Award-winning project and academic leadership celebrated

An award-winning University of the West of Scotland (UWS) dementia project has been unveiled as part of a collaborative national educational resource.

The ‘CATE Collection: together in collaborative educational leadership ’ captures the spirit of Advanced HE’s Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence (CATE) and supports conversations around good practice in higher education via sharing award-winning experiences and insights from across the UK.  

CATE was established to acknowledge the shared practices and team working that leads to teaching excellence. The Alzheimer Scotland Centre for Policy and Practice at UWS was awarded its first CATE in 2020, for its pioneering dementia-focused ‘Class in a Bag’ initiative.

Class in a Bag is a portable, intergenerational education resource used by student nurses to teach schoolchildren about dementia and how they can help support people living with the condition.

Since 2016, CATEs have been awarded to teams who can highlight evidence of excellence in their approach to working collaboratively and those that have a demonstrable impact on teaching and learning, including beyond their immediate academic or professional area.

UWS’s Professor Debbie Tolson, Director of the Alzheimer Scotland Centre for Policy and Practice and Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy is one of four co-editors chosen to lead the inaugural CATE Collection. Commenting on the Collection, Debbie said: “It has been an honour to edit the CATE Collection, which includes inspiring stories from across a range of disciplines.

“I am delighted that our UWS Class in a Bag was independently selected as one of the feature chapters, and our work will be shared more widely through this resource.

Winning a CATE award – especially for our ongoing, important work on improving the lives of those living with dementia – was a momentous occasion for me, the adult nursing team and for the Alzheimer Scotland Centre for Policy and Practice at UWS. To know that this achievement will be captured in The CATE Collection, and that the steps we took as part of the collaboration could help and inspire others to win their own CATE is really fantastic. It has been such a wonderful project to be part of.

Professor Debbie Tolson

Find out more about the ‘CATE Collection: together in collaborative educational leadership’ and Advance HE’s CATEs on their website.

The CATE Collection can be viewed here.