Open data on school mathematics in 10 countries
Open datasets on how national school systems teach mathematics: which skill is taught in which grade, how each country writes numbers and operations, which skill depends on which, and which units and money a child meets. All are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0, each has a DOI and a GitHub repository.
What the data shows
Across 211 maths skills that appear in the curricula of at least eight countries, the age at which a skill first appears differs on average by 2.7 years between the earliest and the latest country. The biggest differences:
| Skill | Earliest | Latest | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Volume of cylinders, cones and spheres | age 12 — France, Switzerland, United Kingdom | age 18 — Poland | 6 years |
| Distance between two points using Pythagoras | age 12 — Italy, Spain, Switzerland | age 17 — Poland | 5 years |
| Halves and quarters | age 5 — United Kingdom | age 10 — Poland | 5 years |
| Median of a data set | age 10 — Austria, Germany | age 15 — Switzerland | 5 years |
| Add and subtract fractions with like denominators | age 7 — France, United Kingdom | age 11 — Germany | 4 years |
| Area by decomposing a figure | age 9 — Austria | age 13 — Poland | 4 years |
| Arithmetic sequences: nth term and sum | age 13 — United Kingdom | age 17 — Poland | 4 years |
| Capacity units | age 5 — United Kingdom | age 9 — Poland | 4 years |
| Classify triangles by sides and angles | age 8 — United Kingdom | age 12 — Switzerland | 4 years |
| Complete a function table | age 7 — Austria, Switzerland | age 11 — Italy | 4 years |
Skills on which the countries largely agree (first taught within one year of each other): Count objects and write how many (age 5–6), Tens and ones of a two-digit number (age 5–6), Addition within 100 (age 6–7), Benchmarks for standard units (age 6–7), Directions in space and on paper (age 6–7), Numbers on a number line (age 6–7), Properties of operations (age 6–7), Area of a rectangle and a missing side (age 9–10), Generate and extend number patterns from a rule (age 9–10), Add and subtract integers (age 11–12).
Datasets
Imaginesis curriculum crosswalk: maths skills × national curricula × grades
The official mathematics curriculum documents of 10 school systems mapped to one shared taxonomy of maths skills, grade by grade, with the identifier of each requirement in its source document.
School maths conventions across 10 countries: notation and grade levels
How schools write numbers and operations — decimal comma or point, × or ·, ÷ or :, thousands separator, intervals, repeating decimals, point coordinates, tan/tg, sin/sen — with the official documents each convention was read from; and how grades line up by age, named in 7 languages.
School maths skill prerequisite graph: which skill requires which, with reasons
Directed graph of prerequisites between school maths skills, from place value to integrals; every edge is marked hard or soft and explained in one sentence. Same skill identifiers as the crosswalk.
Units of measurement and money in school mathematics across 10 countries
Metric or customary units, whether the decagram and the are/hectare are school units, imperial units, and money — currency symbol and its position, minor unit, coins and banknotes.
School maths skill names in 7 languages, in each country's curriculum terminology
473 school maths skills named in English, Polish, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Dutch the way each country's curriculum and textbooks name them (Schriftliche Addition, addition posée, cijferend optellen); five languages machine-translated and reviewed. Same skill identifiers as the crosswalk.
Method
The crosswalk was built by reading the official curriculum documents of each country (laws, decrees, standards, exam frameworks; links to every document are in curricula.csv) and assigning each requirement to one shared taxonomy of maths skills, grade by grade. Notation and units were checked against the same documents, exam papers and official guides; values without documentary evidence are marked as not specified. The datasets are updated automatically when a mapping changes; each release gets its own version DOI.
How to cite and reuse
The licence (CC BY 4.0) allows any use, including commercial, with attribution: name Imaginesis as the source and give the DOI, as in the citations above. Corrections and additions are welcome as issues in the GitHub repositories.