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 where an NC anchor genuinely exists (KS4 NC is thin; most KS4 nodes are defined by the union of overlays and may 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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