Curriculum for Excellence Explained (Without the Jargon)

Scotland does not describe school progress in year groups the way England does. Instead the Curriculum for Excellence — usually shortened to CfE — describes what learners should experience and achieve at five broad levels. Children move through them at their own pace, and it is normal to be at different levels in different subjects.

The five levels

• 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.
• 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.

The eight curriculum areas

CfE organises learning into expressive arts, health and wellbeing, languages, mathematics, religious and moral education, sciences, social studies and technologies. ScotLearn Adventure covers numeracy and mathematics, literacy and English, sciences, social studies and technologies.

What "experiences and outcomes" means

You may see the phrase "Es and Os", or codes like MNU 1-03a. These are statements describing what learning should look like, written from the learner's point of view ("I can…"). Teachers plan against them rather than against a fixed page-by-page syllabus, which is why two P4 classes can be doing quite different work.

What this means for helping at home

You do not need to know the codes. Ask your child's teacher which level they are working at in maths and in literacy, then pick activities at that level — a slightly-too-easy activity that gets finished is worth far more than a hard one that gets abandoned.