Primary Curriculum of the International School

International Schools' Primary Curriculum

It has always been important for children to receive a great education. In the challenging global, interdependent world of the 21st century, it is more important than ever before.

But it’s also more difficult than ever. In the same way that far fewer children play football because there are so many other competing things for them to do, so it’s far harder to help young children learn in international school when other parts of their lives can seem so much more attractive, and when so many children are in homes – professional and non-professional – where time for parents to be attentive to their children is at a premium.

This is the paradox we inhabit. The need is great and, at the same time, the opposing forces are more powerful than they’ve ever been.

Getting a primary curriculum right is more difficult today than it’s ever been because it has to meet multiple goals. Of all those goals, the most essential ones are:

1. Engaging Children
2. Rigorous Learning
3. Intercultural Awareness
4. Developing Personal Dispositions
5. Supporting Teachers
6. Supporting Schools
7. Measuring Success

If that’s the case, how does the International schools' Primary Curriculum (IPC) ensure rigorous learning? What does a high level of engagement mean in IPC practice? What about the development of personal dispositions?  And what is it about the IPC that has gained the commitment of over 1,300 international schools in over 63 countries around the world in just ten years?

1. Engaging Children

The theme enables young children to remain motivated through the learning of science, geography, history and so on. It also allows them to make purposeful links and connections throughout their learning and to see how their subject learning is related to the world they live in.

Within each theme, the IPC suggests many ideas for collaborative learning, for active learning, for learning outside the classroom, for role play, and for children learning from each other. All of these approaches are crucial factors affecting engagement. Teamwork with a purpose, where every person plays a vital but different role, enables children to become deeply engaged in their learning, especially when that learning is relevant to their interests and needs.

2. Rigorous Learning

Each IPC unit incorporates most of the core subjects including science, history, geography, ICT, Art and PE and provides many opportunities to incorporate literacy and numeracy. Subjects are only included in each theme if there is a direct link between the required learning and the ideas behind the theme. Each subject then has a number of learning tasks to help teachers to help their children meet a range of learning goals set out in the curriculum.

The IPC learning goals are deliberately explicit; designed to make sure that teachers distinguish clearly between children’s learning of knowledge, skills, and understanding.

3. Intercultural Awareness

Each IPC unit has embedded within it, learning-focused activities that help young children start developing a global awareness and gain an increasing sense of the ‘other’. Every unit creates opportunities to look at the learning of the theme through a local perspective, a national perspective, and an international perspective.

With international schools in over 63 countries learning with the IPC, opportunities abound for children to share their local experiences related to an IPC unit with children in dramatically different environments.

4. Developing Personal Dispositions

The personal dispositions we form as individuals do not come from reading about them in a book or discovering them spontaneously. But rather, they are established over time with constant use and that’s how the IPC views children’s learning of personal skills. So instead of ‘add-on’ lessons about such elusive personal skills as morality or respect, the opportunities to experience and practice very specific personal dispositions are built into the learning tasks within each thematic unit.

In addition, many of these tasks are group activities which encourage children to consider each others’ ideas and opinions, share responsibilities, respect other people’s views and communicate effectively. For example, in the IPC Water unit, a group of children has to make a water turbine. They start by creating if from cardboard and, through their own research and development  - along with gentle guidance from the teacher - work out how to improve their design to make it more resilient and effective. Not only are they learning about the power of water, but at the same time, these children are developing the skills of cooperation, inquiry, communication, and adaptability.

5. Supporting Teachers

Each IPC unit has a very structured yet flexible teaching framework providing teachers with a series of learning tasks. These are designed to achieve the learning goals through creative, meaningful and memorable learning activities that appeal to all learning styles and are relevant for all children of all abilities. In addition, these learning tasks have been carefully designed to help children build upon their development of individual skills from previous IPC units.

However, the learning tasks are purely a guide and provide plenty of scope for creative teaching, personalization to the class and the locality, and development of the theme.

6. Supporting Schools

The IPC was originally designed purely as a curriculum. But ten years of growth and development have resulted in a vibrant, global IPC community of over 1,300 international schools in over 63 countries as diverse as Swaziland, Malaysia, Qatar, Japan, Russia, and Brazil. In the UK the IPC community embraces almost 1,000 international schools including state primaries plus academies, independent schools, special schools as well as several highly active Local Authorities. This provides a sharing of best-practice and minds encouraged through blogs, podcasting, conferences, summer schools and more, ensuring that no school, however remote, feels isolated.

7. Measuring Success

The IPC provides you with a very clear teaching framework to follow which we personalize to meet the needs of our children in our locality.