QCA national curriculum vocabularies
Introduction
The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) National Curriculum vocabularies are an important part of the vocabulary management services.
The vocabularies include National Curriculum Specifiers that contains all the subject specifiers (or keywords) that are used for tagging resources against the National Curriculum (in England) for the 5 to 16 age range. This has undergone a revision to include a few additional terms. There are also vocabularies for the Schemes of Work and the Programmes of Study in which each learning objective is associated with a set of specifiers.
QCA have recently published some new Programmes of Study that will be used in schools from September 2008. In preparation for this, Becta and QCA have produced a set of vocabularies (with suffix 2008). The old versions will remain in Bank until September 2008 at which point some may be withdrawn.
No subject specifiers have been removed so all metadata records, such as those conforming to the Curriculum Online scheme, should remain valid. Though there are about 20 terms that have been indicated as deprecated. The Foundation section is retained, though will not have currency in the future as new Early Years Foundation Stage vocabulary has been published.
Please note that guidance on copyright and reproduction of the National Curriculum vocabularies is available on the Office of Public Sector Information website.
Programmes of study
- Are available as individual subject vocabularies.
- All learning objectives are represented as terms, with the term type specified in the metadata.
- The full text of the National Curriculum, including numbering, is available in the metadata.
- Terms longer than approximately 60 characters have been truncated and the original placed in the 'longterm' metadata field.
Schemes of work
- Are available as individual subject vocabularies.
- Within each subject they are grouped by year, and each sub-vocabulary has year and subject as related terms.
- Terms longer than approximately 60 characters have been truncated and the original placed in the 'longterm' metadata field.