The International Primary Curriculum (IPC) is a comprehensive, thematic, creative curriculum with a clear process of learning and with specific learning goals for every subject, for international-mindedness and for personal learning.

The IPC has been designed to ensure rigorous learning but also to make learning exciting, active and meaningful for children. Learning with the IPC takes a global approach: helping children to connect their learning to where they now live as well as looking at the learning from the perspective of other people in other countries.

The IPC is used by schools in more than 90 countries around the world. For more information, please visit 

A globalized world requires a globalized way of teaching students, especially at their formative early years. What is the International Primary Curriculum and how is it addressing the needs of today’s primary school students?

It’s always been important for children to receive a high-quality education that enriches their lives. In a globalized, interdependent world, it’s more important than ever before to give children the tools they need to succeed as adults. But it’s also more difficult than ever. Parents and schools are encouraging children to partake in more activities than ever before, which means that the way primary schools teach children needs to adapt, as well; this makes finding the right school difficult for any expat family. One program that aims to better address the needs of students is the International Primary Curriculum.

What is the International Primary Curriculum?

Getting a primary curriculum right is more difficult than ever because it has to meet multiple goals. The most essential goals are:

• Rigorous learning: This means paying attention to essential and transformational knowledge as well as the development of key skills. Slow and steady progress towards deep understanding across a broad range of subjects is crucial when it comes to rounding out a child’s education.
• High levels of children’s engagement: Schools must ensure that this rigorous learning can win the battle against superficially more exciting out-of-school activities. Children should enjoy the learning process enough to want to continue throughout their lives. It’s also essential to incorporate accessible opportunities for parental involvement.
• International, global, and intercultural awareness: Many of the world’s problems arise from different groups not knowing or respecting each other. Many opportunities open to today’s youth will be in places vastly different from where they grew up.
• Developing personal dispositions: This means creating opportunities for children to develop qualities that help them on their journey through life. Qualities such as adaptability, morality, respect, resilience, enquiry, cooperation, communication, and thoughtfulness are crucial.
• Supporting teachers: Schools must provide their teachers with all of the right tools to carry out the curriculum to the best of their ability. A curriculum is only as good as the teachers that use it; providing resources for teachers gives students the opportunity to learn best.

One curriculum – the International Primary Curriculum – is attempting to meet all of these needs. How does the International Primary Curriculum (IPC) ensure rigorous learning? What does a high level of engagement mean at IPC schools? How do students develop their own personal dispositions? What is it about the IPC that has gained the commitment of over 700 schools in over 90 countries?

• The IPC is flexible and can be adapted to children’s interests and level of understanding
• IPC helps engage parents with learning, and to understand the relevance of learning in the classroom and at home
• Assessment is done by teachers and children to help engage them with learning, and understand their level of skills and knowledge
• The IPC encourages collaboration and reflection not just between teachers and pupils, but amongst teachers within the school and worldwide

• Children learn best when they want to learn. That’s why the International Primary Curriculum has over 80 different thematic units of learning; they’re all child-friendly, modern-day topics appealing to all ages of primary schoolchildren. Teachers use themes as the hook, the learning platform, and the wrapping paper to engage children. Thematic learning enables young children to remain motivated while learning science, geography, or history. It also allows them to make purposeful links and connections; students see how a subject is related to the world they live in.
• Within each theme, the IPC suggests many ideas for collaborative learning, active learning, learning outside the classroom, and role play. “All these approaches are crucial factors affecting engagement,” says Director of the International Primary Curriculum, Steven Mark. “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. At the same time, there’s a huge flow of knowledge; this develops a variety of skills.”

Skills need time to develop. As a result, children must always have the opportunity practice core skills. To develop them, individuals need context and purpose. This is why the International Primary Curriculum suggests practical, real-life learning experiences. Units encourage children to work both individually and together towards their learning goals. Students should be able to see that they’re learning something from a particular discipline within the context of an overarching theme.

Intercultural awareness

Each International Primary Curriculum unit has learning-focused activities embedded within it. These units help young children develop a global awareness. Each unit creates opportunities to look at learning of the theme through a local perspective, a national perspective, and an international perspective. With schools all over the world, opportunities abound for children to share their experiences related to an IPC unit with students in different localities. Take the children at the International School of Iceland; students there shared their first-hand experiences of the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruption with fellow IPC students from around the world within the context of the IPC Active Planet unit. These children listened to, communicated with, and learned from each other in a real-world context.

Developing personal dispositions

Our personal dispositions we form as individuals don’t come from reading about them in a book or discovering them spontaneously. Rather, students build personal skills gradually over time through constant use and interaction with others. That’s how the International Primary Curriculum views children’s learning of personal skills. Instead of dedicated lessons about morality or respect, opportunities to experience specific personal dispositions are built into learning tasks. In addition, many of these tasks are group activities that 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 must build a model of a water turbine. They start by creating it from cardboard; 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. On the one hand, students learn about the power of water; beyond this, they’re also developing the skills of cooperation, enquiry, communication, and adaptability.

Supporting teachers

Each IPC unit has a structured, yet flexible, teaching framework providing teachers with a series of learning tasks. These are designed to achieve learning goals through creative, meaningful, and memorable learning activities that appeal to all learning styles and any ability level. However, the learning tasks are purely a guide; they provide plenty of scope for creative teaching, personalization to the class, and development on the theme.

As an example, British international schools cross-reference IPC learning goals with the National Curriculum for England. This allows teachers the assurance that their children are learning in a rigorous as well as engaging, creative, and relevant way. Cross-references are also available for Welsh and Scottish students to be able to learn using their home curriculum abroad.

The International Primary Curriculum started purely as a curriculum. But after years of development, there is a considerable IPC community; over 700 schools in over 90 countries use the International Primary Curriculum.

The IPC Learning Goals are vital as they: · Help identify the knowledge, skill and understanding children should be learning; · Help focus on the most appropriate teaching strategies; · Help decide on the best sort of assessment to use.

The IPC types of learning: knowledge, skills and understanding The Learning Goals are the foundation on which the IPC is built. They define what children might be expected to know, what they might be able to do and the understandings they might develop in their academic, personal and international learning. At SSSJ we believe that differentiating between knowledge, skills and understanding is crucial to the development of children’s learning. We also believe that knowledge, skills and understanding have their own distinct characteristics that impact on how each is planned for, learned, taught, assessed and reported on. 1. Knowledge: refers to factual information. Knowledge is relatively straightforward to teach and assess (through quizzes, tests, multiple choice, etc.), even if it is not always that easy to recall. You can ask your children to research the knowledge they have to learn but you could also tell them the knowledge they need to know. Knowledge is continually changing and expanding – this is a challenge for schools that have to choose what knowledge children should know and learn in a restricted period of time. 2. Skills: refer to things children are able to do. Skills have to be learned practically and need time to be practiced. The good news about skills is the more your practice, the better you get at them! Skills are also transferable and tend to be more stable than knowledge – this is true for almost all school subjects. The IPC’s Assessment for Learning Programme is based around the assessment of children’s skills. 3. Understanding: refers to the development or ‘grasping’ of conceptual ideas, the ‘lightbulb’ moment that we all strive for. Understanding is always developing. None of us ever ‘gets there’, so you can’t teach or control understanding, but what the IPC units do allow you to do is provide a whole range of different experiences through which children’s understandings can deepen. At SSSJ, children, staff and governors have defined knowledge, skill and understanding as: Knowledge is something that we know is a fact. It is true. Knowledge is always right or wrong. A skill is something you learn at any age and with practice you will get better. To develop understanding we need to use our knowledge and skills in different ways.

The process of learning:

The IPC units of learning have been developed around a process which supports the ways in which children learn best from the ages of 5-12 years. It is important that children don’t just experience the structure and process of the IPC, but also that they understand why they are learning in this way. The Entry Point is an exciting and memorable event that launches every IPC unit.

The aim of the entry point is to get children thinking about, and engaged with, the learning that’s to follow. The Knowledge Harvest provides teachers with the chance to find out what children already know about the theme and helps them to personalise the unit by finding out what children want to learn in order to tailor their lessons accordingly. It reinforces connections between existing and new learning and allows children to take ownership of their learning. 11 Explaining the Theme provides teachers, children and parents with the big picture of the unit before it launches so that connections between subjects and concepts can be facilitated. The Big Picture provides teachers with subject-based background information and research which links to the learning contained within each unit.

Research Activities:

Each subject area has planned research activities which are designed to make sure that children can access information in a way that is appropriate to them, drawing on a wide range of learning approaches such as role play, digital learning, library research and so on. IPC research activities are experiential and exploratory. Some are collaborative; others are designed to develop individual enquiry and resilience, and therefore help to embed and develop the IPC Personal Goals.

Recording Activities:

The recording activities enable children to process and present the information they have gained in their research activities through a range of approaches which tap into their different strengths and interests, and enable them to get better at other ways of recording. This might involve learning through digital recording, drama, musical compositions, maps, graphs, experiments, art work and so on. Exit Point: the exit point completes every unit. It helps children to draw on their prior learning, reminding them of all the connections between subjects that they have made, and creates time and opportunities to build their understanding of their learning, and to reflect on this individually and as a group. The exit point is an excellent chance to engage with parents, guardians and carers and involve them in celebrating the learning that has been achieved.