International Primary Curriculum (IPC)

UCSI International School’s primary years curriculum is supported by the International Primary Curriculum (IPC). With its foundations build on the British national curriculum, it has been improved and transformed into one of the fastest-growing curriculums in the world today. With over 800 schools in the UK adopting IPC, its fun, creative and hands-on subjects promote learning through the use of interactive themes. These themes offer specific learning goals for every subject, for personal learning and for international mindedness. The IPC is now the curriculum choice of international and national schools in over 1,500 schools in 77 countries around the world.

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

IPC was designed and developed based on three main guiding questions:

What kind of world will our children live and work in?
What kinds of children are likely to succeed in the world?
What kinds of learning will our children need and how should they learn it?

Learning Goals are the foundation for IPC
The Learning Goals define what children are expected to know, what they are able to do and the understandings they will develop as they move through school. Well written learning goals guide teaching, help focus learning and provide a standard for assessment and evaluation. We believe that the IPC Learning Goals are equal to or exceed those of any curriculum in the world. These Learning Goals can be divided into three main groups:

Subject goals

Knowledge - the facts and information children might learn
Skills - those practical abilities children need to be able to do
Understandings - the deeper awareness of key concepts which develops over time
Subject goals are for Language Arts, Mathematics, Science, Information Technology, Design Technology, History, Geography, Music, Physical Education, Art and Society

Personal goals

Individual qualities and dispositions essential for children of the 21st century
Developed to enable children to be at ease with life’s continually changes
Personal goals are for enquiry, resilience, morality, communication, thoughtfulness, cooperation, respect and adaptability

International goals

More thoroughly develops each student’s national prospective
Moves children towards an increasingly sophisticated international perspective

The IPC Learning Process
There is a distinct learning process with every IPC unit, providing a structured approach to make sure that children’s learning experiences are as stimulating and rigorous as possible.

Units of Work

We know that children learn best when they want to learn.
That’s why the IPC has over 90 different thematic units of learning; all child-friendly, modern-day topics appealing to all ages of primary children. Themes include Time Detectives, Airports, I’m Alive, Inventions and Machines, Global Swapshop and many others.

The theme enables young children to remain motivated through the Learning of Science, Geography, History and other subjects. These subjects are taught such that Science, English, and History lessons, for example, will be related as they follow the same theme. It allows students 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.

Each IPC unit incorporates a range of subjects including Science, History, Geography, ICT, Art and PE and provides many opportunities to link literacy and numeracy. Each subject then has a number of learning tasks to serve teachers as they help children achieve a range of IPC learning goals.

To view example units of work, you can view them here.

Assessment for Learning

How do we know children have learned?
The IPC is a learning-focused curriculum; designed to help children learn and to enjoy what they are learning. To be learning-focused means that we have to be assessment and evaluation-focused too. Both assessment and evaluation matter because they are ways in which we find out whether children are learning.

Knowledge, skills and understanding are learned differently, therefore taught differently and assessed or evaluated differently:

Knowledge is about facts. Facts are right or wrong. The easiest way to find out whether children have learned facts is a regular test – we all know how to do that.
Skills are practical and experiential. Skills aren’t right or wrong; they are developmental and so the IPC looks at beginning, developing and mastering when it comes to skills learning. The boundaries between these three levels are not clear-cut and different people have different ideas of what each stage looks like. That’s why the IPC Assessment for Learning Programme is created the way that it is – built around rubrics.
Understanding is personal and fluid; it comes and goes. Finding out about children’s developing understandings is almost entirely a matter or judgement.

The IPC Assessment for Learning Programme (AFL)

Skills cannot be assessed by tests and they can’t reliably be assessed in one single assessment. They need time, and a consistent and simple evaluation process to support teachers. This is where the IPC Assessment for Learning Programme is best. It enables each child’s skills learning to be assessed and progressed through ‘beginning’, ‘developing’ and ‘mastering’ stages. The IPC AfL Programme provides assessments of skills for art, geography, history, information and communication technology, music, physical education, science, technology and international mindedness.