Broad General Education

How can you support learning at home?

Our  S1-3 Broad General Education (BGE) guides are designed to keep you informed about what types of learning your young person is likely to encounter in our different curricular areas. The guides also give you an indication of homework expectations and the skills being developed.

Moreover, the guides illustrate types of activities you could be doing with your child to support learning in each subject area – it really can be as simple as watching the news together, planning meals or discussing a topic that’s being covered in class.

Research, backed up by feedback from learners, indicates that families ‘taking an interest’ in learning in just these ways has a significant impact on progress.

The guides include useful hints and tips as well as highlighting relevant resources such as websites for you to access and use at home. We hope you find this useful in supporting your children in their learning.

The booklets were designed as a direct result of your feedback and input via questionnaires, focus groups and through our Parent Council.

This Information for Parents about the BGE is available here:

S1

S2

S3

Literacy

Numeracy

Health and Wellbeing

The Broad General Education (BGE)

The overall purpose of the curriculum in Scotland is shown below and can be summed up as helping children and young people to become:

• Successful learners

• Confident individuals

• Responsible citizens

• Effective contributors.

These are referred to as the “four capacities.”

The BGE phase in Scottish Education runs from Primary 1 through the Secondary 3.  During this time pupils will be exposed to all the broad areas of learning as shown below:

The eight curriculum areas are:

• Expressive arts

• Health and wellbeing

• Languages (including English, Gaidhlig, Gaelic learners and modern languages)

• Mathematics

• Religious and moral education

• Sciences

• Social studies

• Technologies.

Literacy, numeracy and health and wellbeing are recognised as being particularly important – these areas are seen as being the ‘responsibility of all’ staff.

As pupils move through the BGE their learning becomes more specialised and more demanding preparing them for the Senior Phase (SP) which runs from S4 to S6 and includes external SQA examinations.

You can find out more about Curriculum for Excellence and the BGE here.