“Bradbury is an authorised International Baccalaureate World School and completed its last joint evaluation visit from the IB in 2023.”
What is an IB education?
IB’s mission and philosophy:
At the centre of an International Baccalaureate (IB) education are students aged 3 to 19 with unique learning styles, strengths and challenges. The IB focuses on each student as a whole person. Thus, IB programmes address not only cognitive development but social, emotional and physical well-being. The aim is to develop inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people with adaptable skills to tackle society’s complex challenges and who will help to make it a better, more peaceful world.
Validating the efficacy of the IB’s four programmes are research and more than 45 years of practical experience. IB programmes emphasise learning how to learn and teaching students to value learning as an essential, integral part of their everyday lives.
The IB promotes the development of schools that:
- inspire students to ask questions, pursue personal aspirations, set challenging goals and develop the persistence to achieve those goals.
- develop knowledgeable students who make reasoned ethical judgments and acquire the flexibility, perseverance and confidence they need in order to bring about meaningful change.
- encourage healthy relationships, individual and shared responsibility and effective teamwork.
Measuring Outcomes
To measure what students have learned and to monitor their progress, IB teachers use a range of assessment strategies including formative assessments that provide ongoing feed-back that can be used by instructors to develop their teaching and by students to identify their strengths and weaknesses, and target areas that need improvement. Teachers use summative assessments which are internationally benchmarked for older students, and are criterion-referenced. This means students are measured against a set of agreed upon learning outcomes rather than graded on a “bell curve” as in norm-referenced assessments.
In the Primary Years Programme (PYP), the IB’s youngest students learn about and use knowledge, concepts and skills from a variety of subjects to explore six transdisciplinary themes and begin to develop the attributes of the learner profile.
The Middle Years Programme (MYP) is a challenging framework that encourages students to make practical connections between their studies and the real world and culminates in a personal project. Students who complete the MYP are well-prepared to undertake the IB Diploma Programme.
- Diploma Programme (DP) and Career-related Programme (CP)
In the final two years of high school, students can choose to enter either:
- the Diploma Programme (DP), a curriculum which emphasises both breadth and depth of knowledge. The DP is made up of six subject groups and a core, comprising theory of knowledge (TOK), creativity, activity, service (CAS) and a research paper of up to 4,000 words, the extended essay (EE);
- or, the Career-related Programme (CP). The CP combines two IB diploma courses with school-based, career-related study. It equips students to pursue further education or to enter their chosen career path immediately.
What is the Primary Years Programme?
Introduction for Parents
Introducing the PYP to Bradbury families 2024
Click here for the video
Expansion 2: PYP Terminology
See IB PYP Glossary of Terms
- Action: Taking responsible, ethical, and meaningful steps as a result of learning. International Mindedness Associated words: The action cycle- A process involving choosing, acting, reflecting, and demonstrating the impact of one's actions. How do we want students to act?; reflect, choose, act.
- Additional Concepts: A concept is a “big idea”—a principle or notion that is enduring and is not constrained by a particular origin, subject matter or place in time (Erickson 2008). Concepts represent ideas that are broad, abstract, timeless and universal.
- Agency: voice, choice, and ownership When learners have agency, the role of the teacher and student changes; the relationship between a teacher and a student is viewed as a partnership.
- Approaches to Learning (ATLs): Skills that help students become self-regulated learners, that students develop across subject areas and apply to real-world situations.These are thinking, research, self-management, social, and communication skills.
- Assessment: the process of evaluating and gathering information about an individual's or a group's understanding, knowledge, and skills. Associated: four dimensions of assessment: MONITORING, documenting, measuring, and reporting.
- Assessment Criteria: Descriptors outlining levels of achievement for different aspects of learning.
- Learner Profile Attributes: Dispositions that contribute to the well-being of individuals and the learning community. A set of attributes that learners are encouraged to develop, reflecting the IB mission and values. International MindednessThese are: inquirers, knowledgeable, thinkers, communicators, principled, open-minded, caring, risk takers, balanced, reflective.
- Central Idea: A statement summarising the main concept addressed in a unit of inquiry. The central must: Central ideas are written to be globally significant, provoke student inquiry and should be broad, timeless, universal and abstract.
- Collaboration: planning and reflecting together—inquiring into the effectiveness of their teaching, and reflecting on its impact on learning.
- Concept-Based Learning: Focusing on big ideas and enduring understandings rather than isolated facts.
- Conceptual Understanding: Grasping the deeper, abstract ideas that connect and organise knowledge.
- Disciplinary: refers to anything related to a specific field of study or discipline.
- Differentiation: Adapting teaching strategies to meet the diverse needs of learners.
- Early learner: Experiences during the early years (3–6-year-olds) lay the foundation for positive social and cognitive learning in future years (McCoy et al. 2017).
- Formative Assessment: Ongoing assessment during the learning process to provide feedback and inform instruction.
- Global Contexts: Overarching themes that provide a framework for exploring real-world issues and making connections to the transdisciplinary themes.
- Inquiry: a teaching and learning approach that encourages actively engaging in the process of exploring, questioning, and investigating the world around them. Associated: Inquiry Cycle: The process of inquiry involving exploring, engaging, explaining, and reflecting.
- Interdisciplinary: This approach promotes collaboration and the blending of knowledge from different areas to create new insights, foster innovation, and solve problems in a more comprehensive way.
- International Mindedness: A concept promoting understanding, respect, and appreciation for different cultures and perspectives.
- Specified Concepts: Fundamental concepts that form the basis of understanding within the PYP. These are: form, function, causation, change, connection, perspective, responsibility (and reflection - which should be part of all learning).
- Learner agency: They direct their learning with a strong sense of identity and self-belief, and in conjunction with others, thereby building a sense of community and awareness of the opinions, values and needs of others through voice and choice.
- Learning environment: the physical, social, and psychological context in which learning takes place.
- Lines of Inquiry: Specific aspects or perspectives of a central idea explored during a unit of inquiry. These are fact/knowledge driven and support the understanding of the central idea.
- Multidisciplinary: The IB definition: Multidisciplinary learning begins and ends with subject-based content and skills (Beane 1997). The boundaries among the subjects remain.
- Play based learning: is an educational approach that uses play as the primary method for teaching and learning. It is rooted in the belief that play is a vital part of a child’s development, fostering cognitive, social, emotional, and physical growth.
- PYP Exhibition: A culminating project in the final year of the PYP, where students demonstrate their understanding and take action on a real-world issue.
- Summative Assessment: Evaluation of learning at the end of a unit or period.
- Transdisciplinary: is a curriculum-organising principle to offer students a broad, balanced, conceptual and connected learning experience. Transdisciplinarity transcends subjects. It begins and ends with a problem, an issue or a theme. Students’ interests and questions form the heart of transdisciplinary learning.IB definition: “with the links and the transfer of knowledge, methods, concepts and models from one discipline to another”.
- Transdisciplinary Theme: Broad, organising ideas that guide inquiry across multiple subject areas. These are: Who We Are*, Where We are in Place and Time, How We Express Ourselves*, How the World Works, How We Organise Ourselves, and Sharing the Planet (*2 of the 4 units taught in Early Years).
- Translanguaging: Translanguaging is a process in which students draw on known languages, naturally and flexibly, combining their elements to meet communicative and social needs.
- UOI (Unit of Inquiry): The planned, taught, and assessed units at each grade level under the 6 (or 4 for EY) Transdisciplinary Themes.
*IBO documentation and wording was used to define some of these terms.
Programme of Inquiry 2024-2025
