Skip to content
RAG Repo

UK National Curriculum (England)

The National Curriculum for England is the statutory framework that sets out what maintained schools must teach across the four key stages, from key stage 1 in primary through to key stage 4 in secondary. It is published by the Department for Education and hosted as a collection on GOV.UK. This is a curriculum framework rather than teaching content: it defines an ordered set of programmes of study and attainment targets by subject and level, the standards spine against which lessons and textbooks are written, not the lessons themselves. Coverage spans the twelve statutory subjects, among them English, mathematics, science, computing, history, geography, languages, art and design, and physical education, with non-statutory guidance for religious education and personal, social, health and economic education alongside.

Access is by document rather than by feed. The collection page is HTML and links to framework documents published as PDF and HTML, so building a structured resource means parsing the programmes of study once into subject, key stage and statement, then reusing that structure. There is no API or bulk data export. For RAG this material is most useful as a competency backbone: an AI tutor can map a learner to a key stage and subject, retrieve the relevant programme of study, and sequence teaching against the stated attainment targets, then pull explanatory content from graded resources to fill each step. It pairs naturally with the open educational content already listed here, such as OpenStax, MIT OpenCourseWare, LibreTexts, OER Commons and MERLOT, which supply the lessons and textbooks the framework can order and align.

The licence position is unusually clean for a national standard. The material is Crown copyright, released under the Open Government Licence version 3.0, which permits reuse and adaptation for any purpose, including commercial products, on the sole condition that the source is attributed. That makes it safe to build on commercially, unlike several non-commercial curriculum sources.

curriculumukstandardsk12governmentopen-government-licence

Related sources