Supporting Curriculum for Excellence in a Local Authority
Overview
Laura Gingell is the Curriculum for Excellence Development Officer for West Lothian Council, these responsibilities take up 0.5 of her timetable. For the rest of her week she is a Principal Teacher at Windyknowe Primary School in West Lothian.
Context
Within the West Lothian Curriculum for Excellence Team, each Cluster has two Curriculum for Excellence 
Development Post holders, one primary and one secondary. Laura set up the CfE Development Glow Group as an area which allows for sharing between the Development Post Holders. However, it is also functions as an area all teachers can access and learn from the practice in every cluster. Each cluster is represented by a page tab in the Glow Group. However, the Glow Group also contains information on page tabs such as which schools in West Lothian are involved in piloting the National Assessment Resource; information for in-service days and Building Your Curriculum information. This Cookbook will focus on the cluster page tabs.
Click on the video to find out why Laura set up the Glow Group and what information was in it. (0.56)
What does a Cluster Page within the West Lothian CfE Development Glow Group look like?
Contact Details
A Text Editor Web Part was used to show photos of the Cluster CfE Development Post holders, their names, schools and email addresses.
Document Library
Within the Document Library teachers and Development Post holders could share information such as action plans, CfE Newsletters, minutes from meetings and any other CfE documents relating to their Cluster.
Web Links
This web part was used to link to the websites of the Cluster Schools. It also has links to specific Glow Groups for that Cluster .
News
Each Cluster page has a News Web Part, so the CfE Development Post holders could keep the teachers within their Cluster up to date with any news, for example events, updates, etc.
Ingredients
What did Laura need to set up the West Lothian CfE Development Glow Group?
- Glow Group at a Local Authority Level
- Several Pages
- Text Editor Web Parts
- Document Library Web Parts
- Web Links Web Parts
- News Web Parts
Recipe
In the following videos, we will take a look one of the Cluster pages within the West Lothian CfE Development Glow Group and find out how to replicate its structure and content.
What does a Cluster page within the Glow group look like? (1.13)
How to add a new page. (0.46)
How to add an image to a Text Editor web part. (2.36)
How to add two images to a Text Editor web part. (3.01)
How to create a Document Library and add a folder. (1.49)
How to create a Web Links web part and change the style. (2.12)
How to create a News web part. (2.05)
Impact
The intended impact of this Glow Group was to improve communication between colleagues within West Lothian and Laura feels this has been achieved. After the initial set up of the Glow Group, the responsibility was handed over to the CfE Development Post holders, so they selected the relevant information to display on their page.
Listen to Laura explain how the Glow Group improved communication. (0.30)
Listen to Laura explain who was responsible for the Glow Group. (0.33)
To view a cookbook on how this Glow Group was used to support an Authority Wide In-Service Day click here.