The National Curriculum publishes KS4 programmes of study for English, mathematics and science (and for citizenship, computing and PE) — Department for Education (2014), National curriculum in England: key stages 3 and 4 framework document. For those subjects the canonical KS4 nodes anchor on the real programme of study, exactly as the KS3 nodes do, and carry nc_ref anchors where the Oak ontology provides them.
For every other subject (humanities, creative arts, digital literacy) there is no KS4 programme of study: what counts as the curriculum is the awarding-body specifications in aggregate. There the vault treats canonical KS4 nodes as frames defined by the union of overlays that point at them. In both cases the overlay layer does the same work — it shows which qualification tests what.
A canonical KS4 English Reading node, for example, names the broad area of learning in plain English (“comprehension of unseen non-fiction texts, including 19th–21st century literary prose”) and surfaces the overlay outcomes that test it — Edexcel IGCSE 4EA1 AO1, AQA GCSE English Language AO1, Pearson Edexcel FS English L2 R1 — with wikilink annotations showing which overlay tests what.
The result is navigable two ways: top-down (here’s an area of KS4 English; here’s how each overlay approaches it) and bottom-up (here’s an Edexcel spec point; here’s the canonical area; here are the AQA and FS equivalents). What learning is at KS4 becomes the consensus across overlays, made visible.
Branches
- English — exemplar branch (populated 5 May 2026)
- Maths
- Science
- Creative Arts
- Humanities
- Digital Literacy
See Tagging Schema v0.3 §2.6 for the full mechanic.