The national curriculum is one of the most important documents in English education. It defines what every child should learn, year by year, across core subjects. And yet, until now, it has been remarkably difficult to actually use.
The Problem with PDFs
The national curriculum for England is published by the Department for Education as a collection of PDF documents and static web pages. If you want to know what a Year 4 child should learn in fractions, you need to find the right PDF, scroll to the right section, and read through dense paragraphs of statutory text. There is no search. There is no way to compare across year groups. There is no way to see how a topic progresses from Year 1 through to Year 6.
For teachers, this is a daily frustration. For parents, it is essentially inaccessible. And for anyone building educational tools, it means starting from scratch every time.
1,548 Statements, Structured and Searchable
We went through the entire national curriculum for Mathematics, English, and Science – every key stage, every year group, every topic - and extracted each individual learning objective. The result is 1,548 discrete curriculum points, each tagged with its subject, key stage, year group, and topic area.
You can now search across the entire curriculum in seconds. Type "fractions" and see every mention across every year group. Browse Year 3 Science to see exactly what should be covered. Compare what children learn about grammar in Year 2 versus Year 5.
The curriculum should not be something you need a teaching degree to navigate. Every parent deserves to know what their child is supposed to be learning.
How Teachers and Parents Can Use It
For teachers, the curriculum browser is a planning tool. You can quickly check which objectives you need to cover, see how topics connect across year groups, and identify gaps in your scheme of work. It is particularly useful for mixed-age classes where you need to track multiple year groups simultaneously.
For parents, it answers the question every parent asks at some point: "What should my child actually know by now?" Instead of guessing or relying on school reports alone, you can see the specific expectations for your child's year group. If your child is struggling with something, you can see exactly where it fits in the broader picture.
Free for Everyone – Including the Government
The curriculum browser on Bell.Study is completely free to use. No login required, no paywall, no restrictions. We believe access to curriculum information is a right, not a privilege.
We have also offered to share our structured curriculum data with the Department for Education at no cost. The government should not need a startup to make its own curriculum accessible. If our work can improve the official curriculum pages, we would be delighted to contribute. Education data should be open, searchable, and useful – not locked in PDFs from 2014.