{"id":218,"date":"2013-08-15T11:48:00","date_gmt":"2013-08-15T10:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.qualifications.gov.scot\/computing\/2013\/08\/15\/welcome-back-3\/"},"modified":"2013-08-15T11:48:00","modified_gmt":"2013-08-15T10:48:00","slug":"welcome-back-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.qualifications.gov.scot\/computing\/welcome-back-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Welcome back"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Welcome back for another year. I won&#8217;t pretend I don&#8217;t miss my long summer holidays (which I enjoyed for 22 years) but there is the consolation of being able to choose when I take my holidays.<\/p>\n<p>The big challenge this year is the introduction of the <a href=\"http:\/\/sqacomputing.blogspot.co.uk\/2013\/06\/hnd-computing-launch-event.html\">new HN awards<\/a>. We recently validated a new HNC and four new HNDs, including a brand new HND in Computer Science, and lots of you will be involved in delivering one or more of these new qualifications this year. It&#8217;s an exciting prospect. The new awards are very up-to-date and, I think, have many improvements over the old awards &#8212; not least of which is the 50% reduction in assessment. But I appreciate the challenge in delivering lots of new things in a short period of time. Don&#8217;t hesitate to <a href=\"mailto:bobby.elliott@sqa.org.uk\">contact me <\/a>if you need any help or support. There is a range of things I can do to help &#8211; from organising a development visit to personally visiting your centre. There are lots of support materials available for these new awards (more than we have ever previously provided). <a href=\"mailto:caroline.douglas@sqa.org.uk\">Contact Caroline<\/a> if you want to know what&#8217;s available.<\/p>\n<p>Look out for two things in the near future. Our <b>annual satisfaction survey<\/b> is about to be issued (when I ask you what you think of the service we provide) and I am currently working on the <b>annual update letters<\/b> (one for NC, one for HN, and one for SVQ). I hope to get these finished in the next couple of weeks. Readers of this blog won&#8217;t learn anything from the letters (it&#8217;s all been posted here in the past) but for those who don&#8217;t these letters provide a useful update on developments such as the on-going <a href=\"http:\/\/sqacomputing.blogspot.co.uk\/2013\/06\/pc-passport-review.html\">review of PC Passport<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>In the meantime, don&#8217;t hesitate to <a href=\"mailto:hilary.weir@sqa.org.uk\">contact Hilary<\/a> for anything related to non-advanced awards (National Units, NPAs and NCs) and SVQs, or <a href=\"mailto:caroline.douglas@sqa.org.uk\">contact Caroline<\/a> for advanced awards.<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Welcome back for another year. I won&#8217;t pretend I don&#8217;t miss my long summer holidays (which I enjoyed for 22 years) but there is the consolation of being able to choose when I take my holidays. The big challenge this year is the introduction of the new HN awards. We recently validated a new HNC and four new HNDs, including a brand new HND in Computer Science, and lots of you will be involved in delivering one or more of&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qualifications.gov.scot\/computing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qualifications.gov.scot\/computing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qualifications.gov.scot\/computing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qualifications.gov.scot\/computing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qualifications.gov.scot\/computing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qualifications.gov.scot\/computing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qualifications.gov.scot\/computing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qualifications.gov.scot\/computing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qualifications.gov.scot\/computing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}