8 Curriculum Areas
There are eight curriculum areas: expressive arts, health and wellbeing, languages (including English, Gàidhlig and Gaelic learners and modern languages), mathematics, religious and moral studies, sciences, social studies and technologies.
Learning in the broad general education may often span a number of curriculum areas (for example, a literacy project planned around science and technology might include outdoor learning experiences, research and the use of ICT). This is likely to be in the form of themed or project learning which provides children and young people opportunities to show how skills and knowledge can be applied in interesting contexts. The term often used for this is interdisciplinary learning.
Experiences and Outcomes
Each curriculum area is planned using experiences and outcomes. These describe the knowledge, skills, attributes and capabilities of the four capacities that young people are expected to develop.
Benchmarks have been developed to provide clarity on the national standards expected within each curriculum area at each level. They set out clear lines of progression in literacy and English and numeracy and mathematics, and across all other curriculum areas from early to fourth levels (first to fourth Levels in Modern Languages). Their purpose is to make clear what learners need to know and be able to do to progress through the levels, and to support consistency in teachers' and other practitioners' professional judgements.
