Why use this resource?

This framework will support you as an individual, organisation or partnership to more fully understand your strengths and any areas for improvement. This will help support you to understand and improve the impact that you are making and to ensure that outcomes for all learners and communities are improving. It can also support you to strengthen leadership at all levels. It supports the development of a shared language and understanding across all those involved in CLD in Scotland.

Who is it for and who should be involved?

It can be used as a tool for self-evaluation by CLD practitioners and those adopting CLD methodologies in their work. It can be used by volunteers, community leaders, staff, managers and senior leaders in public services and in voluntary and community organisations. It can also be used by partners working together to improve the quality of services. It shares a common language with other quality frameworks developed by Education Scotland and can be used alongside other evaluation tools. Everyone can contribute to self-evaluation. The best way to use a self-evaluation resource is to involve a wide cross section of people from your organisation, partners and other stakeholders in a joint self-evaluation process.

How to use it?

As you look through the document you will see a number of quality indicators which focus on specific areas for improvement. Use the quality indicators to help you identify your strengths and areas for improvement, to demonstrate the difference you are making and what you need to do next. It is designed to support you in thinking about how you can use resources, learn from elsewhere and plan for change. They are grouped under three headings; performance and outcomes, management and delivery, and leadership and direction.

Each quality indicator has a general statement and themes to explain what areas it includes. There are illustrations of what very good practice could look like for each theme. These illustrations are intended to provide examples of the range of evidence and practice. They are not fully comprehensive, nor should they be used as a checklist. Each quality indicator also includes a set of challenge questions to prompt discussion.

Getting started

You can begin with any quality indicator and can look at them in any order. You do not need to use every quality indicator or every theme, but quality indicators do relate to each other so looking at more than one will give you a broader understanding of your impacts and areas for improvement. It is also helpful to consider indicators from each section, performance and outcomes, management and delivery, leadership and direction to best understand how well your organisation, service or partnership is improving quality. You may want to begin by looking briefly at all of the quality indicators and by doing so, identify those that are most appropriate to explore in more detail.

Gaelic Sector

This quality and improvement framework can be used and adopted to different community, learning and development contexts, on which a range of practitioners, partners and volunteers collaborate to support national outcomes for Gaelic. This may include for community development; youth work, family learning, supporting immersion as part of Gaelic Medium Education and other early intervention work; community-based adult learning; work to improve their health and wellbeing and volunteer development. Effective collaboration entails using and applying the quality indicators and themes to the Gaelic sector to drive change and improvement. In doing this, practitioners should refer to the Advice on Gaelic Education to ensure that the distinctive approaches to Gaelic Education are taken into account.

Glossary of terms

PDF file: Glossary of terms (134 KB)

More about self-evaluation

PDF file: More about self-evaluation (149 KB)