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Skills for Learning, Skills for Life and Skills for Work

SQA has developed a new framework of broad, generic skills. The Skills for Learning, Skills for Life and Skills for Work framework is derived from Building the Curriculum 4.

The framework outlines definitions of the five broad areas of generic skills that are essential for qualification development.

The five broad areas are:

This new skills framework is being used in the development of qualifications that support Curriculum for Excellence. It will also assist with the design of assessment and learning and teaching methods. These skills sit alongside knowledge, understanding and subject based skills.

A ‘toolkit’, Skills for Learning, Skills for Life and Skills for Work: Using the Curriculum Tool has been developed to support the use of the skills framework. It is available on SQA’s secure website and can be obtained via your centre’s SQA Co-ordinator.

Skills for learning, skills for life and skills for work will not be automatically certificated. The development of these skills is the responsibility of all practitioners. Many of the opportunities to develop the skills will be naturally occurring, through learning and teaching activities.

Core Skills remain an important part of our Scottish system and Core Skill qualifications will remain for the foreseeable future.

Find out more about Skills for Learning, Life and Work.

This leaflet was designed to help SQA's development teams incorporate generic skills into the new National Qualifications which support Curriculum for Excellence. Practitioners may also find it useful when thinking about skills for learning, life and work in the new National Qualifications.

Literacy and Numeracy

The new skills framework will also be used to develop new Units in Literacy and Numeracy which will be available at SCQF levels 3, 4 and 5 from 2013/14.

Once these Units have been developed, we will clarify the relationship they have to Core Skills Units in Communication and Numeracy within the Core Skills framework