How good is our school? The Journey to Excellence explores what we mean by success for children in Scottish schools. Success involves wanting to learn now, and wanting to carry on learning in the future. It is about realising potential and about achieving. Importantly, The Journey to Excellence recognises that the pace of children’s progress is varied and that individual children face different challenges and barriers.
What is certain is that every child can learn. It is up to the people who support them through the learning process to strive to ensure that each and every one of them learns at the pace that is most appropriate for them, and to meet their needs in the best possible way.13
In Scotland, learning is increasingly about developing the four capacities of the Curriculum for Excellence. Successful outcomes for deaf pupils, as for all pupils in Scottish education, should be defined in terms of those four capacities. At the end of their school experience, deaf pupils should be successful learners, confident individuals, effective contributors and responsible citizens.
For deaf pupils this means they should be achieving and attaining in line with national expectations and progressing well in school. They should feel included, and participate in all aspects of school life, as well as having the opportunity to develop a positive deaf identity. This should ensure they are well placed to make positive and challenging choices after they have left school. They should all be able to enter employment, education or training.
Some deaf pupils may not require high levels of support but may still need to have their progress monitored. Others will require careful planning and support to enable them to achieve successful outcomes.
Planning for excellence involves four key collegiate activities.
How good is our school?
How good can we be?
How do we get there?
What have we achieved?
The self-evaluation and improvement process
Your vision will be a rounded and balanced view of what you hope to achieve for the pupils you serve. Your vision will be aspirational. It will be about excellence. The dimensions in Part 2 of How good is our school? The Journey to Excellence will be a key source of inspiration. Establishing your vision is an activity for the whole school community, including pupils and parents. When thinking about what you want to achieve for deaf pupils you may also want to involve others with an additional perspective of the long-term needs of young deaf people, for example, former pupils, deaf adults in your community, or careers officers and college staff who will be working with young adults.
You may already have a well-established vision and aims for your school or service, but developing excellence is a process which is continually evolving and it is important to revisit and challenge your established vision. If you work in a mainstream school with a small number of deaf pupils, or you support pupils in mainstream schools, the school will have established a vision for all pupils in that school. While this vision will include deaf pupils, there is an additional challenge to consider what this specifically means for deaf pupils.
The outcomes you hope to achieve for deaf pupils will be similar to the outcomes you want for all pupils, with some additional outcomes relating specifically to deaf pupils. However, different and specific issues need to be addressed in order to achieve these outcomes for deaf pupils.
In the following pages you will find a brief introduction to the three dimensions of excellence which are the focus of this document. These should be read along with the full exploration of each dimension contained in The Journey to Excellence Part 2. This is followed by a number of signposts which are based on the findings reported in Part 1 of this document, organised under the elements of each dimension. These are key factors which were identified as being crucial to achieving success for deaf pupils. Under each signpost there are prompts which will help you think about where you are on your journey to excellence. You can ask yourself if they describe practice in your service or establishment. They may suggest areas where you need to plan action to improve outcomes for your pupils.
You can use the dimensions and these prompts alongside the quality indicators in Part 3 of The Journey to Excellence. For example you may wish to look at the experiences of deaf pupils by using QI 2.1 Learners’ experiences. From this, you will establish pupils’ views of their learning experiences, and gather evidence about the quality of their experiences. To plan improvements in their experiences you can then consider the valuable material in Part 2 Exploring Excellence about pupils’ learning and link with the particular prompts in this publication. You may also want to consider recent research on learning related to deaf pupils. Publications such as Deaf Friendly Teaching14 and Deaf Friendly Schools15 are also useful sources of best practice in deaf education. You can then agree priorities for action and draw up a plan for improvement. You need to be clear in doing this what specific improvements in outcomes you are aiming for to benefit your pupils. These may be related to achievements or, for example, attitudes to learning and motivation.