Being Me builds upon the original principles and philosophy of Pre-Birth to 3 and Building the Ambition. The new guidance retains the relevant content from the previous guidance which it replaces, extending and strengthening it in line with current research and evidence about how children develop and learn.
This refreshed early years national practice guidance for Scotland presents key information about the characteristics of child development based on research and evidence.
In essence, ‘Realising the Ambition: Being Me’ increases expectations of high quality but still provides the necessary support for all who work in the early years sector and beyond.
Please see the links below for more detail:
- Realising the Ambition overview part 1 discusses the guiding principles and the importance of the imagery used in the guidance.
- Realising the Ambition overview part 2 looks at pedagogy in practice and transitions.
