Do you need a scheme of work?

Yes. NaCCA's own planning guidance puts the scheme between the curriculum and your weekly lesson note, and expects the note to be written from it. The questions that follow are the ones that catch teachers out: there are two schemes with the same name, the official template is paced to a term length this year does not have, and some districts hand one out anyway.

What NaCCA says

When the standards-based curriculum arrived in 2019, NaCCA published a Teacher Resource Pack to orient primary teachers to it. One of the aims it sets teachers is to "prepare schemes of learning for a given academic year, term or week", and it says a lesson note "based on this Scheme of Learning must be prepared" for the indicators being taught.

The Basic 7 resource packs say the same about JHS. Their list of what a subject teacher does includes to "prepare scheme of learning and lesson plans/notes according to specification". Two JHS curricula put it most directly. The Creative Arts and Design curriculum says "the curriculum cannot be taken as a substitute for lesson plans. It is therefore necessary that teachers develop a scheme of learning and lesson plans", and Career Technology's says the same with "scheme of work".

That is the two names in one pair of sentences. Scheme of learning is the standards-based curriculum's term, scheme of work the older one most teachers still use, and NaCCA's own documents use both.

Two schemes with one name

NaCCA's packs describe two documents, and a lot of confusion about "the scheme" comes from mixing them up.

The yearly scheme, which the primary pack also calls a yearly curriculum overview, is one table for the whole year: a row for each week, a column for each term, and in each cell the sub-strand taught that week. It decides which parts of the curriculum belong in which term. This is the start of NaCCA's own sample, from the Basic 7 Science resource pack:

The full table carries on to the revision and examination weeks at the end of each term.

The termly scheme takes one column of that table and opens it out. For each week of the term it gives the strand, sub-strand, content standard, indicators and resources. This is the document your weekly notes are checked against, and its columns are set out in the GES scheme of work format.

That leaves the week. NaCCA's aim names it as a level of planning too, and the document the same pack describes for it is the lesson plan, what most teachers call the lesson note. So when a download site offers a "weekly scheme", look at what is inside it. In NaCCA's chain, the weekly layer is your lesson note.

Which one do you need? Both of the first two, and they are very different amounts of work. The yearly overview is one page, drawn once at the start of the year. The termly scheme is written each term from it. If there is time for only one before term starts, do the yearly overview first. It is the one that catches a sub-strand with no term to go in.

The template assumes twelve weeks

The primary pack's templates have twelve rows a term. The pack says its scheme "has assumed a term duration of twelve (12) teaching weeks", and asks for the year's content to be "evenly distributed across the 12 weeks in each of the 3 terms".

This year's terms are unequal. Once the revision and examination weeks come out, the 2026/2027 calendar gives first term one teaching week more than the template and second term two fewer, and how to write a scheme of work does that count. Paced to the template, first term finishes its content a week early, and second term has two weeks of content left when teaching stops.

NaCCA allows for this. The same page says the scheme "has been designed based on the minimum length of a school year to allow flexibility" and that the teacher "should be able to add more teaching time as necessary". The Basic 7 Science sample above already lays its first term over fifteen weeks. Fitting the scheme to this year's calendar is part of writing it.

The order is yours to set

The primary pack arranges sub-strands "in a recommended teaching order but the teacher is free to teach sub-strands in any order within a class per local requirements and resources." A scheme can follow the farming season, a school event, or the materials you will have that term.

Two things hold whatever order you choose. Every sub-strand for the year appears somewhere in the scheme. And the names and codes in each row are copied exactly as the curriculum prints them, because those are what your lesson notes will be read against. If the codes are still unfamiliar, see how an indicator code is built.

If your district gives you one

Some districts issue a common scheme for each class. A published Basic 8 Career Technology facilitator's guide puts it plainly: depending on the district, "the subject coordinators will provide a scheme of learning for their schools".

If you have been given one, that is your scheme. Two checks are still worth the few minutes. First, the dates: schemes are passed around for years, and some circulating files are labelled for a 2022 "first semester". Second, the pace: a scheme drawn for twelve-week terms needs adjusting to the weeks this year actually has.

teache builds the whole year's scheme from the curriculum for your class, term by term, paced to this year's real term lengths with every week dated, and you edit it from there. See how it works or download a blank template and draw it by hand.