Curriculum

Measured against the real ladder

Every skill in the syllabus is tagged to the ladder the Victorian Curriculum already uses. "Where your child sits" becomes a claim any teacher can verify, in the language every school-entry interview already speaks.

Three domains

Numeracy

Early number sense

Subitising, true counting, numeral–quantity mapping, patterns and order. Quantity before symbols, always.

Literacy

Phonemic awareness & oral language

Hearing, isolating and blending sounds, before letters and before writing. Plus dense vocabulary and full-sentence reasoning.

Spatial & motor

Spatial reasoning

Pattern replication, 3D construction from memory, fine-motor control. The quiet predictor of later maths.

Shapes and measuring

Measurement and space

Sorting, shapes, repeating patterns, and comparing size, length and weight. None of it needs numbers, so a child can travel a long way here before they can count.

The ladder

The Victorian Curriculum achievement standards define the bands. Wedgetail derives your child's operating band per domain from logged, demonstrated mastery only. It then reports the delta against the age-expected band. A Prep-age child working at Level 2 is a +2 delta. That is the number that matters.

Wedgetail is built on the Victorian Curriculum. The skills map closely to the Australian Curriculum, so a family in another state gets the same syllabus with Victorian band labels.

Victorian Curriculum bands with typical ages and exemplar skills
Band	Typical age	Maths exemplars	English exemplars
Towards Foundation A–D	pre-school	Attending → recognising small quantities → early counting	Responding to sounds → rhyme and syllable awareness
Foundation (Prep)	5–6	Count to 20, subitise small collections, match names–numerals–quantities	Phonemic awareness, letter–sound knowledge, decode CVC words
Level 1	6–7	Count and order to 120, partition, skip-count	Read decodable texts, blend and segment fluently
Level 2	7–8	Place value to 1000, addition and subtraction strategies	Fluent reading, morphemic spelling
Levels 3–7	8–13	The same ladder, tested nationally. NAPLAN checks it at Years 3, 5 and 7, and Grattan's analysis of that data shows gaps widen each year rather than close. Wedgetail's program runs to the Year 7 checkpoint: the operating-band method keeps working, only the skills change.

Every skill and drill on this ladder is reviewed by a leading primary school teacher with more than 20 years in the early years of school. The engine schedules; an experienced human checks that what it schedules is sound.

Dispositional development (identity, wellbeing, curiosity) sits under the VEYLDF, the Victorian framework for birth to eight. Wedgetail tracks it as context, never as a score. Children are never graded on who they are.

The questionnaire grows with your child

Your baseline comes from a questionnaire, and the questionnaire is not one-size-fits-all. It asks only what is within reach of your child's age: everything up to two steps past the age-expected level. As your child grows, new question sets unlock automatically. You answer a handful at a time, never the whole ladder at once.

How the baseline questionnaire changes by age group
Age group	What we ask about
1–2 yr	Foundations, not academics: first words, pointing to share attention, stacking two blocks, posting objects into containers, handing over one thing on request. Every question is answerable from ten minutes of ordinary play.
2–2½ yr	First combinations: two words together, a six-block tower. Short answers from a short attention span. Still no letters and no numerals.
3 yr	The syllabus opens up: counting songs, seeing 1 or 2 at a glance, four-word sentences, copying patterns, sorting by colour, big and small.
4 yr	Sharper questions: counting five objects accurately, hearing rhymes, clapping syllables, rebuilding a pattern from memory, comparing length and weight.
4½ yr	The bridge skills schools quietly assume: the first sound in a word, matching written numerals to amounts, harder patterns, measuring with blocks, retelling a story.
Prep	The questionnaire hands over to the school's own assessment. Wedgetail keeps drilling and rechecking, but the questions stop, because a teacher is now watching daily.

Why not ask everything up front? Because a parent of a one-year-old answering "not yet" forty times learns nothing except discouragement. The questionnaire meets the child where they are, exactly like the syllabus it feeds.

The professional methods behind it

Nothing in Wedgetail is invented from scratch. Every part of the system borrows a method that professionals already use, and names it, so you can check our working.

The professional methods and frameworks Wedgetail is built on
What it grounds	The method or framework
The teaching model	Benjamin Bloom's mastery learning: fixed standard, variable time, no advancement without demonstrated mastery. Bloom showed one-to-one mastery teaching moves an average student two standard deviations above a conventional classroom.
The 1, 3, 7, 14-day rechecks	The spacing effect, one of the most replicated findings in memory research: practice distributed over expanding intervals is retained; massed practice fades.
The skill ladder and levels	The Victorian Curriculum F–10 achievement standards, with dispositional development framed by the VEYLDF.
The baseline questions	CDC developmental milestones and the fine-motor checklists occupational therapists use.
The word counter	The parent-report method of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories, the standard instrument speech pathologists use to measure early vocabulary, with age guides from published speech-pathology norms.
The phrase counter	Brown's stages of language development: two-word combinations arrive once vocabulary passes about 50 words, then utterances lengthen stage by stage. The phrase bank is graded on those stages.
The human check	Every skill and drill is reviewed by a leading primary school teacher with more than 20 years in the early years of school.

What excellence means here

A sustained positive delta with intact engagement. A syllabus that burns out the child or the parent has failed, whatever the band says. So adherence and engagement are first-class metrics in the engine, and every failed mastery check gets an easier, different drill instead of pressure.

Questions parents ask

Join the waiting list

Places open in small batches, in order. The earlier a child starts, the cheaper excellence is to build, so a waiting-list position is worth more every month you hold it.