In this post, Dr Gavin McCabe, Professor Simon Riley, Dr Tobias Thejll-Madsen, and Tia Affleck discuss how Student-Led Individually Created Courses (SLICCs) are a fitting vehicle for the University’s transition to the Skills for Success Framework (SFSF). The authors demonstrate how, while the SLICCs already helped students focus on their futures, the transition to the SFSF helped re-articulate and re-ground the already beneficial learning outcomes within the SLICCs to more explicitly link to student futures and enable students to articulate this more succinctly. This post is part of the Skills for Success Framework series.
Good frameworks evolve. Since their launch in 2015, Student-Led Individually-Created Courses (SLICCs) have always started with a simple yet powerful idea: that students learn most deeply when they connect real-world experience to genuine reflection on who they are and who they are becoming. Equally, SLICCs have also always sought to connect that personal journey to the broader values the University holds for its graduates. The University’s transition to the Skills for Success Framework (SFSF) from the Graduate Attributes Framework gives us a fresh opportunity to deepen and sharpen those connections and make them more visible, more meaningful, and more explicitly linked to students’ careers and futures.
What are SLICCs?
For those unfamiliar, SLICCs provide a flexible framework for reflective experiential learning that can supplement almost any experience: a research project, an internship, volunteering, a community placement, or even a self-directed skill-building endeavour. Students contextualise the generic SLICC learning outcomes to their own specific activity, reflect regularly throughout their experience, and are assessed on the quality of their reflective evidence for each learning outcome – not on the output or ‘success’ of the activity itself. The message is clear: if it doesn’t go to plan, but you reflect on why and what you’ve learned, that’s absolutely fine. Students can still attain a high mark.
Currently, more than 30 courses across the University use the SLICCs framework, spanning all 3 colleges and from SCQF levels 8 to 12. That scale matters because when we update the framework, the ripple effect is institution-wide.
What’s changing, and why?
Two of SLICCs’ 5 learning outcomes have, until now, been based directly on the University’s Graduate Attributes Framework – one focusing on skills and one on mindsets. The transition to the SFSF presents a natural moment to update these, and we have approached it not as a tick-box exercise, but as a genuine opportunity to strengthen what SLICCs offer.
For the learning outcome asking students to select and purposefully develop a single skill, the change is relatively straightforward. Students will now select one of the 10 SFSF skills – curiosity, critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, reflection, communication, inclusivity, adaptivity, data and digital literacy, or individuality – as their focus, replacing the previous 4 skill groups from the Graduate Attributes Framework. Whichever skill a student selects, the SLICCs process provides the structure and support to embed that development intentionally, surface it through reflection, and equip students to articulate it with confidence – to themselves, and to the world beyond their studies.
For the prior learning outcome focusing on mindsets, this outcome will now be explicitly focused on careers and employability. The career benefits of going through a SLICC have always been substantial: students develop self-awareness, learn to articulate their growth, build confidence, and reflect on how experiences shape their futures. Students develop career-relevant insights through their SLICCs and the new learning outcome ensures students are supported to actively consider what their experience, their learning, and their personal growth mean for their careers, their employability, and their futures.
This matters particularly for students whose SLICCs are driven by personal interest rather than professional ambition. We don’t want to dampen that; quite the opposite. But the new learning outcome will now gently require every student to ask: what does this experience, whatever it is, mean for my future? One student noted:
“Now in my fourth year, the reflective process emblematic of the SLICC course continues to present itself in my personal and academic life… I don’t foresee that the usefulness of reflection as a critical skill will diminish once I graduate. I hope that it’ll make me an asset in any institutional environment, encouraging me to innovate internally and externally as I imagine that the University expects of its alumni.”
Nia Obed-Arthur, Edinburgh Law School alum, previous SLICC participant
Embedding the SFSF at scale
One of the most exciting aspects of this update of learning outcomes is what it means beyond SLICCs itself. The University’s move to the SFSF has prompted many Course Organisers to ask what it will mean for their courses. For those using the SLICCs framework, the answer is: far less disruption than you might expect and far more opportunity than you might anticipate. We are piloting and refining the changes to make sure of that. If designed well, these learning outcomes should also be portable: any course that wants to incorporate a careers-focused or SFSF-linked learning outcome can adapt them without starting from scratch.
We also see this as an opportunity to support practice more broadly. Even colleagues who don’t formally use the SLICCs framework often look to it as a reference point for how to think about reflective, portfolio-based, and experiential learning. The more clearly the SLICCs framework models the integration of the SFSF and careers thinking, the more it can inform and inspire colleagues across the institution and beyond who are looking for a tried-and-tested starting point for their own course development and enhancement.
What comes next
We are piloting these revised learning outcomes in Summer 2026, gathering student and staff feedback, and refining as we goThe full suite of updated resources – workbooks, guidance, assessment rubrics – will reflect these changes across all SCQF levels.
If you are already using SLICCs and want to know more, or are curious about what a careers-embedded, SFSF-aligned experiential learning framework might look like in your own context, we’d love to hear from you.
Further information and open-access resources: https://sliccs.ed.ac.uk/
Dr Gavin McCabe
Gavin is a Careers and Employability Manager in the University’s Careers Service, shaping strategies and activities to enhance students’ employability, reflection, and skills. He co-leads SLICCs, co-authored the Reflection Toolkit, created initiatives including the Edinburgh Award, Making Transitions Personal, and MyDevelopmentHub, and served as Subject-Matter Expert on graduate attributes for Skills Development Scotland.
Prof Simon Riley
Simon is a recently retired as Professor of Experiential Student Learning, based in Edinburgh Medical School. Drawing upon his long-term interests in student agency and autonomy, he was co-lead developing SLICCs, including acting as course organiser. He continues to retain his interests and involvement in student learning during retirement, particularly through the SLICCs.
Dr Tobias Thejll-Madsen
Tobias is a Teaching Fellow at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, where he teaches on the Interdisciplinary Futures (MA Hons) programme, with a particular focus on research methods and reflective practice. He completed his PhD at the University of Glasgow in Psychology and Computer Science in 2025. Tobias has a keen interest in educational research and the development of learning resources, and he co-authored the University’s Reflection Toolkit. He takes over as Course Organiser for SLICCs in summer 2026.
Tia Affleck
Tia is an Operations Assistant in the University of Edinburgh’s Careers Service, supporting a range of activities and initiatives across the department. She is a key part of the team behind SLICCs, contributing the operational expertise and coordination that keeps a complex, institution-wide framework running smoothly for staff and students alike.
