Dream-to-Reality

1 · The mission and the essence: regenerative entrepreneurship

REAL School Budapest exists to inspire and empower a generation to dream and build a beautiful world. That is the mission in full. It is the kind of sentence that is easy to put on a wall and hard to mean — and the purpose of this handbook is to set out, as plainly and honestly as we can, what it takes to mean it. At the centre of the answer is the programme we call D2R — Dream-to-Reality — and the idea of regenerative entrepreneurship.

The kind of person we are trying to grow

A mission to build a beautiful world points, in the end, at a kind of person. Ours is the regenerative entrepreneur: a young person who can sense what is wrong in the world, envision what could be, and act with care to build something that lasts. And they learn to do this not in the abstract but in a real place — for us, the city of Budapest — on problems they can walk to and with people they can meet.

By entrepreneur we do not mean someone who starts a company, though they might. We mean someone who creates real value under real constraints — who notices a need, makes something that meets it, and tests it against the world rather than against a mark scheme. By regenerative we mean something more exacting than merely doing good — we define it carefully below. An entrepreneur without the regenerative commitment can build things that extract and deplete; that is most of what the word has come to mean. A would-be world-healer without the entrepreneurial discipline tends to produce good intentions and little that works. The regenerative entrepreneur holds both: the care and the craft, the dream and the delivery.

What we mean by "regenerative"

It is worth defining regenerative carefully, since everything that follows is built on it. The term comes from the Latin regenerare, to create again. Paul Hawken defines it simply as putting life at the centre of every action and decision. We hold to a working definition that is a little more exacting: regeneration is action that grows the capacity of people and places to become healthier over time — going beyond doing less harm to producing enduring, net-positive system health. The test is whether the good a thing does keeps going. Something is regenerative only if it positively perpetuates.

That standard is best understood as the top of a continuum, because most action sits somewhere below it. The Regeneration Continuum — adapted from Bill Reed's regenerative design lineage (7group & Reed, The Integrative Design Guide to Green Building, Wiley, 2009) — runs through five levels, which we use across the school to judge the impact of real things:

• Conventional action leaves a harmful system as it is — fast-fashion apps, most ordinary commerce.
• Green action does less harm: swapping bulbs for LEDs while leaving the habits of energy use untouched.
• Sustainable action holds the line so the future is no worse — refillable bottles in place of single-use ones — but past harm remains and nothing grows.
• Restorative action repairs a piece of the damage: cleaning a river, planting trees, while the system that caused the damage carries on upstream.
• Regenerative action shifts a root cause and leaves behind capacity that endures — a school that builds a complete soil cycle, where compost feeds the gardens, the gardens feed the kitchen, the kitchen's scraps feed the compost, and each year's students train the next, so the system keeps improving after they have gone. Endurance is the design goal, not a bonus.

[Visual to come: the Regeneration Ladder — five rungs from Conventional through Green, Sustainable and Restorative to Regenerative.]

We are honest with ourselves that most of what any school does — most of what we do — sits below the top level, and that genuinely regenerative work is a high bar. We do not lower the bar to feel we have cleared it, and we do not claim to have cleared it when we have not. Naming the continuum makes the standard visible, so that students and teachers can ask of any piece of work the three questions that matter most: will this last, who will look after it, and does it leave the system healthier over time?

Why this, and why now

A school could have taken up this mission in any decade. It is more urgent in this one. Artificial intelligence is rapidly absorbing the routine cognitive work that schools have spent a century optimising for — the summarising, the calculating, the standard essay, the predictable analysis. As machines take over more routine knowledge-work, the capacities that remain distinctly human grow more valuable, not less: the judgement to tell what is worth doing, the care to do it with and for other people, and the resolve to act inside messy real systems and recover when things go wrong. These are precisely the capacities a regenerative entrepreneur needs, and none of them is built by transmission. A school that only hands over knowledge is preparing children for a world that is disappearing. We should be honest about that.

Where D2R sits

This is why REAL School organises its whole programme around six commitments, gathered in the word ANSWER — Academics, Nature, Smart technology, Wellbeing, Entrepreneurship, and Regeneration. The last two — Entrepreneurship and Regeneration — are the essence this handbook concerns; the other four make up the wider ANSWER programme around it. D2R — Dream-to-Reality — is the scheduled programme block where that essence becomes real work: a substantial part of the week in which students learn to take an idea and carry it the whole way into the world, as real, as beautiful, and as lasting as they can make it. It is not maths by stealth, and it is not where we try to build the sequenced knowledge of science or language acquisition. It is the home of project work: entrepreneurship, humanities and literacy are built and assessed there through real products and audiences, while the complementary Regeneration course builds much of the regenerative understanding that D2R puts to work. Everything that follows in this handbook — the projects, the knowledge that underpins them, the way the work is taught and assessed — exists to grow the regenerative entrepreneur described here.

How the pieces fit, in one view. The mission is to help children dream and build a beautiful world. The kind of person this points towards is the regenerative entrepreneur. The capabilities are named through the ANSWER competencies. The main vehicle is the D2R programme block: real projects, rooted in Budapest, where entrepreneurship, humanities and literacy are built and assessed through work that has an audience beyond the classroom. The complementary Regeneration course builds much of the understanding D2R draws on; the Literacy block sharpens the craft of writing; and the sequenced subjects — maths, science, music and language acquisition — secure knowledge that has to be built in order. Assessment then asks what a student can actually do, against clear evidence, rather than how they rank against someone else.

If that is the destination, the first question is what it actually takes to get there — which capabilities a young person must build to become such a person. Naming them, honestly and in full, is where the next section begins.

2 · The capabilities we grow: the ANSWER competencies

To dream and build a beautiful world, a child has to become genuinely capable in it. Not merely informed about it, not merely able to talk about it, not good at school in the narrow sense — capable: able to take real action, on real problems, that actually works and goes on working. That is a high bar, and meeting it asks three things of us. We have to be clear about which capabilities we are trying to grow. We have to grow them on purpose, rather than hope they appear somewhere along the way. And we have to be able to tell, honestly, whether a child is growing them. Those capabilities are what we call competencies, and this section sets out the ones we commit to, why these, and how they grow.

One thing we want to be careful about from the start, because it is so easily got wrong. A school built around action can slide into a quiet contempt for knowledge — as though doing were the real work and knowing were a dull preliminary to it. We reject that completely. Knowledge is the ground that action stands on: you cannot read a system, weigh evidence, or judge what is fair without first knowing a great deal, and action taken without understanding is not wisdom but mere activity. So when we say we grow capabilities, we never mean capabilities instead of knowledge. We mean knowledge built well and then put to work — which is the harder thing, and the more valuable one.

What we mean by a competency

A competency is a capability a student can actually use — not a topic they have covered, but something they can do, dependably, when it counts. It folds together what a student knows, the skill to use it, and the disposition to use it. The OECD, whose work on this has shaped our own, describes a competency as a holistic thing, and adds a fourth element — values:

The OECD Learning Compass 2030 defines competency as a holistic concept: “Competencies can be built on these core foundations. A competency is a holistic concept that includes knowledge, skills, attitudes and values. The OECD Future of Education and Skills 2030 project defines a competency as more than just ‘skills’. Skills are a prerequisite for exercising a competency. To be ready and competent for 2030, students need to be able to use their knowledge, skills, attitudes and values to act in coherent and responsible ways that change the future for the better. Competency and knowledge are neither competing nor mutually exclusive concepts.” It adds that competency “involves the mobilisation of knowledge, skills, attitudes and values to meet complex demands in situations of uncertainty.”

We hold values as central too, but not as a box to be ticked. They live in the dispositions we name — care for living things, fairness, the conduct that holds a community together — and, more deeply, in which competencies we chose to grow at all: a set built around regeneration, care and justice is already a statement of what we believe matters. One word we change on purpose. Where the OECD says attitudes, we say dispositions, because a disposition is something enacted — something a person does, again and again, across many situations — rather than a belief held quietly in the head. Dispositions also grow differently from knowledge and skill: not by climbing fixed stages but by becoming steadier and more sensitive to the moment that calls for them. How they grow, and how we can fairly tell that they are growing, is genuinely its own problem, and we take it up in the section on assessment.

There is a reason we tie all of this so tightly to real capability. We want our students to have agency — to act, with purpose, on the world they are inheriting. But agency is not a feeling, and it is not free-floating confidence. Nor is it the same thing as autonomy. This is one of the most damaging misconceptions in some progressive and project-based education: that if children are simply given enough choice, their natural interests will turn into intrinsic motivation and deep learning. Sometimes they will. Often they will not. Agency has to be nurtured. It depends on competence, support and responsibility. A student’s agency becomes real only when it is supported by real knowledge, skill, judgement, opportunity and relationships. Confidence without capability is fragile; capability without a chance to act is wasted. This is why we are not content to inspire children; we set out to make them capable, because that is what makes their agency real rather than rhetorical.

Why these, and the company we keep

We did not arrive at this particular set on our own, and it is worth being open about the company it keeps — a parent is right to ask not only what we grow but why these, and on whose authority. For more than a decade, the people thinking hardest about what schooling is for have been converging on a similar answer: that a fast-changing and uncertain world needs young people who can do more than reproduce knowledge — who can think across disciplines, act on real problems, and take responsibility for the world they are helping to shape. We see ourselves as part of that movement, and we have checked our own set, deliberately, against the most serious attempts anyone has made to name these capabilities.

Four of them come from the European Union, which has published reference frameworks for precisely the capabilities a modern education ought to build: GreenComp for sustainability, DigComp for digital and AI competence, EntreComp for entrepreneurship, and LifeComp for the personal, social and learning-to-learn capabilities that hold the rest together. Alongside them stands the OECD's Learning Compass 2030 — the shared work of dozens of countries asking what a child beginning school today will need as an adult. It names three "transformative competencies" — creating new value, reconciling tensions, taking responsibility — and it holds that young people learn to act not in isolation but inside a web of relationships, what it calls co-agency, with peers, teachers, families and community:

The OECD is especially useful here because it makes this distinction explicit: “Student agency is often mistakenly used as a synonym for ‘student autonomy’, ‘student voice’ and ‘student choice’; but it is much more than these concepts. Acting autonomously does not mean functioning in social isolation, nor does it mean acting solely in self-interest. Similarly, student agency does not mean that students can voice whatever they want or can choose whatever subjects they wish to learn.” The same note defines student agency as involving “a sense of responsibility” and “the ability to frame a guiding purpose and identify actions to achieve a goal”, and adds that “students need support from adults in order to exercise their agency and realise their potential.”

And the World Economic Forum, in its recurring survey of employers, reports which human capabilities are rising in worth as machines absorb the routine ones: analytical and creative thinking, resilience and flexibility, curiosity and lifelong learning, environmental stewardship among them.

Our relationship to all of this is one of answerability, not derivation. We did not assemble ANSWER out of these frameworks; we built it from our own purpose — regenerative entrepreneurship — and then held it up against them to see whether what we grow honours a shared intent. It does, closely: we answer to all of GreenComp and LifeComp, and to most of EntreComp (80%) and DigComp (76%). Where a framework names a capability in the abstract — "creating new value", say — our task has been to show what it actually looks like as something a child does, and to make it teachable and judgeable as that child grows. In a few places we part from the frameworks deliberately: we treat agency, for teaching and assessment, as something evidenced in action over time, not merely as a self-reported belief, aspiration or preference; and we decline to grade what cannot be graded fairly — curiosity, intellectual courage, a growth mindset — naming these as qualities we cultivate rather than capabilities we score.

There is one more reason this matters now more than it would have a decade ago. As AI takes over more of the routine cognitive work, it has also become easy to produce work that looks competent without being so. A school now has to be able to tell the difference between a performance and a real capability — and naming competencies clearly, then assessing them honestly, is how we keep hold of that distinction.

The six commitments, and the competencies within them

We gather the competencies in the word that names the whole school — ANSWER: Academics, Nature, Smart technology, Wellbeing, Entrepreneurship, and Regeneration. Academics comes first because everything else is built on it. It is the disciplinary spine of the school — the subjects, taught and sequenced with the care that durable knowledge needs — and it is where the knowledge the other commitments draw on is properly built. The five commitments that follow each carry a cluster of competencies. The Habits of Learning — how a person manages and steers their own learning — sit within Academics as well, because learning to learn belongs alongside learning itself.

Twenty-seven competencies in all, and beneath them sixty-seven learning targets — the plain "I can…" statements that say what a student is actually able to do. The competency is the broader capability; the learning target is the observable statement of what that capability looks like at a particular stage. Ecological Literacy is a competency; "I can describe a food chain and how change in one part affects others over time" is one of its learning targets. The evidence comes from the work itself — products, performances, conversations, observations and reflections. The targets are where teaching, practice and judgement meet the ground, and they are the working unit of everything that follows.

How a competency grows

No competency is something a student simply has or lacks; each one grows. We describe that growth as a progression across developmental bands, so the same capability can be recognised in a five-year-old and in a fourteen-year-old without pretending the two look the same. Ecological Literacy begins, for the youngest, as naming what lives in a patch of ground and the one thing each living thing needs; it grows, over the years, into comparing two habitats from collected data and being honest about the limits of one's method; and further still into drawing field evidence and scientific knowledge together to explain how an ecosystem changes over time. The capability is one thing throughout; what grows is its reach, its independence, and the demands it can meet.

REAL School runs, at present, from kindergarten to the end of grade eight — four bands, A to D. Each competency is written one step further, into bands E and F, so the progression is ready for the high school we mean to grow into, and so a teacher can see where a capability is heading before a child reaches it.

Not all of these capabilities grow in the same way, and that turns out to matter a great deal. Knowledge has to be built in a deliberate order, each secure step making the next one possible. A skill develops through practice, from halting to fluent. A disposition deepens only as it is lived — enacted across more, and more demanding, situations. Keeping these apart, and evidencing each as the kind of thing it actually is rather than forcing all three onto one scale, is the work of the sections on building knowledge and on assessment.

Naming the capabilities is where the work begins, not where it ends. The real question is how a child actually becomes capable — and for a school built on making real things in a real place, the answer is that you become capable by making them. That is the case for learning through projects, which the next section takes up.

3 · Why we learn through projects

You do not learn to build a beautiful world by reading about beautiful worlds. You learn it by building something real, for real people, and finding out where it works and where it fails. That is why D2R makes authentic project work the main work of learning rather than a supplement to it — not an activity that follows the "real" lessons, but the setting in which literacy, humanities, regeneration and entrepreneurial thinking become worth having in the first place.

There is good reason to organise learning this way. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead warned a century ago about inert ideas — knowledge a student can recite on Friday and never once put to use, knowledge connected to nothing and therefore quick to fade. Most of us can remember learning like that. Project work is the antidote: when a class is genuinely trying to cut the waste a building produces, or to design something a local group will actually use, the knowledge they need is knowledge they reach for and use — so it carries meaning, and meaningful knowledge is far harder to forget. The education researcher David Perkins makes the same case with a different image: that we should let children play "the whole game" rather than drilling its separate parts forever in the hope they will one day be assembled. You learn to write by writing for a reader, to design by designing for a user, to act regeneratively by taking real action in a real place.

What makes a D2R project different from ordinary project work

Project-based learning is not new, and much of what carries the name amounts to little — a poster at the end of a unit, a diorama that illustrates content the teacher could simply have explained. D2R is a more demanding thing, and the differences are deliberate.

In a conventional project, the project illustrates the content; in D2R, the content serves the project — students learn what they need in order to make something matter. Conventional projects tend to solve problems the teacher invented; D2R projects begin from a real problem or opportunity that exists independently of the school, usually identified with the community it affects, and they are designed to leave that community better off — at the least repairing part of a problem, at best shifting the system that caused it. And where a conventional project stops at a model, a proposal or a prototype, a D2R project builds the real thing. Students do not design a solution that someone else might one day make; they make it, and put it in front of the people it is for — the community, a public expo, a panel that decides. That is far harder and more ambitious, and it is exactly why the learning runs deeper: a real product, used by real people, tests a student's understanding in a way no mock-up ever can.

Many D2R projects carry one further commitment: stewardship. Where it makes sense, students plan a handoff so that what they built can keep improving after they have moved on — the step that lifts a project from a worthy one-off towards something genuinely regenerative. Not every project ends in a handoff; whether it can depends on what was made and whether anyone can carry it forward. But the question is always asked, because it is the question that separates impact that lasts from impact that fades.

The REAL criteria

Every D2R project is held to four standards, gathered in the word REAL.

Relevant. The project addresses a genuine problem or opportunity that exists independently of the school. Not a simulation, not a hypothetical: a real need that someone actually has. A class designing a quieter, calmer corner of a noisy building because the people who use it cannot concentrate is working on something relevant; a class designing an imaginary city is not.

Entrepreneurial. The project creates real value under real constraints — a working product, made within the limits of time, budget and materials, that has to function for the people it is for. Students make trade-offs and live with them. A product that looks impressive but does not actually work has not met the standard.

Art-filled. The work attends to craft, beauty, story and emotion, because beautiful work moves people and shoddy work does not, however worthy its intentions. Students are expected to care how a thing looks, reads and feels, not only whether it functions.

Lifelong. The project builds the capacity to set goals, monitor one's own progress, and act on feedback — the metacognitive habits that outlast any single piece of work and let a young person keep learning long after they leave us.

Not every project reaches the top of the Regeneration Ladder, and we do not pretend otherwise; a project may land as restorative rather than fully regenerative, or lean harder on one criterion than another. What does not flex is that the work is real, made for someone, made with care, and built to develop the maker as much as the product.

The honest limit

But there is a problem that project-based learning, done well, still struggles with, and naming it honestly is the only way to design against it.

Knowledge can fail a student in two different ways, and they are easily confused. The first is the inert knowledge above — knowledge that never gets used. Good project work is one strong answer to that one. The second is subtler, and it is the one projects are prone to: knowledge that works once, in the project where it was built, but does not transfer. A class can produce something genuinely impressive — a polished product, a confident expo presentation — while the understanding beneath it never really takes hold. The work looks like deep learning, and teacher and student alike can believe it has happened, when what has really happened is a strong performance on the day. Call it the illusion of fluency: smooth on the surface, hollow underneath. And because each project tends to live in its own world, what is learned in one rarely transfers to the next. Over a year a student can gather a fragment about food here and a fragment about a city there without ever building the connected understanding that lets them carry an idea from one situation into a genuinely new one — which is what transfer means, and what deep learning is for. The fragments never join into a whole.

This is not an argument against projects. It is an argument that projects alone are not enough — that the relevance and action which make D2R powerful do not, on their own, make knowledge stick and build. Something has to be added underneath: a deliberate way of deciding what knowledge a project should build, making sure it is the kind of knowledge projects can build well, and ensuring it accumulates across the years rather than scattering. That is the subject of the next section, and it is the part of the design that most distinguishes REAL School's project work from project work elsewhere.

4 · Building knowledge that lasts

To build knowledge that lasts, we have to understand two things most schools take for granted: how a piece of understanding grows from first contact to something a student can use freely, and how memory holds on to it — or loses it. Neither is obvious, and getting them wrong is how a great deal of teaching produces so little.

Start with how an idea or skill develops. It does not arrive all at once; it passes through stages, and researchers have mapped them in what is called the instructional hierarchy (Haring and colleagues, 1978). Take something we genuinely teach: mapping a system — drawing out the parts of, say, a food system and the ways they affect one another. At first, in the acquisition stage, a student can do it only with help and only haltingly: they pick out a few parts, draw a few arrows, get some wrong, and need prompting. With practice they reach fluency — they map a familiar system on their own, accurately and without much effort. Later comes generalisation, the stage that matters most: they meet a system they have never seen before, an economy or a city's transport network, recognise it as a system, and bring the same thinking to bear. At the far end is adaptation: they reshape the tool for a genuinely new and messy situation, combine it with other ideas, or can explain why it works. Generalisation and adaptation are what we mean by transfer — using what you know in a situation that looks nothing like the one you learned it in — and transfer, as Section 3 showed, is exactly what project work struggles to produce. A student who meets an idea only once, which is all a single project gives them, gets stuck near the bottom of this hierarchy: they have acquired the idea but cannot yet use it freely, and — for the reason we come to next — they will lose it.

That reason is the one schools most often miss, so it is worth being clear about. Knowledge is not something a student simply "has" in the abstract; to know something is to be able to bring it back to mind when it is needed. Knowledge, in other words, lives in memory, and a thing that cannot be recalled is, for all practical purposes, not known. Building knowledge is therefore the work of getting things to lodge in long-term memory and stay reachable. And here is the difficulty: forgetting is the brain's default setting. Unless a memory is used, it fades and grows harder to reach — this happens to everyone, after even the best lesson, and faster than most people expect. A class can understand something perfectly on Tuesday and have lost most of it within a month. Teaching that does not plan for forgetting is planning to be forgotten.

Three well-evidenced practices push back against the fade. None is complicated, and each works for a reason worth knowing. The first is retrieval: having students bring something back from memory — "what do we already know about soil?" — rather than re-reading their notes. The act of recalling is itself what strengthens the memory; reaching for something makes it easier to reach for next time, in a way that passively reviewing it never does. The second is spacing: returning to something after a gap of days or weeks rather than going over it again and again in one sitting. The gap is the point — coming back to something you have half-forgotten makes recall effortful, and that effort is what consolidates it. Cramming feels productive and lasts far less. The third is interleaving: meeting the same idea inside different topics rather than in one unbroken block — the idea of a system met first in a food chain, then again in an economy, then in a city. Mixing contexts forces a student to notice which idea applies and to retrieve it afresh each time, and that is what builds knowledge flexible enough to transfer, rather than knowledge welded to the single example it was learned with. Retrieval and spacing are among the most reliable tools we have for durable learning; interleaving in particular strengthens the ability to apply knowledge, not merely recall it (Dunlosky and colleagues; Rohrer and Taylor).

This also explains a choice that can look surprising in a project school: we do not simply turn students loose to "discover" knowledge for themselves. It sounds appealing, but for a beginner it works poorly, for a precise reason — a novice does not yet know enough to steer their own search, so they flounder and overload. For novices especially, explicit teaching followed by guided practice is usually a better route than minimal guidance, because beginners do not yet know enough to steer their own search well (Kirschner, Sweller and Clark). And there is no shortcut around the content itself. We sometimes hope students are absorbing general "skills" — critical thinking, problem-solving — that will work anywhere; they are not. Thinking critically in history is mostly a matter of knowing a great deal of history, and it does not carry over to thinking critically about ecosystems (Tricot and Sweller). Skill is built on knowledge, not instead of it.

Not all knowledge is the same kind

There is a complication the account so far has set aside, and it decides what projects can and cannot do. Knowledge is not all of one kind, and each kind is best built differently.

Some knowledge is hierarchical: it has a genuine prerequisite order, where you cannot understand the next thing until you have understood the one before. Most of mathematics is like this — you cannot grasp ratio without first securing multiplication and division. Hierarchical knowledge has to be built in a careful, fixed sequence, one secure step at a time, and that is precisely what a project cannot supply on demand: a project follows the logic of its problem, not the logic of the ladder. This is why D2R does not try to build mathematical knowledge. It can offer real occasions to apply the maths a student already has — a budget, a set of measurements, a scale drawing — and that application is valuable. But the building of hierarchical knowledge belongs in its own properly sequenced block, and at REAL School maths is handled exactly that way. Hoping a project will teach the ladder is a reliable way to leave holes.

Other knowledge is horizontal: it has no fixed ladder. The same move — weighing evidence, reading a system, judging what is fair — is met again and again, applied each time to wider and subtler territory, deepening not because it sits one rung higher but because it has been met in more places. Most of the humanities, and most regenerative thinking, is knowledge of this kind. It is what D2R and the Regeneration course are built to develop, and it grows well in projects — so long as it is deliberately sequenced and interleaved rather than left to chance.

A third kind is dispositional: qualities like care, self-regulation and perseverance that are not really known at all but lived — they exist only as they are enacted, and they grow by being practised over time, across many situations. These too develop well in the thick of real work, though they are recognised and nurtured rather than taught as content, and they are evidenced quite differently — the subject of Section 10.

Keeping these three kinds apart is what lets us put each where it belongs: maths in its sequenced block; horizontal humanities and regeneration knowledge in D2R and the Regeneration course; dispositions grown across all of it. The rest of this section is about the second kind — the horizontal knowledge that is D2R's particular charge — and how to make it accumulate.

Knowledge, Understanding and Doing

To plan that deliberately, we describe what students learn in three parts. Knowledge is the content — the actual material of a topic: the course of the Danube, what changed when farming was mechanised, the journey a tomato takes to a Budapest market. Understanding is the concepts — the bigger, portable ideas we use to make sense of that content: system, power, trade-off, change over time. Doing is the disciplinary skills our Learning Targets describe — analysing what caused something, building an argument, mapping a place.

Content and concepts need each other, and neither works alone. A concept with no content is empty: "power" means nothing until it is the power of a particular government over particular people. Content with no concept to organise it is the inert knowledge of Section 3 — a string of facts that adds up to nothing usable. The content is the material; the concept is what turns the material into understanding.

And concepts are what let knowledge accumulate. Because a concept is portable, every time a student meets it in a new context it can deepen. A student who studies power in the governance of a river, and meets it again in who gets displaced when a city is rebuilt, understands power more fully the second time — even though the two topics share no content at all. Content varies from project to project; the concept is the thread that runs through them and grows stronger. In a subject like history or geography you cannot lay content out in a strict ladder the way you can in maths — but you can plan the concepts to recur. The concept, not the content, is the unit that carries coherence across a project-based curriculum (Rata).

Planning the knowledge deliberately

The weak version of project design lets the knowledge be whatever the activity happens to leave behind: choose an appealing project, run it, and see what students picked up along the way. We work differently. The project's focus and purpose still come first — that is what makes the work matter. But once the focus is set, we plan the knowledge the project will build straight away, before designing the activities, and we make sure that knowledge lines up with the project's goals and its Learning Targets. The knowledge is chosen deliberately and early, not gathered by accident.

There is a reason it cannot be left to whichever projects happen to come up. A learner cannot see the gaps in their own knowledge — by definition, you do not know what you do not know. A child who has never encountered the idea that food systems have a history cannot ask to learn it; the gap is invisible to them, and invisible to a project too, if no one planned for it. Only a curriculum mapped out in advance can name what students do not yet know and make sure they meet it across the years. That is the case for planning the knowledge deliberately — not to constrain teachers, but to fill the gaps no one would otherwise notice.

How far in advance the knowledge is mapped does shift with age, and the commitment bends without breaking. For the youngest children, whose learning is emergent and led by what genuinely catches them, the teacher plans the conditions richly but lets much of the specific knowledge be met in the moment, recording what is built rather than steering to a fixed list — the approach Sections 5 and 7 describe. The deliberate, mapped-in-advance planning set out here is the upper-school end of that same commitment: the older the students, the more the knowledge can and should be sequenced before the work begins. What holds at every age is that knowledge is never left to be whatever an activity happens to leave behind.

The concepts we keep coming back to

If concepts are the thread, the next question is which ones. Our humanities span six areas — history, geography, civics, economics, culture, and technology-and-society — and each has its own important ideas. But looking across all six, a handful turn up again and again, area after area, and these are the ones we return to on purpose. They are not the only things students learn; they are the spine we make sure comes back, year after year, in new contexts.

Power — who decides, who benefits, and who is left out, whether in a government, an economy or a culture.

Systems — how the parts of something connect, so that a change in one part shifts another.

Change over time — how things came to be as they are: what caused them, what held, and what shifted.

Trade-offs & scarcity — there is never enough of everything, so every choice gives something up.

Evidence & perspective — how we know what we claim, and whose account gets heard or left out.

Fairness & equity — who is treated justly, and what a fair arrangement would actually require.

These six are what hold a project-based curriculum together. Without them, the danger in a curriculum like ours is what one might call Swiss-cheese knowledge: a great many interesting fragments, with holes where the connecting understanding should be. A project on food and a project on a city can each go well and still leave a student unable to see what they have in common. The answer is to plan the same core concepts to recur deliberately across projects — system in the food project and again in the economy, power in a question of governance and again in the life of a city — so that the concepts become the connective tissue the fragments lack. The content can still be chosen for its relevance and for Budapest; coherence is carried underneath by the concepts returning and deepening (Rata). This is the difference between hoping knowledge will join up and planning it to.

Why so much of this runs through the humanities

So much of this knowledge work runs through the humanities — history, geography, civics, economics, culture — for three reasons.

The first is the world our students are growing into. As we saw at the outset, artificial intelligence is taking over more and more technical and routine thinking; the judgement that stays distinctly human, and hardest to automate, is judgement about people and societies — why people act as they do, how communities change, what is fair, whose story is being told. A school preparing children for that world should lean into the human disciplines, not treat them as decoration around the sciences.

The second is reading. The single biggest factor in whether a student understands a text is not a general "comprehension skill" but how much they already know about its subject — a child reads a passage about farming far better if they already know something about farming (Hirsch; Willingham). Broad knowledge of the human world is what makes reading work, and the humanities are where that breadth is built.

The third is community. Shared knowledge — of history, of how societies work, of one another's cultures — is what lets people understand each other and act together as citizens (Young). In a school of some twenty-five nationalities, that common ground cannot be assumed; it has to be built, and the humanities are where we build it.

Bringing knowledge back

One practical thing remains, because even well-built, well-connected knowledge fades if it is never revisited, and ordinary lesson time is poor at the particular job of returning to something lightly, again and again, over months. So the design leans on simple technology for exactly that. Once a concept or body of knowledge has been taught and used, lightweight spaced-retrieval routines — short written recalls, oral retrieval, concept maps, low-stakes quizzes, and flashcards where they fit — return it to students outside project hours, spaced over weeks, so it consolidates instead of slipping away (Dunlosky and colleagues; Rohrer and Taylor). The project builds the knowledge and puts it to work; the tool keeps it from fading. The technology is deliberately minor: it does the one thing classrooms do badly, and nothing more.

This is the architecture beneath the projects — horizontal knowledge, chosen in advance, organised by concepts planned to recur, taught explicitly and brought back deliberately, so that it accumulates rather than scatters. It answers the limit named in Section 3 without giving up anything that makes D2R worth doing. What it raises is a question of structure: if knowledge must be built this carefully, where exactly does the building happen, and how is the work divided between D2R and the courses that run alongside it? That is the subject of the next section.

5 · How the parts fit together

If knowledge has to be built as deliberately as the last section argued, then the D2R block cannot do all the work alone — and at REAL School it does not. D2R is the major scheduled programme block for project work. It is supported by a small number of companion courses, especially Regeneration. What decides which learning is woven into the project work and which keeps its own course is not habit or timetable convenience; it is the kind of knowledge involved.

What is woven in, and what stays separate

Horizontal knowledge — the humanities, regenerative thinking and most entrepreneurial understanding, all of which deepen by being met in more and wider contexts — is woven through D2R and its companion Regeneration course, for two reasons. The first is where Section 3 began: knowledge used in the service of real work is knowledge that means something, and so is far likelier to last than the same material handed over for its own sake. The second is from Section 4: horizontal knowledge grows precisely by being applied across varied situations, which is exactly what a sequence of real projects provides. So the humanities and entrepreneurship are not separate subjects taught alongside D2R; they live inside the D2R block, where they are both built and used. Regeneration is slightly different: it has its own complementary course, because much of that understanding needs more deliberate time to build, and then D2R puts it to work.

Hierarchical knowledge is different, and we treat it differently. Subjects that have to be built in a strict prerequisite order — maths, science, music, the acquisition of a new language — cannot be assembled by a project, which follows the logic of its problem rather than the logic of the ladder. These keep their own dedicated, sequenced courses, where each step is secured before the next. D2R offers real occasions to apply them — a budget, a measurement, a piece of writing in a new language — but it does not try to build them. That distinction matters. D2R is not where maths and science are secretly taught through projects; it is where students may use some of what those courses have already built. Hoping a project will teach the ladder is a reliable way to leave holes.

That one distinction — weave the horizontal, sequence the hierarchical — runs through the whole design.

Regeneration builds; D2R puts to work

The Regeneration course is where much of the regenerative understanding is built. It is the home of the knowledge spine — the concepts and content of regenerative thinking, held in close relationship with the humanities — taught with the time and the sequence that careful knowledge-building needs, in a way a project on its own cannot provide. Students read, observe, discuss and write reasoned positions about how systems work and how they can be restored.

D2R is where that understanding is put to work — and where knowledge of its own is built: the entrepreneurial, humanities and literacy knowledge that grows through doing serious work for a real audience, such as spotting a real opportunity, testing an idea against the people it is for, researching a place or community, writing for a purpose, working within a budget, and making trade-offs and living with them. Students take what they built in Regeneration and use it to make something real, for a real audience, and — where it fits — to steward it onward. They study the ecology and history of a food system in Regeneration, then draw on exactly that to design and build a food-system intervention in D2R. The understanding is built where there is time to build it properly, and used — and extended — where it becomes real.

D2R is not the only place knowledge is built; a project's deep immersion in a real problem teaches a great deal. But immersion alone cannot do the careful, sequenced building that makes knowledge accumulate across a year, which is why Regeneration carries the main load and D2R draws on it. The two also share one piece of language — the Regeneration Ladder of Section 1 — used to weigh real-world examples in Regeneration and the impact of projects in D2R. When a student calls something "restorative but not yet regenerative" in both courses, the idea has genuinely transferred from one to the other.

Humanities: woven, not a separate subject

The humanities — history, geography, civics, economics, culture, technology-and-society — are not taught here as a standalone subject. They are woven through the two project courses, anchored in real questions: the history of a food system as students work on it, the civics of a city as they intervene in it.

This is a real trade-off, and worth being honest about. A separate, tightly sequenced humanities course would build that knowledge in a cleaner order, one topic logically after another. Weaving it through projects gives something up in that respect — and risks exactly the Swiss-cheese scattering Section 4 warned of — in exchange for relevance, real questions, and knowledge a student actually uses. What makes the trade worth taking, especially in the primary and middle years where a strict subject order matters less than it will later, is the concept spine. Because coherence is carried by the six concepts returning across projects rather than by a fixed march through content, the humanities can be spread across the work and still add up — so long as those concepts keep coming back.

That is not left to chance. The map below shows where each of the six concepts recurs across the humanities areas, so that planning can make sure a student meets each one repeatedly, in genuinely different content, as the years go on.

Literacy: built through the work, sharpened in the block

Much of literacy is built through D2R, because reading, writing and speaking are strongest when there is something real they are doing them for. This does not mean literacy is left to chance or treated as merely instrumental. It means that the most important writing and speaking often happens inside real work: a proposal a panel will judge, a stakeholder interview, a critique session, a public exhibition, a guide someone else will actually use. Within D2R and the Regeneration course, students read to build genuine comprehension, working through texts that serve the project — a piece on how farming has changed, a story of belonging in a changing city — and they write and speak for real purposes and audiences: a proposal a panel will judge, a stakeholder interview, a critique session, the expo. Reading comprehension, writing and oracy are all built here, in the thick of the work, and D2R carries roughly sixty per cent of the school's writing and speaking load.

The Literacy block does something narrower and complementary. It gives focused, dedicated time to the mechanics and craft of writing, contextualised by the very texts students have been reading for their projects. Rather than introducing new passages or drilling grammar in isolation, the teacher takes a text the class already knows and works from it — how its sentences are built, how it is punctuated, how its argument or narrative is shaped — and has students write from there, with grammar taught as a writer's choice inside real, familiar sentences. Some reading will always happen in the block too; it simply is not where the bulk of reading lives. Daily silent reading rounds this out, and the standing commitment across all of it is at least one whole book a year, with shorter texts throughout. Working from known texts carries a further benefit in a school like ours: it gives our many English-as-an-additional-language learners a second, meaningful encounter with the same language in a new setting.

Smart technology

From Fire Dragons onward, students also develop their smart-technology and digital capabilities — evaluating information, digital making, and the careful, attributed use of AI tools. In the lower years this is embedded in the work rather than taught as separate lessons; in the upper years it becomes more explicit. A coherent scope and sequence for these capabilities across the learning groups — which are introduced when, and whether in D2R, Regeneration, or both — is in development, and not yet settled enough to lay out here. That unsettledness should be visible rather than hidden: the commitment is firm, but the exact sequence still needs to be tested and made usable for teachers.

Where each domain is built and assessed

Across the project work, the picture is this:

Two things stand out. The four domains that anchor every D2R project — Entrepreneurship, Regeneration, Humanities and Literacy — are all assessed in the project work itself, because that is where students use them. And two of them, Regeneration and Literacy, are double-homed: each is also built and assessed in a companion course, which is what lets a project draw on understanding that was properly built elsewhere. The sequenced academic subjects — maths, science, music, language acquisition — sit outside this picture by design: they run in their own courses, and D2R draws on them rather than building them.

Rooted in Budapest

One feature runs through all of it. D2R projects are not set in the abstract; they are rooted in Budapest — its rivers and markets, its communities and histories, its institutions and its problems. Students work on things they can walk to, people they can meet, and systems they can see for themselves. Place is what makes the problems real, the audiences reachable, and the knowledge worth building, and it is the ground the whole programme stands on.

So the parts fit together as a division of labour: Regeneration builds the understanding, D2R puts it to work and makes it real, the Literacy block sharpens the writing, and the sequenced subjects hold their own ground — with the humanities woven through and the concepts holding it together. But a division of labour describes the structure flat, as though it were the same for every child. It is not. A five-year-old and a fourteen-year-old are not at different points on one ladder; they are living different realities, and the programme has to be built around that. How it grows with the child is the next section.

6 · The developmental journey: a programme that grows with the child

A division of labour, set out as Section 5 set it out, describes the programme as though it were one fixed thing delivered to everyone. It is not. The most important fact about teaching a five-year-old and a fourteen-year-old is that they are not at different points on the same ladder — they are living different realities, and a programme that ignores that will fail the youngest, the oldest, or both. To see why D2R has to change shape across the school, it helps to be clear about how children actually develop.

Start with the body, because schools routinely forget it. Thinking, feeling and learning are not activities of the brain alone; they are activities of the whole person — sensed, felt and moved through, not merely processed (Claxton and Poel; Immordino-Yang and Damasio). This is true at every age, but for the youngest it is nearly the whole of how they learn. A five-year-old understands the world by handling it: by touching, moving, making, playing, feeling their way into things long before they can reason about them in the abstract. Their grasp of the living world, met directly through the senses, can be more vivid than an adult's. Learning for them is bodily and emotional first, and it happens above all through relationship — through warm, attuned adults and the safety to explore. A curriculum for young children that works from the neck up, in words and worksheets, is working against the grain of how they learn.

Alongside this runs a second, slower change. The capacity to hold abstract ideas in mind — to reason about systems, to weigh trade-offs, to consider how things might be rather than only how they are, to hold several perspectives at once — is not there from the start. It develops gradually through childhood and well into adolescence, as working memory grows and the brain's executive functions mature. Young children reason most surely about the concrete, the immediate and the tangible; the abstract and the hypothetical come later, and unevenly. This is why a six-year-old can care fiercely for one particular tree while making little of "the ecosystem", and why a fourteen-year-old can argue about justice in a supply chain they will never see. The movement is from the concrete and sensory, through a transitional middle, towards the genuinely abstract and systemic — and it cannot be rushed, only met and stretched.

Two consequences follow, and together they are why different approaches across the school are both necessary and possible. The first concerns what knowledge a child can build: the youngest work with what they can see, touch and care for, while older students can reason about systems they can only model — so the same concept, whether a system or fairness or change over time, is met first in something concrete and only much later in something abstract. The second concerns how much of the work a child can drive: the youngest need learning woven into the rhythm of the day, emergent and richly supported by adults; as children mature they can take on more structure, more sustained effort, and steadily more direction of their own, until the oldest can carry a year-long undertaking largely by themselves. A programme that asked a six-year-old to map an economy would fail; so would one that asked a fourteen-year-old only to wonder at a pond. The craft is to meet each child where they are, and to stretch them from there.

One feature holds steady beneath all this change. At every age students have real choices within the bounds the work sets — what to make, how to make it, which problem to pursue and how. What grows as they move up is the structure and the rigour around those choices, not the extent to which the work is someone else's: the oldest students, working in the most demanding and most structured way, drive more of the planning, making and critique themselves, not less. What shifts across the years is the balance between structure and freedom — never whether the work is the student's own.

REAL School organises this growth into developmental bands, A to D, and into the learning groups — the Dragons — that move through them. The table sets out the journey at a glance; the next section shows how the work itself is shaped at each stage.

What this developmental arc demands of D2R is a process that can itself change shape — emergent and embedded for the youngest, structured and explicit for the middle years, largely self-directed for the oldest. REAL School uses two such processes for exactly this reason. The next section explains what each one is, how they differ, and how the work takes a different form in each learning group.

7 · The two D2R processes: SEEDS and the Builder Process

Every D2R project follows a process — a sequence of stages a project moves through, from first understanding a problem to making something that makes a real difference, sharing it, and, where it can, seeing that difference last. The process is not there to constrain a teacher's or a student's creativity; it is there to ensure rigour, so that a project genuinely builds knowledge, reaches a real product, and produces an impact worth the name rather than a display. But for the reasons Section 6 set out, one fixed sequence cannot serve a five-year-old and a fourteen-year-old. So REAL School uses two processes, matched to developmental stage: SEEDS, for Water and Air Dragons, and the Builder Process, for Earth, Fire, Metal and Light Dragons. Both aim at the same thing — real regenerative impact that, wherever it can, is built to last — and they differ in their structure, their pace, and how much of the work the children themselves direct.

SEEDS: the youngest children

For the youngest, the process is SEEDS — five stages that unfold not as weeks but as seasons across a whole year, rooted in the outdoor learning area the lower school is given to know and care for.

Sense. The children attune to their place: they observe, handle, wonder, and build a relationship with what is alive around them. What is here? What has changed since the autumn? What keeps catching their attention? This stage is unhurried by design — it can take a whole term — because everything that follows grows from what the children genuinely notice.

Envision. Wondering turns into possibility. The children begin to imagine how something could be better, and to ask "what if?" — what if we could help the frogs, look after this corner, make this place kinder?

Experiment. They try things: making, planting, building, testing, and adapting when something does not work. Failure is part of it, and so is the discovery that effort changes things.

Design to Last. This is where stewardship lives for the youngest. The children turn to the question that runs through the whole programme — who will look after this? — and create simple routines of care, teaching others and preparing to hand the work on so the difference they have made continues.

Share. They tell the story and celebrate it, showing others what they did, what they noticed, and what they are proud of.

SEEDS is cyclical, not linear. The stages overlap and loop back, and Share connects round to Sense as a new question opens. And although it follows the children's genuine interests, it is not unplanned: the teacher plans the conditions carefully, offers provocations, watches closely, documents what emerges, and makes deliberate choices about where to take the inquiry next. Assessment fits the age too — it is built from a teacher's close observation and documentation of how children are growing, rather than from marked products, as Section 10 describes. Across the two Air Dragon years, returning children take on more: leading observation walks, teaching newcomers the routines, going deeper into the same place.

The Builder Process: from Earth Dragons upward

From Earth Dragons on, students follow a more structured process — the Builder Process, whose seven stages run Immerse → Dream → Plan → Do → Re-Do → Share → Steward. It is more explicit than SEEDS, more staged, and increasingly driven by the students themselves as they move up the school. It is a rigorous, regeneration-bent version of the design-and-build process behind serious product development everywhere.

Immerse. Students get to know the real problem — and, where it makes sense, the system that holds that problem in place — through excursions, meeting the people affected, and observing how things actually work. Here they begin building the foundational knowledge the project needs, and study what quality looks like by examining strong, average and weak examples and working out together what separates them. The driving question takes shape by the end of this stage. Immerse is where knowledge-building starts, but not where it stops: rather than front-loading everything at the beginning, the project keeps building and deepening knowledge as the need arises — and much of the underpinning understanding is built in parallel in the Regeneration course, as Section 5 described.

Dream. Before settling on anything, students generate many possibilities — asking "how might we?", thinking widely, drawing where useful on how nature solves similar problems.

Plan. They turn a chosen idea into a workable plan: roles, a timeline, the resources and constraints, and an honest look at what might go wrong.

Do. They build, make and produce — prototyping, testing, and picking up the specific skills and knowledge they need just as the need arises.

Re-Do. This is the stage most schooling skips, and it is where quality is made. Work goes through cycles of critique and expert feedback, measured against the success criteria the class built in Immerse — feedback tied to explicit, shared criteria rather than to opinion — and students revise through multiple drafts, attending to craft and beauty rather than settling for a first attempt.

Share. The work meets a real audience: an expo, an exhibition, a panel, with genuine questions from people who care about the outcome.

Steward. Most project work ends at the applause. D2R does not. In Steward, students see that the work continues — naming who will carry it on, creating what is needed to hand it over, establishing routines of care — and reflect on what they have learned and who they are becoming. This is the stage that makes a project regenerative rather than a one-off, and, with Share's authentic audience, it is what most sets the process apart from ordinary project work.

Two things hold across all seven stages. First, knowledge-building and reflection are not confined to single stages — they run throughout. Immerse opens the knowledge-building and Steward draws the reflection to a close, but a project keeps building and revisiting knowledge at every stage, interleaving it as Section 4 argued and leaning on the Regeneration course for much of the rest. Second, a project of this kind typically runs across a term: the early weeks in Immerse, a short Dream and Plan, the bulk of the time in Do and Re-Do, and the final weeks in Share and Steward.

How the Builder Process is shaped from Earth Dragons to Light Dragons

The same seven stages are run very differently across four years of growing maturity.

In Earth Dragons, the process is taught as much as used. This is the transition Section 6 described — the point, around ages nine and ten, where children become ready for multi-week planning, self-assessment against criteria, structured critique and stewardship thinking. So each stage is made explicit and heavily scaffolded: the teacher shows what "Immerse" or "Re-Do" means and what good work looks like at each step. Projects run a term, stay concrete and rooted in a nearby place, and are designed afresh each year by the Lower School team so they can follow the children and the place.

In Fire Dragons, the process runs in earnest. Students have the maturity to carry the full process, and the six projects across the two-year rotation are pre-designed to build knowledge deliberately, with each student individually accountable for their own learning targets even as they work in teams.

In Metal Dragons, the same process carries more abstraction and more independence: students drive more of the planning, the making and the critique themselves, across three substantial projects in the year.

In Light Dragons, the seven stages stretch across an entire year and are largely handed to the students. The Regenerative Action Project is the Builder Process at its most ambitious and most self-directed. Across three terms, students find a real problem in the city and plan a response (Immerse, Dream, Plan), build and put it into action and improve it (Do, Re-Do), and then, in the final term, share it and hand it on (Share, Steward): they assess honestly what their work actually achieved — in an impact assessment, or, where a project did not succeed, a failure analysis held to the same standard — give a TED-style public talk to parents, community members and invited guests, and formally hand the project over to those who will carry it forward. It is the point at which the process becomes wholly the student's own.

Where quality comes from

The quality of D2R work does not come from the first attempt; it comes from iteration — from the Re-Do cycles of the Builder Process and the try-and-adapt of SEEDS' Experiment, from critique that is kind but honest and tied to clear criteria, from expert eyes, and from the expectation that good work is redrafted rather than handed in once. To keep this manageable and focused, each project gathers its learning into a small number of summative products — usually two — against which it is assessed; how that assessment works is the subject of Section 10.

That is the engine and the shape of the work. What it does not yet show is the work itself — the work itself as students move up the school — what they actually do at each stage, and what it is built to develop. The next two sections set this out, beginning with the lower school.

8 · The lower school: the roots of the work

The work itself begins long before children can plan a project or weigh evidence. It begins with a five-year-old crouched over a patch of earth, turning a leaf to see what lives beneath it. For the youngest this is not preparation for real work later; it is the real work, in the form their development makes possible — and getting it right matters as much as anything in the years above.

At this age the work is more child-based than project-based. The project is still the vehicle — the children still make real things and act in a real place — but the children, not the plan, are the centre. What drives the learning is a genuine connection to the work: the sense that it is theirs, that it is safe to try, that what they think matters. When that connection is there, the usual blocks fall away, and children who are otherwise hesitant will talk, make and share without being asked. When it is missing, no amount of structure supplies it. The first task of the teacher, then, is not to deliver a plan but to create the conditions in which that connection can form.

This shapes how a teacher plans. At the start of the year the plan is a loose, directional vision — a theme for the term and a sense of where it might lead — rather than a detailed scheme of work, because a fixed scheme written before you know the particular children is largely wasted at this age: the planning that pays off is planning the conditions, not the outcomes. The teacher then follows the children's energy, offering provocations, watching closely, and steering the inquiry towards what genuinely catches them — letting a planned strand go when it finds no purchase and taking up one the children seize on. The plan is real; it is simply held lightly and adapts to the children as the teacher comes to know them. This is how the youngest learn, as Section 6 set out — through the body and the senses, in relationship and in play — and it is why, at this age, knowledge is met in the moment rather than marched through in advance.

For Water and Air Dragons the work takes the shape of the SEEDS cycle described in Section 7: the children sense their place, envision how it could be better, experiment by making and trying, design ways for their care to last, and share what they did. This is real making, not rehearsal. Guided closely by adults, they do real regenerative work at the scale their age allows — rewilding a pond, planting perennials, growing food, helping a habitat recover — work with real impact on their place, tended so the good carries on after them. They make real things to carry the story too, from a told tale to a simple guide for the children who come next. And the impact does not always stop at the school gate: when children are gripped by what they are doing they carry it home, and families have taken up growing, fermenting and baking after a child first met it in the classroom.

What this grows is not yet "systems thinking" or "entrepreneurship" by name, but their living roots. Children who care fiercely for one particular tree are beginning to understand a system through the thing in front of them. A child who notices that something is wrong and does something about it is taking the first act of the agency the whole programme rests on. In Design to Last — who will look after this? — the stewardship that defines regeneration is there from the very start. Language grows the same way, through making rather than before it: a child with little English who builds something they are proud of finds a domain where words are not the barrier, and the pride in the work creates the wish to tell someone about it, so the language follows the desire to communicate rather than being demanded ahead of it. The aim is to bring children to the point of wanting to talk, not the obligation to.

Because the children lead, assessment here is led by observation rather than by a march through a checklist. There is a plan, but the teacher does not steer each child towards a fixed list of targets; they notice and record which competencies and dispositions are met as they are met, in the course of work the children genuinely care about. This fits both the age and what matters most at it, and the fuller account of how it works sits in Section 10.

Around the ages of eight to ten, children become ready for something the youngest cannot yet hold: work that runs over weeks, with a plan, a standard to meet, and a deliberate handover at the end. Earth Dragons is the bridge into it. The more formal structure that begins here is not introduced because the younger approach is lesser, but because the children are now ready for it and are, increasingly, held back without it — older children who can plan, work to a standard and carry a project through gain something real from being shown how. The process changes with them, from the seasonal, emergent rhythm of SEEDS to the staged Builder Process; how that is taught and scaffolded is set out in Section 7. What matters here is the principle: the rigour is not imposed from outside but grown into, met first in the most concrete form a young child can hold and returned to, year on year, in steadily more demanding and more independent work. The structured projects of the upper school, which the next section sets out, take that journey up where the lower school leaves it.

9 · The upper school projects

By the upper school, Dream-to-Reality work takes its mature form. Each student spends the year on real problems in Budapest, and each project ends in something made, shown to people who matter, and left behind in better shape than it was found.

Two commitments hold across every project. The first is that the work builds regenerative entrepreneurship — the habit of noticing a real need, building something that meets it, and caring for what happens after the work is handed over. The second is that students learn to carry that work to people who are not in the room: to research, write, present, and persuade for a real audience. Every summative product is held to the standard the rest of this handbook sets: it answers a genuine problem rather than an invented one, and it sets out to leave the people and places it touches better off. These are not exercises that stand in for real work later; the work is real now, at the scale a young person can reach.

Students have wide latitude inside each project. Which part of the problem to take on, what to make, how to investigate it, and how to bring it to an audience are theirs to decide. The project sets the territory and the purpose; the decisions that shape the work belong to the students. We think of this as agency within purposeful constraint — the kind of freedom that produces real value rather than busywork.

The whole map sits here before the detail:

Fire Dragons run on a two-year cycle. The class holds two year-groups at once, and the projects alternate between a Year A set and a Year B set, so a student meets one set in their first year and the other in their second and never repeats a project. System Stewards is the deliberate exception: it runs every Term 1, because it is built to be inherited and extended from one year to the next, as the project below describes. Metal Dragons work three projects across a single year. Light Dragons give the whole year to one capstone project, the Regenerative Action Project, which closes this section.

The shape of the year. Within each Fire Dragons and Metal Dragons year, the three projects move through three lenses in turn, and the order is deliberate. The first project examines regeneration through the living world — the flows of energy, water, waste, and food, and the limits the natural world sets on them. The second turns to value and enterprise — what people need, what things cost, who benefits, and whether something can be built that creates value without doing harm elsewhere. The third comes at it through people and society — fairness, power, culture, and the rules and relationships that shape how we live together. The commitment to leaving things better runs through all three; what changes is the vantage point from which students examine it. By the end of a year a student has reasoned about regeneration ecologically, economically, and socially, rather than from a single angle.

The idea underneath: the doughnut. Across the upper school we lean on a simple picture, drawn from the economist Kate Raworth. Imagine a doughnut. The hole in the middle marks the line below which people's basic needs go unmet — food, shelter, safety, dignity. The outer edge marks the line beyond which we take more from the living world than it can replace. The safe and fair place to live, and to build anything, is the ring between the two: meeting human needs without overshooting the planet. When students ask whether something is worth making, or whether a system is working, this is the test they return to.

What each project develops. Every project draws together four kinds of learning: regeneration, entrepreneurship, the humanities — how people, places, and societies work — and literacy, the craft of reading, writing, and speaking with purpose. Rather than touch all four lightly, each project concentrates on the handful of skills its real work genuinely demands: the ones a student must use to research the problem, build the product, and present it well. Those are the skills the project sets out to develop and to assess. The table within each project names them, alongside the exact statement of what a student at this stage is working to be able to do.

Each project below opens with the question that drives it, then sets out what the project is and why it matters, the summative products students make, and the learning each product develops.

Fire Dragons (UK Years 6–7, US Grades 5–6)

System Stewards

Term 1 · ecological lens · runs every year

Driving question: How do we improve the living systems our school runs on, and pass them on better than we found them?

The school runs on living systems — the way it uses water and energy, the way it handles waste, the way food reaches and leaves the kitchen. System Stewards makes those systems the thing students study and the thing they act on, so that the building stops being a backdrop and becomes a set of flows they can map, improve, and keep improving.

The project runs as a cycle. Fire Dragons is a multi-age class, and System Stewards opens each year with the experienced students teaching the newer ones the system they built and have maintained since the year before. This is how the younger students first meet the idea of a system at all — through something real that already works and that someone is accountable for. The class then audits that system together, finds the problems that have surfaced or were never solved, designs and builds an improvement, and takes responsibility for keeping it alive. Because each group inherits and extends the last one's work, the systems compound from year to year rather than starting over — the difference between a project that ends at the expo and one that leaves the school permanently better.

The first summative product is a system map and intervention proposal: students choose a system, map its parts, flows, and feedback loops, find the point where a change would do the most good, and argue for a specific intervention from the evidence they have gathered. The second summative product is the built improvement together with its stewardship record — the instructions, measures, and named responsibilities that let the next group run and extend it. That record is also what the next year's experienced students teach from, which is why its quality matters beyond the life of the project.

Hearts & Hands

Term 2 · economic lens · Year A

Driving question: Can we make something of real value that helps a cause we care about?

Hearts & Hands is social entrepreneurship at its most direct. Students find a real need in their community and a cause worth serving, make a product or service from low-cost materials, and run a campaign to gather support for it. The lesson at its centre is that value is something you create for other people, under real limits of money, materials, and time — and that a good idea is worth only as much as your ability to bring others to it.

The first summative product is the product or service itself, made within a tight materials budget, together with the financial record that shows what it cost and what it returned. The second summative product is a fundraising pitch and campaign for the chosen cause, taken to a real audience whose response decides whether the work succeeds.

PEACE by Design

Term 3 · social lens · Year A

Driving question: How does conflict arise, and how can story help us repair it?

PEACE by Design approaches conflict and repair through story, and takes its name from the school's values — Passion, Equity, Authenticity, Care, and Excellence — which the work asks students to practise rather than recite. Students learn how conflict begins and how it can be resolved, drawing on restorative practices — approaches that focus on repairing harm and relationships rather than assigning blame. They turn that learning into something the class can use, and into stories that help younger readers understand conflict and the work of mending it.

The first summative product is an illustrated story anthology written for a younger audience, carrying real characters through conflict and toward repair. The second summative product is a restorative-practice playbook that the class adopts and actually uses when conflict arises.

Leave It Better

Term 2 · economic lens · Year B

Driving question: Can we plan and fund an expedition that leaves a wild place better than we found it?

Leave It Better is an expedition the students plan, cost, and fund themselves — a rite of passage with a real budget and a real duty to the place they visit. The enterprise lives in the planning. Students cost the trip, weigh its risks, manage or raise the funds, and organise the logistics, then carry out a low-impact expedition that does the place some genuine good. The bar is not to leave no trace but to leave the place better than they found it.

The first summative product is a costed, risk-assessed expedition plan and the pitch that wins the support and resources to run it. The second summative product is the expedition itself, carried out, with a record of the positive impact it had on the place.

Fair Share

Term 3 · social lens · Year B

Driving question: Whose story gets seen, and how can art make fairness visible?

Fair Share explores fairness, identity, and belonging through art. Students examine where fairness breaks down — whose stories are told and whose are left out — and make art that brings a fairness issue into view for an audience. The project treats art as a way of arguing: a piece that makes a viewer see what they had not seen before.

The first summative product is an exhibition art piece, shown publicly. The second summative product is a curatorial or artist's statement that explains what the piece is doing and why the issue matters.

Metal Dragons (UK Year 8, US Grade 7)

Foodprint

Term 1 · ecological lens

Driving question: What does our food cost the living world, and how could we grow it to give back more than it takes?

Foodprint traces the food that reaches Budapest back to the land and the systems it comes from. Students follow the costs that usually stay hidden — to soil, water, climate, and the people who grow and move it — and then act locally by establishing a real food-growing system on regenerative principles. The understanding at the centre is that food is a system with limits, and that some of those limits, once crossed, do not come back.

The first summative product is a field-research report with a systems map, built from real investigation rather than secondhand reading. The second summative product is an established food-growing system, planted and set up so that it can be maintained and handed on.

Worth Making

Term 2 · economic lens

Driving question: Can we build a venture that meets a real need and creates net-positive impact?

Worth Making asks students to design and run a small real venture — not a simulated classroom economy, but something that creates value for real users. The discipline of the project is judgement: deciding what deserves to be made at all, for whom, and at what cost. The doughnut is the test they keep returning to — does the venture meet a genuine need without overshooting what people and the living world can bear?

The first summative product is a venture proposal that makes the case for the idea to its intended users and to those who might back it. The second is the venture brought to life as something real — a product, a service, or an event — built and tested with the people it is meant to serve.

Circular City

Term 3 · social and civic lens

Driving question: How do shared systems flow through our part of Budapest, and where could we change them for the better?

Circular City studies how resources and waste move through students' part of the city — what is used, discarded, repaired, and reused — through the lens of the circular economy. Students then find a point where they can intervene in a shared system and make a change that holds. The work is as much about people as about materials: shifting a shared system means changing a habit, a rule, or the way something is run, not only fixing an object. The aim is to change how a shared system works rather than to start a business, which belonged to the previous project.

The first summative product is a systems analysis paired with a civic pitch that names the change and argues for it to the people who can enable it. The second summative product is a stewarded civic intervention — a real change to a shared system that students put in place and then hand on.

Light Dragons (UK Year 9, US Grade 8)

The Regenerative Action Project

the whole year · integrative capstone

Driving question: How do I bring a regenerative venture to life that solves a problem I care about and lasts after I've gone?

The Regenerative Action Project is the culmination of everything the programme has been building towards, and the most demanding thing most students will have taken on. Working in a small team, each student takes a real problem in Budapest that they genuinely care about and carries it the whole way — researching it properly, designing a regenerative venture in response, bringing that venture to life, and handing it on so that it continues after they have gone. What the earlier projects rehearsed in parts and under guidance, students here do largely on their own. The premise the year runs on is deliberately personal: I matter. The project is built to prove it — to show a young person that they can see something wrong in the world and actually change it.

This is why the project matters beyond the things it produces. Bringing a venture of your own from a problem you care about to something that endures builds agency and a sense of identity that no classroom exercise can. It creates genuine impact in the city, and it develops, in one sustained piece of work, the skills the rest of school tends to treat separately — designing a project, managing it when it does not go to plan, and telling its story well enough to move other people. The venture can take many forms — a working system, a product or tool, an ongoing programme, a social enterprise, or a change in how an institution operates — but in every case it is built to endure.

The year runs across three terms, each with its own work. In the first term students find their problem and make their plan: weeks of walking neighbourhoods, meeting people, and stress-testing ideas against hard questions — is this genuinely better, who benefits, what happens when we are gone? The term ends at a gateway we call the REALity Check — the one outright pass-or-fail moment in the whole programme. Each team pitches its proposal to a review panel that includes at least one outside expert, and the plan must pass before any building begins. The panel tests it against the questions the programme turns on: is the project at least restorative, with a credible path toward genuine regeneration; are its intended outcomes specific and honestly scoped, with a clear sense of who benefits and how we will know; can it actually be done with the time, skills and partners available; has the need been validated by the people who actually experience it, rather than assumed; and is there a credible plan for what happens after the students have gone? A plan that cannot yet answer these goes back for rework rather than forward into action.

In the second term students make it happen. They build, organise, and adapt — and things do not go to plan, which is the work itself. Each team is paired with an external mentor, a practitioner with real experience in their problem area, who meets them through the term. They keep a public record of the journey and reflect honestly on what is working and what is not.

In the third term they finish, share, and hand off. The work is brought to a close and assessed honestly — including, where a project did not achieve what it set out to, through a formal failure analysis held to the same standard as a success, because effort and rigour are what is being judged, not luck. Each team then gives a TED-style public talk to parents, community members, and invited guests — filmed and shared where consent, safeguarding and the nature of the work make that appropriate — and formally hands the project on to younger students or community members who will keep it going, so that what they built outlasts them.

Because the project spans a year and a full arc of work, it produces a whole suite of summative products. The learning targets each one carries are set out below.

10 · How we know: assessment

A programme that promises real capability has to be able to show it — to a student, to a family, and to itself. Assessment at REAL School is built to do exactly that: to say, honestly and specifically, what a child can now do, where they are growing, and what comes next. It is not a verdict delivered at the end of the work; it is the running account of a capability taking shape.

We assess against the target, never against each other

Every learning target — every "I can…" statement — is assessed against itself, not against the other children in the room. There is no curve, no ranking, no forced spread of grades. This is what criterion-referenced means, and it is a matter of principle rather than preference: a child's progress is measured by what they can actually do, against a clear and stable description of the capability, so that two children can both reach the standard, or neither can, and the judgement is true either way.

For each target we describe five levels of quality, in plain, work-facing language: No Evidence, Emerging, Developing, Competent, and Extending. Competent is the standard — it is what success looks like, the point at which a child has genuinely got hold of the capability, and it is what we teach every child to reach. Extending describes real excellence beyond that — carrying the capability into a new situation, with unusual depth, or being able to teach it to others — and it is genuinely rare. It is never required, and no child is failing for not reaching it. The levels below Competent are not the same thing in vaguer words; each names a specific, visible difference in the work, so that a child can see exactly what is missing and what to do next. This is where the instructional hierarchy matters: a rubric level should not just say whether work looks better or worse; it should show whether the student is acquiring the capability, becoming fluent with it, generalising it to new contexts, or adapting it with independence and judgement.

Different kinds of capability, assessed in different ways

Not everything is assessed the same way, because not everything is the same kind of thing. Where a capability is a matter of knowledge and reasoning — building an argument, mapping a system, analysing a cause — a rubric of the kind just described does the job well, judging the quality of the thinking and the knowledge it rests on together. But some of what we care about most is dispositional: perseverance, the way a child treats others, how they manage themselves. These cannot honestly be graded on a five-point scale. A disposition is not performed on a single day; it is lived, across many situations, and it is recognised rather than marked. So we evidence dispositions through careful observation over time, gathered from more than one adult who works with the child, rather than forcing them onto a scale that would produce a confident-looking number and a false one. Grading a child's character also risks corroding the very thing it is meant to nurture; we will not do it.

Honesty over inflation

Honesty runs through all of it. We hold to Competent as the real standard and do not inflate our way past it: a polished performance that does not rest on genuine understanding has not met the bar, however impressive it looks on the day. Where a project does not achieve what it set out to, students write a failure analysis held to exactly the same standard as a success, because what we are judging is the rigour and the learning, not the luck. This kind of honesty matters more, not less, in an age when it has become easy to produce work that looks competent without being so. Telling a genuine capability from a convincing performance is now part of the work of assessment, and ours is built to do it.

An assessment system this rich — knowledge that must build in order, capability tracked from halting to fluent, dispositions recognised across many situations and by more than one observer — has always been more than any teacher could hold well by hand. For most of the history of schooling that has forced a hard trade: assess narrowly and reliably, or richly and unreliably. This is where technology, in the era of AI, changes what is possible. Used well — behind the teacher, never in front of the child — it can carry the record-keeping, surface the patterns, and give a teacher back the time for the judgement and the relationship that only a person can bring.

This is the deeper purpose, and it is worth naming plainly: assessment of this kind is the foundation of genuinely personalised learning. To teach a child as an individual you have to know that individual — what they can do, where they are growing, what they are ready for next — and to hold that for every child at once is exactly what has always defeated a single teacher in a full classroom. Done well, this knowledge is a form of care: it exists to support a child's growth, not to rank children against one another, and never to watch over them. The tools that make it practical are arriving quickly — open, evidence-based libraries of teaching practice, and AI assistants built for precisely this work — and the school intends to draw on them in the service of that aim. The technology does not assess the child; it makes it possible to assess what actually matters without exhausting the people who do it. That requires guardrails. AI may help organise evidence, surface patterns for a teacher to inspect, and reduce clerical load; it must not make final judgements, produce hidden scores, or replace professional moderation. Families and students should be able to see what evidence a judgement rests on, and sensitive observations — especially about dispositions — must be recorded sparingly, respectfully and with clear limits.

The mechanics beneath all this — how each rubric level is worded and bounded, how knowledge, reasoning and disposition are routed to the right kind of assessment, and how the multi-informant observation of dispositions is gathered — are set out in full in Appendix B, for teachers and for anyone who wants to see the engine rather than the dashboard.

A closing word

None of this is simple, and we will not pretend otherwise. But for the first time it is genuinely possible — to teach for real capability, to know each child as more than a grade, and to do both at the scale of a whole school. That possibility is part of why we are building this now, rather than waiting. The work is to grow young people who can dream and build a beautiful world; the rest of this handbook has been our honest account of how.

Appendix A · Alignment with external frameworks

This appendix sets out, for the reader who wants the detail, how the ANSWER competencies relate to the major external frameworks. The relationship is one of answerability, not derivation: ANSWER was built from the school's own purpose and then checked, competence by competence, against the most authoritative reference frameworks available. The mapping below is the school's own crosswalk, re-derived from the primary sources in June 2026; it shows correspondence of intent, not claimed equivalence.

The frameworks, in brief

• GreenComp — the European sustainability competence framework: the EU's reference set for the knowledge, skills and attitudes of sustainability, organised around embodying values, embracing complexity, envisioning futures and acting for sustainability.
• DigComp — the European digital competence framework (3.0, 2025): the reference set for digital and, increasingly, AI competence — information literacy, communication and collaboration, content creation, safety, and problem-solving.
• EntreComp — the European entrepreneurship competence framework: what it means to act on opportunities and ideas to create value, across ideas-and-opportunities, resources, and into-action.
• LifeComp — the European framework for personal, social and learning-to-learn competence: the personal, social and learning capabilities that underpin the rest.
• OECD Learning Compass 2030 — the OECD's shared vision of the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values young people need, including its three transformative competencies (creating new value, reconciling tensions, taking responsibility), student agency and co-agency, and the anticipation–action–reflection cycle.
• WEF Future of Jobs — the World Economic Forum's recurring survey of the human capabilities employers report as rising in value, including analytical and creative thinking, resilience and flexibility, curiosity and lifelong learning, and environmental stewardship.

Coverage of the four EU frameworks

In the school's June 2026 internal crosswalk, the ANSWER set shows at least partial correspondence with most of the 57 competences these four frameworks name, with stronger named anchors in some areas than others. These figures should be read as a check of correspondence and intent, not as a claim that ANSWER is equivalent to the external frameworks. By framework:

Representative strong anchors

• Systems Thinking for Regeneration ↔ GreenComp's systems-thinking competence (considering time, space and context to understand how parts of a system interact).
• Love of Life ↔ GreenComp's promoting-nature competence (recognising humans as part of nature and respecting other species).
• Inclusion and Justice ↔ GreenComp's supporting-fairness competence — extended, in ANSWER, to the more-than-human community of life.
• Create & Test ↔ EntreComp's competence for testing ideas and prototypes early to reduce the risk of failing.
• Finance & Impact ↔ EntreComp's ethical-and-sustainable-thinking competence (assessing the effect of entrepreneurial action on community, society and environment).
• AI Literacy and Information Literacy & Safety ↔ DigComp's evaluating-information competence (assessing the credibility of sources and content, including misinformation and bias).
• Emotional & Social Self and Attention & Reflective Practices ↔ LifeComp's personal and social competences (self-regulation, empathy, communication, collaboration).

Full crosswalk matrix

The table below shows how each ANSWER domain maps to the four EU competence frameworks. Coverage is rated as Strong (named anchor with quoted-text correspondence), Partial (correspondence of intent), or None. Aggregate: 86% any-coverage, 61% strong-anchor across 57 EU competences.

Bidirectional gaps (open)

• EU expects, ANSWER under-serves: DigComp cluster 2 (interacting, sharing, collaborating through digital technologies); DigComp 5.2/5.4 (networks and cybersecurity depth); EntreComp vision, taking the initiative, and mobilising resources.
• ANSWER asserts, EU does not strongly anchor (deliberate strengths): RSHE/consent; Wellbeing Science; Ecological Literacy; Outdoor Confidence & Skills; Regenerative Mindset & Design; Attention & Reflective Practices.

Where ANSWER goes beyond the frameworks, on purpose

• It routes dispositions to multi-informant observation rather than to rubrics — a discipline none of the frameworks applies.
• It requires the substantive knowledge a performance draws on to be named inside the assessment criterion and to grow across levels, where the frameworks leave knowledge to be inferred.
• It treats agency, for teaching and assessment, as something evidenced in action over time, not merely as a self-reported belief, aspiration or preference; and it follows the OECD in rejecting the confusion of agency with autonomy, voice or choice.
• It holds that agency requires domain competence — that without real knowledge and skill, agency has nothing to stand on — a claim absent from the OECD, EU, WEF and other surveyed frameworks.
• Its Regeneration domain reaches past sustainability (doing less harm) into regeneration (leaving systems healthier), territory GreenComp does not contain.

Honest gaps

• DigComp: collaborating and creating through digital tools (the framework's communication-and-collaboration cluster) is enacted in projects but not yet named as an assessed competency; cyber and networks depth is thin.
• EntreComp: the cluster of vision, taking the initiative, and mobilising resources is developed through projects rather than assessed as a discrete competency.

Sources. GreenComp (Bianchi, Pisiotis and Cabrera, 2022, EUR 30955 EN); DigComp 3.0 (Cosgrove and Cachia, 2025, JRC144121); EntreComp (Bacigalupo and colleagues, 2016, EUR 27939 EN); LifeComp (Sala and colleagues, 2020, EUR 30246 EN); OECD Future of Education and Skills 2030, Learning Compass 2030 concept notes (OECD, 2019); World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report 2025; UNESCO AI Competency Framework for Teachers (UNESCO, 2024).

Appendix B · The assessment engine

This appendix sets out, for teachers and for anyone who wants to see the mechanism beneath Section 10, how the assessment actually works. It is drawn from the school's Rubric Logic Guide.

The five levels. Every learning target is judged against five criterion-referenced levels, described in both student-facing and educator-facing language.

The percentages aid calibration; they are not targets. Competent is the standard and Competent is success — it is what every child is taught to reach, and it represents genuine mastery of the band-level expectation, not "good enough". Extending is genuinely rare and never required. A child reaches it only by demonstrably exceeding the target along one of four pathways: depth (understanding beyond what the target requires), transfer (applying the capability to a new context unprompted), sophistication (unusual nuance or quality), or teaching (effectively helping others develop it). Extending is never awarded for effort or as encouragement; treating it as a reward inflates expectations and makes the record meaningless.

The rubric row. Each learning target generates one rubric row, with the exact band statement from the master sheet in an "I can…" column and a descriptor at each of the five levels. Descriptors follow strict rules: written in work-facing voice (describing the work, not the child); observable and concrete (never "understands" or "good"); distinct at each level, with no overlap between neighbours; and bounded for precision — No Evidence ≤10 words, Emerging ≤15, Developing ≤20, Competent ≤25 (mirroring the target), Extending ≤20. The Competent descriptor restates the learning target; the levels below it name the specific, visible difference in the work, so a child can see exactly what is missing and what to do next.

How knowledge enters the criteria. A competency integrates knowledge, skill and disposition, so the rubric must make the knowledge a performance draws on visible rather than leaving it to be inferred. How it does so depends on the kind of content — a matter of the structure of the knowledge, not its difficulty.

• Hierarchical knowledge (sequenced, with a clear correct path — number facts, decoding, grammar, a procedure): knowledge can be assessed as a separable element; accuracy and recall can be named directly.
• Horizontal knowledge (reasoned across legitimate perspectives — historical interpretation, ethical analysis, evaluating claims): knowledge is inseparable from reasoning, and the criterion must name the specific substantive knowledge the reasoning has to deploy accurately. Reasoning is never assessed in a knowledge vacuum. Each such criterion is written in two parts — a reusable disciplinary skeleton (causation, evidence, significance, perspective) instantiated with the project-specific knowledge the spine installed — and the knowledge dimension escalates across the five levels rather than being held constant while only the reasoning changes.
• Dispositional content (a stable orientation across contexts — self-regulation, curiosity, the conduct that holds a community): not assessed by a five-level rubric at all. Forcing a disposition onto a five-point scale produces unreliable signals and risks the relational ground the programme depends on.

Evidencing dispositions. Dispositions are evidenced through a multi-informant observation protocol — gathered over time, from more than one adult who works with the child, in the course of real work — rather than graded. A single-point reference (the Competent descriptor used as a touchstone) may support student self-assessment, but the five-level rubric is not used here.

Bands and judgement. Assessment runs across the school's four developmental bands, A to D. A child's work is judged against the band-level statement appropriate to their stage; the same five levels apply within each band, so "Competent" always means meeting the expectation for that band, not for the school as a whole. A single assessment task often yields evidence against several learning targets at once — across more than one domain — with each target receiving its own level and its own specific feedback.

The reference document. The full guide — worked examples, language patterns, splitting rules for compound targets, co-construction with students, moderation — is the REAL School Rubric Logic Guide (v2.2), held for staff.