A Curriculum for Excellence (ACE)

About ACE

ACE, as the centerpiece of the Scottish Government's Ambitious, Excellent, Schools agenda, represents the biggest educational reform since the advent of 5-14. It aims to focus classroom practice upon the child and around the four capacities of education:

successful learners
confident individuals
responsible citizens
effective contributors

It also aims to:

simplify and prioritise the current curriculum
encourage more learning through experiences
create a single framework for the curriculum and assessment 3-18.

The ACE story so far...locally and nationally

Who are we?

At Scottish Borders Council, we have a dedicated ACE team, based at Council Headquarters, who are taking the lead for defined areas of curriculum development.

Members of the team are as follows:

Helen Jones - Acting ACE Co-ordinator
Hilary Broatch - Expressive Arts
Jan Deans - Literacy and Numeracy
Fiona Jeffrey - Citizenship, Health & Well-Being, Religious & Moral Education
Fiona Szoneberg - Social Subjects, Science, Technologies

The ACE team welcomes hearing about innovative and creative projects from schools or cluster areas. It is the team's intention to promote, support and share good practice. You can contact the ACE team online

Engage with the Outcomes and Experiences

In order to have a strategy in place for engaging with the Outcomes and Experiences, SBC has convened nine groups of practitioners, from Nursery, Primary and Secondary establishments, to work with the ACE Team and others in engaging with each of the curricular areas, as they are released by the Scottish Government. The groups will each meet for three days. As an end-product of the three days, we hope to have two main items:

Firstly, a constructive feed-back for LTS which will include a note of our distilled views of some of the draft Outcomes and Experiences, as well as details of Teachers' findings after their classroom pilot work – and,
Secondly, a resource which will be compiled by our ACE Team, and distributed to all our schools, which will contain practical advice and suggestions on how ACE, in the context of one set of Outcomes in each curricular area, can be delivered in our classrooms.

The latest timetable we have for the release dates of the Outcomes and Experiences can be seen below; however, we are informed that this timeline is provisional only, and does not require LTS to release the Outcomes and Experiences at these times.

October 2007	Modern Foreign Languages
December 2007	Mathematics Gaelic Classical Languages Expressive Arts
January 2008	Social Subjects English Language Literacy
April 2008	Technologies Religious + Moral Education Religious + Moral Education (R.C.)
May/June 2008	Health and Well-being

If you would like to get involved, in your own establishment, we would be happy to help you get started.

Contact online

The following links provide information and proformae, used by our Outcomes and Experiences groups, which you may find useful.

Interesting practice from our schools

There are many creative ideas and projects which are underway in our schools across the authority. You can view a selection of photographs from Borders schools or you can download various recommendation reports from Register of Interest groups below:

'Cross-Curricular' Register of Interest Group

Development Project - Ancrum & Hobkirk 06-07

'Enterprise' Register of Interest Group

'Small Schools: Planning' Register of Interest Group

'Cross-Curricular, Choral Commission Register of Interest Group

'Formative Assessment' Register of Interest Group

'S1-S3' Register of Interest Group

ACE Strategic Group - New from January 2008

ACE Strategic Group Agendae and Minutes

ACE Steering Group

Scottish Borders Council has formed a Steering Group to drive forward ACE. The group’s remit is to carry out developments strategically through wide group membership including senior management, in the development and implementation of the programme.

Two-year Strategic Plan

ACE Steering Group meeting agendae and minutes

CPD Inset Provision Planning Paper