The International Primary Curriculum (IPC) is an internationally-minded curriculum for children aged 5 – 11 years old that is used in a number of countries around the world. The IPC provides opportunities for global learning – allowing pupils and staff to make links. It is a comprehensive, thematic, creative curriculum, with a clear process of learning and specific learning goals for every subject. It also develops international mindedness and encourages personal learning. The goal of the IPC is to nurture a love of learning through a combination of academic, personal and international learning. Children will develop many skills which they will need in order to face the world of tomorrow confidently.
Why Choose the International Primary Curriculum?
- The IPC is flexible and can be adapted to children’s interests and level of understanding
- It can be integrated with other curriculum to ensure you’re meeting statutory requirements, in a creative and engaging way
- It offers simple but structured curriculum focussed around subject, personal and international learning goals
- With the IPC you’re part of an international community of schools, teachers and learners with access to an online space for information sharing
- 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
Learning Goals
The learning goals are the foundation on which the International Primary Curriculum is built. The IPC provides children with subject goals, personal learning goals, and uniquely, international learning goals, and these are defined for each age phase:
1) Subject Goals
Subject goals cover the knowledge, skills and understanding of children relating to the subjects they are learning. There are subject learning goals for Language Arts, Mathematics, Science, ICT & Computing, Technology, History, Geography, Music, Physical Education, Art and Society.
2) Personal Goals
Personal goals underpin the individual qualities and dispositions we believe children will find essential in the 21st century. There are 8 IPC Personal Goals – enquiry, resilience, morality, communication, thoughtfulness, cooperation, respect and adaptability. Opportunities to experience and practice these are built into the learning tasks within each unit of work.
3) International Learning Goals
International learning goals are unique to our curriculum and help young children begin the move towards an increasingly sophisticated national, international and intercultural perspective. Each thematic IPC unit includes an international aspect, to help develop a sense of ‘international mindedness’.
Units of Learning
We know that children learn best when they want to learn. That’s why all of the IPC’s thematic units of learning are designed to appeal to children’s interests and help them to learn more about the world around them.
Themes include Who Am I?, The Magic Toymaker, Buildings, Chocolate, Active Planet, Young Entrepreneurs, Mission to Mars,and What Price Progress.
Themed units help children to see how subjects are both independent and interdependent. This enables them to see the big picture of their learning, make connections across different subjects, and talk about a topic from multiple perspectives.
Assessment
We believe that differentiating between knowledge, skills and understanding is crucial to the development of children’s learning.
Skills cannot be assessed by tests and they can’t reliably be assessed in one single assessment. They need time, practice, and a consistent and simple process to support both teachers and learners. This is where the IPC Assessment for Learning Programme will help you.
The Assessment for Learning Programme provides:
- Assessment for learning in nine subjects: Art, Geography, History, ICT & Computing, Music, Physical Education, Science, Technology and International.
- Assessment at each milepost – 5-7 years, 7-9 years, and 9-11 years.
- Three developmental stages of assessment from ‘beginning’ to ‘developing’ and ‘mastering’.
- Success criteria (or ‘rubrics’) for teachers to help identify the learning stage of each skill in each subject at each age phase.
- Similar success criteria for children, written in language that’s easy for them to read and follow. These help children take an active role in the assessment of their own learning.
- Specific teaching and learning advice with practical activities to help children improve their learning
- Advice on the implementation process which explains clearly how and when to use the assessment programme
- A dedicated online assessment tracking tool – delivered in partnership with Classroom Monitor – to keep paperwork to a minimum and ensure your assessments are accurate and that progression can be tracked over time, analysed to make improvements and reported to parents, care givers and guardians.