What This Skill Does

This skill tags an external curriculum — already decomposed by the curriculum harness into KUD items, learning targets, and (optionally) criteria — with a school's developmental band labels. The school's band schema is supplied as an input; the skill reads it, derives a mapping table from the source's age ranges to the school's band ranges, and applies that mapping across every item. Every item receives a school_band value, a confidence level, and diagnostic flags. The source's own band labels are preserved verbatim alongside the new school band tags, so the output can always be traced back to, and interpreted against, the original framework.

The skill is a metadata operation, not a content operation. It does not rewrite KUDs, LTs, or criteria, and it does not reinterpret the source's intent. Its only job is to answer the question: "If a teacher planning for a given school band opened this framework, which of its content is relevant to them?" The skill is deliberately conservative where a source band spans two school bands: it assigns both candidate bands, sets an ambiguity flag, and records a rationale. Downstream skills — especially the Curriculum Crosswalk skill and the human planning process — resolve these ambiguities with teacher judgement.

The skill handles three common source-structure scenarios. Most sources have an explicit band structure (Welsh CfW Progression Steps, NZ Curriculum Levels, IB PYP/MYP/DP phases) which maps cleanly with occasional boundary ambiguity. Some have a formal-but-compressed structure (UK RSHE has four Key Stage labels but only two actual age bands in the statutory document), where the skill applies the source's real 2-band structure first and records the formal label via source_band_preserved. A minority have no band structure at all (CASEL, some competency frameworks), where the skill maps by developmental descriptor rather than age and flags every item for teacher review.

Evidence Foundation

Wiggins & McTighe (2005, 2011) — Understanding by Design establishes KUD (Know / Understand / Do) as the unit-level architecture through which framework content becomes teachable, and positions curriculum alignment as a backward-design operation from stated outcomes. The Developmental Band Translator operates on exactly the KUD layer that UbD specifies, and treats school-band assignment as one step in a backward-design pipeline whose final consumer is the classroom teacher.

Vygotsky (1978) — The Zone of Proximal Development grounds the concept that developmental banding is not a pure age-partition. A learner in a given band is defined by what they can do with support, not only by their chronological age. This justifies the skill's use of both age-range and developmental-descriptor evidence when tagging, and its willingness to assign a school band from descriptor-based reasoning alone when age evidence is absent.

Heritage (2008) — Learning progressions literature reinforces that progressions are developmental trajectories, not calendars. The skill treats school bands as trajectory-waypoints. Where a source's native progression is coarser than the school's (e.g. RSHE's 2-band structure vs a 6-band school schema), the skill preserves the coarseness honestly via ambiguity flags rather than forcing false precision.

Webb (1997) — The canonical alignment framework defines four alignment dimensions: categorical concurrence, depth-of-knowledge consistency, range-of-knowledge correspondence, balance of representation. Band translation addresses primarily the range dimension (do the age spans match?) with partial touch on categorical concurrence. The skill does not claim to assess depth or balance alignment; this limit is reported in skill_flags and in Known Limitations.

Input Schema