Background to the school

We are a fully comprehensive school with a roll of around 1150 located in Paisley's Foxbar district, close to the Gleniffer Braes in the west coast of Scotland. The school serves children from the geographical areas of Foxbar, Ferguslie, Glenburn and Lochfield. There are around 45% of pupils living in households from SIMD 1-3 areas with a mix of social and private housing in the catchment.

Traditionally, Gleniffer has been a high attaining school with positive results in SQA examinations. While that tradition remains and is something to be proud of, we have also recognised that not every pupil will achieve a Higher qualification and only around a quarter of our pupils will achieve five Highers in fifth year.

We signed up to the SCQF Ambassador program to guide us through our goal of improving attainment across all levels and widening our offer and levels of accreditation. We see the SCQF framework of qualifications as a tool to raise attainment for all, but also to use as targeted interventions to raise attainment for specific cohorts of students.

In just 6 months you progressed from Bronze Ambassador (Nov 2021) to Silver Ambassador status (June 2022). Can you tell us what progress you’ve made during that time with staff/pupil/parent awareness of the SCQF?

Between November 2021 and June 2022, we continued to develop curricular pathways and work with partner agencies to improve our offer to pupils. As a school we made huge strides in the number of alternate qualifications we were offering, including NPAs, Skills for Work courses and Youth Awards. Departments continued to develop new courses to offer alongside, and as an alternative to, traditional National Qualifications.

To raise awareness among staff and pupils, our SCQF Ambassadors led a number of assemblies to deliver their message about the benefits of the SCQF. Unfortunately, due to COVID, these had to be delivered online, but our Ambassadors did really well in difficult circumstances. To raise awareness to parents, our Ambassadors and some pupils taking part in wider achievement courses made a short video that was shared on our school website as well as social media pages.

This video can be viewed here 

We have also started a twitter account specifically for wider achievement and SCQF activities (@Gleniffer_WA). Through this channel we have advertised the new intake of SCQF Ambassadors, retweeted key messages from the SCQF Partnership and promoted SCQF courses like Level 6 Emergency First Aid at Work and Level 5 Barista Skills happening in Gleniffer High School.

Has the school made any changes to its curriculum?

At the start of the 21/22 session, the curriculum review group met to come up with a proposal on a new curricular model which would aim to raise attainment and offer opportunities to add awards. The changes to the curriculum model won’t come into force until the 23/24 session, however many of the aims of the new model have been brought in earlier. Departments have worked to offer, where appropriate, National Progression Awards alongside the traditional NQ offer, allowing for pupils to gain multiple qualifications from certain curricular areas. This approach has also allowed some pupils to reach SCQF level 5 in S4, which would not have been possible with the NQs alone.


Departments have also looked at the range of qualifications that are being delivered at Senior Phase and have started to offer a much wider range of subjects. Pupils have been offered choices such as SCQF Level 6 Customer Service, SCQF Level 5 Scottish Studies, SCQF Level 6 Creative Industries, SCQF Level 6 Cyber Security for the first time as well as SCQF Level 5 Barista Award being embedded into existing courses.

SCQF level 5 Barista Skills Award

SCQF Level 6 Emergency First Aid at Work Award

Personal Finance as part of PSE