The International Primary Curriculum explained

Well, for a start, we all know that children learn best when they want to learn. That’s why the IPC has over 80 different thematic units of learning; all child-friendly, modern-day topics appealing to all ages of primary children. Themes such as Time Detectives, Airports, I’m Alive, Inventions and Machines, and Global Swapshop. Teachers use the theme as the hook, the learning platform, and the ‘wrapping paper’ in order to excite and engage 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.

It 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, active learning, learning outside the classroom, role play, and children learning from each other. 'All these approaches are crucial factors affecting engagement', says Director of the IPC, 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 and many skills are practised and developed.' For example, in the IPC Rainforest unit, children, through role play, debate the impact of slash-and-burn from all perspectives; from those of the indigenous forest dwellers to the prospectors. 'This is something that we have continually prioritised and developed within the IPC', continues Steven. 'Child-friendly themes involving issues relevant for today’s children and creating opportunities for them to make their own choices in the progress of their learning. As a result, the learning becomes inspiring and fulfilling for them.'

The IPC’s engaging approach also encourages parental involvement as children, inspired by their learning, talk freely to parents and family members about what they’ve done at school and often choose to continue their learning at home. Parental involvement is also promoted through learning-focused letters, extended learning ideas, and end-of-unit ‘Exit Point’ events.

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.

Take, for example, the IPC Chocolate unit. In history, children explore the discovery of chocolate, the period it was discovered, the motivation for discovery, and the changing attitude to chocolate through the ages. In geography, they look at the countries that grow cacao and how particular localities have been affected by its production and by slash-and-burn. They look at the links between countries that grow cacao and countries that produce chocolate. In art, children look at how chocolate is sold and how packaging is designed. In science, children use the Chocolate unit to look at the energy values in foodstuffs and to explore the effects of heating and cooling. 

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

IPC Director Steven Mark points out that knowledge, skills, and understanding may all be examples of learning but that each is learned differently, assessed differently and, therefore, IPC believes, should be taught differently. 'There is absolutely no point in talking about rigorous learning if we don’t make explicitly clear the nature and implications of the learning we want children to achieve', says Steven.

So each IPC unit has a detailed teaching framework incorporating very explicit skills. 'As skills take time to develop, children need to have the chance to continually revisit and practise these key skills', he explains. 'To develop these skills, individuals need context and purpose. Which is why the IPC suggests real-life, practical learning experiences to help them. All our units encourage children to work individually and together towards learning goals. It’s important that children can see that they are still learning skills found in history and geography but set in the context of the big picture theme.'

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 learning the theme through a local perspective, a national perspective, and an international perspective. 

With schools in over 90 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.

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 practise 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 have to make a water turbine. They start by creating it 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, enquiry, communication, and adaptability.

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, personalisation to the class and the locality, and development on the theme.

For UK and British international schools, the IPC learning goals are cross-referenced to meet the National Curriculum guidelines of England and of Wales reassuring teachers that their children are learning in a rigorous as well as engaging, creative, and relevant way.

Supporting schools

The IPC was originally designed purely as a curriculum. But 10 years of growth and development have resulted in a vibrant, global IPC community of over 1,000 schools in over 90 countries as diverse as Swaziland, Malaysia, Qatar, Japan, Russia, and Brazil. In the UK the IPC community embraces many schools including state primaries plus academies, independent schools, special schools, as well as several highly active Local Authorities. This provides a sharing of best practices and minds encouraged through blogs, podcasting, conferences, summer schools and more, ensuring that no school, however remote, feels isolated.