NEOby Nudge Education

NEO Curriculum Vault

NEO Curriculum Vault — nc_ref schema extension (proposal)

4 min read

Purpose

Add one optional frontmatter field, nc_ref, to canonical outcome pages. It anchors a canonical node to the National Curriculum (2014) as represented in the Oak Curriculum Ontology — a machine-readable, W3C-standard (RDF/SKOS) representation of the NC published by Oak National Academy under OGL 3.0.

This is a reference, not a restructure. The vault’s Curriculum × Overlay architecture is unchanged. Nothing about how pages are authored, tagged or published changes. The field is absent everywhere the canonical spine goes beyond the NC — life-and-work, relational-and-symbolic, statutory RSHE — and that absence is itself the architectural statement: NEO’s canonical curriculum is wider than the National Curriculum.

What it buys

The 2027 problem. The KS3 canonical branch is hand-written from NC 2014. When the 2027 NC revision lands, a vault with nc_ref anchors inherits a machine-tracked diff — which canonical nodes point at changed, removed or renamed NC content — instead of a hand audit.

A shared vocabulary. Commissioners, LAs and Oak-aligned tools can resolve exactly which NC content a NEO canonical node covers, cited in a nationally recognised identifier scheme rather than prose.

Interoperability without the stack. The vault stays a markdown vault. If a machine-readable export is ever needed, nc_ref plus existing frontmatter is sufficient to generate JSON-LD from a script — no RDF authoring, ever.

Field specification

Optional, multi-valued, canonical-outcome pages only (never overlay pages — overlays already carry awarding-body IDs).

nc_ref:
  - natcurric:strand-reading
  - natcurric:substrand-read-critically

The natcurric: prefix expands to https://w3id.org/uk/oak/curriculum/nationalcurriculum/ — Oak’s namespace for National Curriculum (2014) data. Use the compact form in frontmatter; expansion happens in tooling.

Reference at the most specific level that genuinely corresponds: strand-* where a NEO page covers a whole NC strand, substrand-* where it covers part of one. Content-descriptor-level references are permitted but not expected — NEO’s canonical granularity sits at strand/sub-strand level by design.

Pinned version: oak-curriculum-ontology v0.1.3 (June 2026). Oak’s release is early (v0.1) and URIs are explicitly subject to change; the validation script exists precisely to catch breakage on upgrade. Do not chase their main branch.

Rules

  1. nc_ref only where the correspondence is genuine — same discipline, same content, not thematic resemblance. An empty field is correct for most of the vault.
  2. Never on overlay pages, Cornerstones, pathways, needs or resources.
  3. Attribution: any published surface that renders nc_ref data must credit “Oak National Academy” per OGL 3.0 / their licence terms. The vault README carries the attribution once.
  4. This anchors to Oak’s National Curriculum namespace (natcurric:), not Oak’s own programme data (oakcurric:). We reference the statutory curriculum through their representation of it; we do not reference Oak’s teaching programmes.

Validation

scripts/validate-nc-refs.py walks content/, collects every nc_ref entry, and checks each against a local copy of Oak’s published data:

python3 scripts/validate-nc-refs.py path/to/oak-data-file.ttl

Point it at a downloaded distribution file (.ttl or .nt) from Oak’s releases, or a subject taxonomy file from their repo. Exit code is non-zero on any unresolved reference, so it can join the existing GitHub Actions deploy as a gate later.

Worked exemplar (this branch)

The four KS3 English canonical pages carry nc_ref:

Pagenc_ref
ks3/english/reading.mdstrand-reading + substrand-appreciation-and-love-of-reading, substrand-increasingly-challenging-texts, substrand-read-critically
ks3/english/writing.mdstrand-writing
ks3/english/grammar-and-vocabulary.mdstrand-grammar-and-vocabulary
ks3/english/spoken-english.mdstrand-spoken-english

Strand-level references are certain (Oak’s four English strands and the vault’s four KS3 English pages both derive directly from the NC 2014 programmes of study). Sub-strand references on reading.md are the ones whose labels correspond textually to the KS3 programme of study; to verify against Oak’s key-stage programme data before extending sub-strand mapping to other pages, since Oak’s taxonomy is phase-agnostic and some sibling sub-strands (e.g. critically-evaluate-texts, english-literary-heritage) may be the KS4-phase equivalents.

Rollout

  1. This exemplar (KS3 English) — review, then merge.
  2. KS3 maths and science strand-level anchors.
  3. KS4 canonical nodes in English, mathematics and science, which anchor on the DfE (2014) KS4 programmes of study. KS4 nodes in subjects with no KS4 programme of study are defined by the union of overlays and carry no nc_ref — correct.
  4. Revisit when Oak ships v1.0 / the 2027 NC revision data.

Open questions

  1. Sub-strand phase verification (above).
  2. Should the Quartz page template render nc_ref (with attribution) or keep it metadata-only? Recommendation: metadata-only until the mapping has coverage.
  3. Schema v0.4: fold this into tagging-schema.md §4 as a fourth auxiliary family on acceptance.

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