What is the national curriculum?

The national curriculum is set by the Department for Education and applies to maintained schools, the ones funded and run by the state. It's organised by subject and by key stage, and it lays out what children should be taught as they move through school.

It works in two layers. The broad layer sets the aims of each subject, the big things a child builds over time, like reading with understanding or working confidently with number. Beneath that sits the programme of study for each key stage: the specific content and skills that get a child there.

So it tells you what, not how. How a subject is taught is the school's decision, which is why two classes can reach the same point by very different routes.

Because learning builds on itself. The curriculum isn't a random list, it's a staircase. You can't add fractions without secure times tables and division, and you can't read a sentence without knowing the sounds the letters make.

That's also why a missing step hurts long after. If something didn't stick in Year 2, the work in Year 4 can look impossible, even though the real gap is two years back. When you know the staircase, you can see where it actually went wrong, instead of deciding your child is "just not good at" the subject.

The short answer: it's set out in the programmes of study, subject by subject and key stage by key stage, and it's all public on GOV.UK. That's where you look up what your child is working towards.

The key stages line up with school years: KS1 is Years 1 to 2 (ages 5 to 7), KS2 is Years 3 to 6 (ages 7 to 11), KS3 is Years 7 to 9 (ages 11 to 14), and KS4 is Years 10 to 11 (ages 14 to 16), leading to GCSEs.

Two things to keep in mind when you read them. First, they're written for teachers, so the language is technical. Second, they describe what's expected by the end of a key stage, not a checklist for a random Tuesday. Children reach these points at different times, and that's normal. There are a few national check-points along the way, such as the phonics screening check in Year 1, the end-of-KS2 tests (SATs) in Year 6, and GCSEs at the end of Year 11.

If you want to know where your child is right now, the teacher is still the best source. The curriculum tells you what's being aimed at; the teacher tells you where your child is on the way there.

You're not meant to teach from it. But it's genuinely useful in a few concrete ways. What it isn't for is measuring your child against a list every day, which piles on pressure without helping the learning.

A lot of homework help has one weakness: it doesn't know where on the staircase your child is standing. A general tool can hand over a technically right answer that sits completely to one side of what the class is doing. That's the exact problem we built Jabba to avoid.

Jabba teaches the full range of subjects aligned to the national curriculum, from primary through to GCSE age. The curriculum isn't a label we added afterwards; it's the backbone of what Jabba teaches and in what order. Underneath sits a learning map of the curriculum, broken into thousands of small goals and wired together so Jabba knows what has to come before what. He never moves on to a step your child isn't ready for.

For you, that means the work your child does with Jabba lines up with what the class is covering, rather than being random tasks off to the side. In the parent overview you follow the progress through the steps, and see where your child is secure and where something's still missing. Jabba is an AI tutor and a learning companion, not a treatment, and he doesn't replace the teacher who knows your child in class. For working in step with what school is actually aiming at, though, he's built for it.