Scottish Parent Teacher Council

Scottish Qualifications Certificate - Comments on Revised Version

We welcome the opportunity to comment, as we are unaware of any previous consultation on the certificate design. As a consequence we are taking this opportunity to comment both on the changes for this year and on the certificate in general.

1) Candidate letter

The second sentence is not syntactically correct and should not be issued by the body responsible for examinations. To rectify this error, the letter should read "I am pleased to enclose your Scottish Qualifications Certificate along with a commemorative certificate which details the National Courses/Clusters you recently completed successfully. The Qualifications Certificate lists all your achievements with the most recent highlighted in bold."

We find the term "commemorative certificate" unacceptable/offensive. It devalues it to nothing more than a piece of memorabilia.

We welcome the explanation of what happens when candidates do not get course awards, but question whether SQA's IT system is actually capable of generating such letters for all courses and all candidates given that other proposed changes have had to be shelved in the interests of IT stability.

2) Commemorative certificate

We welcome this clear statement of achievement but, as already stated, we do not support it being given the status merely of a "commemorative certificate".

3) Scottish Qualification Certificate

Although this is not an area for the current consultation, we have some very definite comments.

We do not think that the layout is at all helpful to users. Courses and their component units should be more closely identified. Hence the units that were taken and passed by the candidate in order for the course award to be made should be integrated in the list of courses. Only those units which do not contribute to courses should be listed separately.

We think this page should cover only the current year's qualifications.

We question the value and cost of routinely issuing a cumulative certificate where much of the information remains unchanged. It is common for school pupils to take National Qualifications in their fourth, fifth and sixth year. It is not clear that it is at all helpful for them to have repeat listings of their Standard grade awards, which will remain unchanged, in their fourth, fifth and sixth years. We suggest that the normal certificate should detail only the most recent achievements but that students could apply for a comprehensive certificate of all their National Qualifications as and when they need it.

As stated above, we do not think it is necessary to re-issue Standard grade results. However, if Standard grade results are reissued, the principle of linking course and elements closely together is even more important. The element awards actually contribute to the final course award so it makes no sense - and is very unhelpful to all users - to separate the course award from the element award as in this proposed document.

There has been much comment on the need to include the units to inform users which units have contributed to the courses. The difference in the units for mathematics has been described as critical and the reason why component units have to be listed separately. We question what information is given to many users by knowing that the candidate has the units Mathematics 1, Mathematics 2 and Mathematics 3.

4) Supplementary Information

We agree that the core skills profile should be moved to the back of the certificate, but we do not find the attached script helpful.

a) The following should be deleted: "Core skills are seen as important, for example for employment and lifelong learning".

As a general principle, certificates should only contain factual statements, not justifications or contentious statements. This comment is a justification and is seen by some as contentious. It should therefore be deleted.

b) The explanation as written is not easy to understand. It would be better to say: "The core skills profile is derived from the SQA units taken by candidates. The same core skills may be derived from more than one unit but the profile gives the highest level achieved through NQ units. This may not be fully representative of the candidate's core skills as he or she may also have gained such skills from non-certificated activities. For details of how core skills are derived see the SQA publication "Automatic Certification of Core Skills in National Qualifications" which can be found on the SQA website and is also held by all examination centres".

5) Risk of Fraud

In the past certificates were laminated in order to prevent fraud. Will all the pages in the proposed certificate be laminated? If not, what steps will be taken to prevent fraud? It would be very simple for someone to generate a fraudulent version of the certificate as it currently stands.

Scottish Parent Teacher Council

01 Feb 2001

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