Subjects

How subjects work

Every subject on Educator comes in two levels: GCSE and KS3. They share the same login, the same practice engine, and the same character system — but they are separate in every stat that matters: XP, streak, leaderboard position, mastery progress, and cosmetic unlocks all belong to a specific subject. Playing Food GCSE does not affect your Food KS3 numbers, and vice versa.

GCSE

Cards are written to exam-board specifications for Year 10–11 students. They carry a Foundation or Higher tier label and a list of boards the card applies to. A school sets its class to a specific board and tier; individual learners pick their own. Cards that do not apply to the selected board are excluded from the adaptive picker automatically.

KS3

Cards cover the DfE national curriculum or agreed-syllabus frameworks for Year 7–9 students. There is no exam board and no tier split — all cards are included for every KS3 learner. The boards field on KS3 cards is empty by design.

Live subjects

All subjects below are available to school accounts and individual subscribers. Beta subjects have a full card corpus and working practice engine but are still receiving teacher feedback before the card bank is finalised.

Beta subjects have a complete card bank and full runtime support — students can practise them today. The Beta label means the card bank is still being refined with teacher feedback before we consider it production-quality. Card wording, distractor quality, and topic coverage may be adjusted during this phase.

KS3 and GCSE — same subject, separate progress

For each subject, the KS3 and GCSE variants share the same character identity system — Food uses chef avatars at both levels, History uses the scholar, Geography uses the custom explorer illustration, and so on. A student who uses Educator in Year 8 for KS3 Geography and then moves into Year 10 GCSE Geography will keep their account; their KS3 streak, rank, and cosmetics are stored separately and remain intact.

KS3 is bundled free with the matching GCSE at every school tier — Geography GCSE includes Geography KS3, Food GCSE includes Food KS3, and so on. A school never needs to license them separately. Teachers create a class scoped to one subject level (e.g. geography for GCSE or geography_ks3 for KS3), and students only see that level's content when they join that class.

Board coverage — how it works

Each GCSE card carries a boards array listing which exam boards assess that content. A card tagged ["aqa", "edexcel", "ocr"] will appear for AQA, Edexcel, and OCR students but not for a Eduqas-only class. A card tagged with all six boards is universal — every GCSE student sees it regardless of board.

When a teacher creates a class, they set the exam board once for the whole class. When an individual learner signs up, they choose their board in onboarding (and can update it from their profile at any time). The adaptive card picker automatically applies the board filter — students never see a board selection dropdown mid-session; it is handled invisibly in the background.

Board coverage by subject

Food Prep & Nutrition

Eduqas (C560) is the primary specification — the vast majority of cards apply to all three Food boards (Eduqas, AQA, WJEC) because the content overlaps heavily. There is no board picker in Food; all students see the same card bank.

History

History has the most board-specific content of any subject, because each board covers different periods and topics. Cards carry explicit board arrays, and topic availability in the picker changes meaningfully depending on which board a class is set to.

Geography

AQA, Edexcel, Eduqas, OCR, and WJEC are all supported. Core physical and human geography content overlaps; case-study and specification-specific cards are tagged to the boards that assess them.

Combined Science

AQA, Edexcel, OCR, WJEC, and Eduqas. Science specifications share a large common core; board-specific required practicals and extension content are tagged accordingly.

PE Theory, Drama

AQA, Edexcel, OCR, Eduqas, and WJEC supported. These subjects have significant cross-board overlap in their theoretical content, with board-specific performance and set-text content tagged separately.

Religious Studies

AQA (primary specification), Edexcel, Eduqas, OCR, and WJEC supported. RS has significant board variation in component selection and set texts; cards carry explicit board arrays so students only see content relevant to their specification. KS3 follows agreed-syllabus frameworks — no board filtering.

Design & Technology

AQA, Edexcel, Eduqas, OCR, WJEC, and CCEA are all supported at GCSE — full six-board coverage. The core materials, systems, and iterative design content is largely cross-board; board-specific coursework weighting and specialist focus areas are tagged accordingly. KS3 follows the DfE national curriculum with no board filtering.

Business Studies

AQA, Edexcel, OCR, Eduqas, WJEC, and CCEA at GCSE. Core concepts (supply and demand, finance, marketing, operations) overlap significantly across boards; board-specific case-study requirements and calculation approaches are tagged separately. Includes the calculation card type for numeric business maths. KS3 covers PSHE and Citizenship-aligned content with no board filtering.

Computer Science

AQA, OCR, Edexcel, and Eduqas at GCSE. The core programming, data representation, networks, cyber security, and algorithms content is largely cross-board; board-specific depth requirements are tagged accordingly. KS3 follows the DfE national curriculum with no board filtering.

KS3 (all subjects)

No board filtering. All KS3 cards are delivered to every student — the boards field is empty and the picker ignores it entirely.

Coming soon

The following subjects are in the authoring pipeline. Tile placeholders are visible on the homepage but clicking through shows a Coming Soon message. They proceed through the three-stage pipeline (Coming soon → Beta → Live) before students can access them.

• Drama KS3 & PE Theory KS3 — Following behind the GCSE Beta variants. Will reach Beta once the GCSE card banks have stabilised through classroom feedback.
• Sociology GCSE & KS3 — AQA, Eduqas, OCR, WJEC. In the authoring pipeline; card bank in development.
• Psychology GCSE & KS3 — AQA, Eduqas, OCR, WJEC. In the authoring pipeline; card bank in development.

How new subjects are added

Every subject on Educator goes through a fixed pipeline before it reaches students. This is deliberate — a subject with poor-quality cards is worse than no subject at all, because it trains students on wrong or misleading information.

1. Spec inventory. The published exam board specifications are downloaded and mapped to a topic/subtopic hierarchy. Each subtopic is classified by exam importance: exam-bait (12–15 cards), substantive (10–12 cards), supporting (8 cards), or awareness (8 cards). This produces a card-count target before a single card is written.
2. Card authoring. Cards are drafted against the spec and classified target. Recall, MCQ, match-pairs, true/false, cloze, and calculation cards are written to tight style rules: answers ≤ 6 words for recall, distractors that are plausibly wrong (not obviously silly), no ambiguity in the prompt. Every card carries its board tags, tier, topic, and subtopic at authoring time.
3. Linter pass. An automated linter checks every card against the hard rules: answer length, distractor count, required fields present, no duplicate IDs, correct type-specific fields. A subject cannot advance to Beta until it passes the linter with zero errors.
4. Teacher review. A qualified teacher with subject expertise reviews the card bank for accuracy, appropriate difficulty, and pedagogical clarity. Corrections, rewrites, and deletions are fed back before the subject goes anywhere near a student.
5. Beta. The subject is made available to school accounts and individual learners with a Beta label. Feedback from real classroom use shapes the final round of corrections.
6. Live. After teacher sign-off on the Beta feedback, the label is removed. The card bank is considered stable — additions and corrections still happen, but the core corpus is production-quality.

Related pages

• Practice — card types, practice modes, and how the adaptive picker uses board and tier filters
• School setup & permissions — how teachers set board and tier for their class, and how subject licences work
• Onboarding — how individual learners pick their subject and board during sign-up
• How we build the questions — source authority, curriculum mapping, card types, quality rules, and expert review