What should a Year 7 be learning?

Year 7 is where a lot of home-educating families start to feel the ground shift. Primary content you half-remember; secondary content you might not. Here is roughly what schools cover, and how much it matters.

You are not legally required to follow the national curriculum. It is useful as a map, not as a rulebook — and a child working a year either side of it is entirely normal.

Maths

Year 7 is mostly consolidation and the first real algebra. The content matters less than the fluency: gaps in number work compound in a way that gaps in, say, history do not.

• Negative numbers — adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing.
• Order of operations, and why it exists.
• Factors, multiples, HCF and LCM, primes, squares and roots.
• Fractions, decimals and percentages, and converting between them.
• The start of algebra: expressions, substituting values, simple equations.
• Ratio and proportion.
• Angles, area, perimeter, and properties of shapes.
• Averages, and reading data from tables and charts.

If your child is shaky on times tables or on fractions, that is worth fixing before moving on, even if it means spending a term on it. Almost everything later leans on those two.

English

The shift in Year 7 is from reading for the story to reading for how it was made. Alongside that, writing becomes more deliberate — choosing a form and a register on purpose.

• Word classes, sentence types, and building complex sentences.
• Punctuation that changes meaning: commas, apostrophes, speech.
• Homophones and the spellings everyone gets wrong.
• Figurative language, and what an effect actually is.
• Reading a whole novel and a range of shorter texts.
• Writing to describe, to narrate, to explain and to persuade.
• A first encounter with Shakespeare, usually the terms rather than a whole play.

Science

Secondary science splits into biology, chemistry and physics, though in Year 7 it is often still taught as one subject.

• Cells, and the difference between plant and animal cells.
• Body systems, and gas exchange in the lungs.
• Reproduction in humans and plants.
• The skeleton and muscles.
• Particles, states of matter, and changes of state.
• Elements, and the beginning of the periodic table.
• Forces as pushes and pulls, balanced and unbalanced.
• Energy resources, and where electricity comes from.

Everything else

Geography, history, RS, languages, art, music, technology, PE. Schools cover these in rotation and rarely in depth in Year 7. Home-educating families often go deeper on fewer of them, which is usually the better trade.

How closely to follow it

Loosely, with two exceptions. Maths and English carry forward — a gap in Year 7 maths is still a gap in Year 10 maths, and colleges care about those two above all. Be organised there.

Everywhere else, following your child's interest usually produces more learning than following a scheme of work. A twelve-year-old who spends a term genuinely absorbed in the Romans has not fallen behind on anything that matters.