Early Level
Nursery and P1 · ages 3-6
Early Level covers nursery through to the end of P1. Learning is playful and hands-on: counting real things, spotting letter sounds, noticing the weather and asking lots of questions.
Curriculum for Excellence levels, explained
Scottish schools describe progress in levels rather than year groups, which is brilliant for children and baffling for everyone else. Here is what each level means, roughly which stages it covers, and what is on ScotLearn Adventure for it.
Levels overlap on purpose — a child can be working at First Level in maths and Second Level in reading, and that is completely normal.
First Level
P2, P3 and P4 · ages 5-8
First Level usually spans P2 to P4. Children move from counting to calculating, from letter sounds to reading whole stories, and start explaining their thinking out loud.
Second Level
P5, P6 and P7 · ages 8-12
Second Level runs roughly from P5 to P7. Work gets more independent: fractions and decimals, longer writing, fair-test experiments and real research about Scotland.
Third Level
S1 and S2 · ages 11-14
Third Level is the early secondary phase, S1 to S2. Ideas become more abstract — algebra, chemical reactions, analysing texts and evaluating historical evidence.
Fourth Level
S2 into S3 · ages 13-15
Fourth Level is the most advanced work on the site, taking learners into S3 territory with multi-step problems, extended writing and deeper scientific reasoning.