Why is “What Year Are You In?” Is One of the Hardest Questions in Education
Imagine two students.
- One lives in Dublin.
- The other lives in Tokyo.
- They’re the same age.
- They’re both studying mathematics, science and English.
- Both are preparing for university.
So they’re at the same educational stage…
…aren’t they?
Not necessarily.
Ask someone in Ireland what year they’re in and you’ll hear things like:
- Sixth Class
- Transition Year
- Fifth Year
- Leaving Certificate
Furthermore ask someone in England and you’ll hear:
- Year 6
- Year 11
- Sixth Form
Similarly ask someone in America:
- Grade 8
- Sophomore
- Senior
Germany has its own structure.
France has another.
Australia another.
India another again.
Every country has developed an education system that makes perfect sense…
inside its own borders.
Outside those borders?
Things become surprisingly complicated.
The hidden language problem
Imagine searching for learning material online.
Should the system recommend content for:
- Year 10?
- Grade 9?
- Leaving Certificate?
- GCSE?
- High School?
- Junior Cycle?
Those labels aren’t wrong.
They’re simply local.
Computers struggle because they don’t understand that many of these describe roughly the same point in a learner’s educational journey.
Humans cope because we use judgement.
Software needs something more consistent.
We don’t need identical education systems.
We need a common language.
One of the biggest misconceptions in education is that interoperability means making everything identical.
It doesn’t.
Countries should teach differently.
Cultures should value different things.
Qualifications should reflect national priorities.
The challenge isn’t preserving those differences.
It’s helping them understand one another.
That’s exactly why I started developing the International Framework of Qualifications (IFQ).
Rather than replacing national education systems…
IFQ simply asks a much smaller question:
“Where is this learner on their educational journey?”
Nothing more.
Nothing less.
A deliberately simple idea
The IFQ uses a sparse twenty-two level progression model.
It isn’t trying to decide:
- which qualification is better,
- which curriculum is harder,
- which university is more prestigious,
- or which country has the best education system.
Those questions aren’t just difficult.
They’re the wrong questions.
Instead, IFQ focuses on something much more stable:
educational progression.
- Early years.
- Primary education.
- Secondary education.
- Further education.
- Undergraduate.
- Postgraduate.
- Doctoral study.
Twenty-two approximate stages that allow educational systems to talk to one another without pretending they’re identical.
Approximation isn’t a weakness.
It’s one of the design principles.
Why approximation matters
When people hear the word “ontology” they often imagine precision.
But educational systems aren’t precise.
Children don’t all learn at exactly the same pace.
Countries don’t introduce algebra at identical ages.
Qualifications evolve.
Curricula change.
Trying to model every educational difference creates something so complicated that almost nobody can use it.
IFQ deliberately takes the opposite approach.
It captures only what needs to be comparable…
and leaves everything else as local context.
Sometimes…
less information creates more understanding.
Built for people, not just computers
The first reason IFQ exists is simple.
To help people discover learning that’s appropriate for them.
But it also solves a growing challenge for AI.
Imagine asking:
Explain photosynthesis to someone beginning secondary school.
Now compare that with:
Explain photosynthesis to a postgraduate biology student.
The subject is identical.
The explanation shouldn’t be.
IFQ gives AI a shared educational reference point without requiring it to understand every country’s curriculum in detail.
All under the thoughtful consideration of a person
That opens interesting possibilities for adaptive learning, international recommendation systems and cross-border educational discovery.
Explore the framework
One of the principles behind WhereWeLearn is that educational infrastructure shouldn’t be hidden.
If we’re asking people to trust recommendation systems, they should be able to explore the foundations for themselves.
That’s why the International Framework of Qualifications is publicly available to browse.
Explore the International Framework of Qualifications
https://wherewelearn.com/ifq_search.php
Browse the progression levels.
Compare educational systems.
See how different countries align.
It’s not a finished answer.
It’s an invitation to think differently about educational interoperability.
Looking ahead
This article is really about one question.
How do we help learners discover the right knowledge…
when education speaks hundreds of different dialects?
The next article explores another piece of that puzzle.
Once we understand where somebody is in their learning journey…
how do we describe what they’re actually learning?
That question leads us to a remarkable system that libraries have been quietly using for more than a century.
And it turns out…
it may have something important to teach AI.
