Meeting with Learning and Teaching Scotland / Curriculum for Excellence

On Wednesday December 10^th Christine and I, along with two of our Project partners, Cleo Jones, Principal Officer, Libraries & Resources at Edinburgh City Council and Ian McCracken, Learning Resources Centre Manager at Govan High School attended a meeting at Learning and Teaching Scotland’s (LTS) offices to discuss possible Project input to the development of the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE).  LTS was represented by Stuart Ritchie, Director of Curriculum at LTS, Fiona Norris, Team Leader, language and literacy and Ian Graham, Schools ICT Programme Director. Although we have been working with LTS for several years, including most recently the case studies of IL in secondary schools, this is the first opportunity we have had to engage with LTS staff at a policy level and the meeting opportunity was therefore very welcome.

We reviewed with LTS colleagues the work of the Project and Cleo and Ian explained some of their work which underlined the key role our partners play in our work. Fiona explained that she is keen to have a project involving school librarians.  Having reviewed what both sides have to offer and identified IL as sitting within the CfE Literacy team – Literacies for Learning, four action points emerged to be taken forward.

1.      A joint project is to be formulated with the CfE Literacy team. As a first stage Stuart and Fiona will discuss it and come back to us with firm proposals. Christine and I will meet with Fiona and colleagues early next year.

2.      We will work with the Literacy team on an IL proposal for presentations / workshops at the Scottish Learning Festival in September 2009

3.      There was some discussion about the presence of IL in different parts of the GLOW (the national intranet for Scottish schools) website which are not linked together. We will jointly look how at how Information Literacy should sit within Literacy

4.      Following a discussion on the need for CPD for teachers in IL we agreed that   online resources are required. Some funding will be available to support the development of this.

5.      A Literacy event is to take place at the Hilton on the 10^th March, 2009 at which the keynote speaker will be Professor David Booth from Toronto. We will discuss Project involvement in this with Fiona.

We will hear more from LTS on the implementation of these plans by mid January. 

PS Thanks to Rob Westwood for giving the blog a mention in the current issues of CILIP Gazette. Apparently we are up there with the Prime Minister and Stephen Fry.