The international primary curriculum explained

What the IPC is

The International Primary Curriculum is a thematic framework for primary-age children, typically children aged five to eleven, that organises learning around cross-disciplinary units of work rather than separately timetabled subjects. Each unit (the IPC calls them themes) integrates science, history, geography, the arts, technology, society and physical education around a central question or topic; mathematics and English language and literacy sit alongside the framework as separate subjects, taught using whichever mathematics and English national curriculum the school has chosen to pair with the IPC.

The framework specifies learning goals at three age-bands, called Mileposts, and a set of personal learning attributes (the IPC calls them learner traits) that run through every unit. Teachers plan units around the IPC themes and the IPC's learning goals, draw on the published unit resources Fieldwork Education provides, and adapt the unit to their specific class, their school context and the children's interests. The framework is deliberately flexible: two IPC schools running the same theme will produce two very different sets of lessons depending on the local context and the teacher's preferences.

The IPC is best understood as a planning and progression framework rather than a syllabus. It does not specify in detail what children should learn each week; it specifies the overall learning goals across the primary phase and the recommended themes that get them there. The day-to-day teaching is the responsibility of the school, the year-team and the individual teacher. Strong IPC schools use this latitude to produce thoughtful, child-centred teaching; weaker IPC schools use it as a substitute for academic rigour, and the difference is sometimes meaningful for the children who pass through them.

Who designs the IPC and its history

The IPC is designed and maintained by Fieldwork Education, a private UK education company that also publishes the International Middle Years Curriculum (IMYC) for ages eleven to fourteen and the International Early Years Curriculum (IEYC) for ages two to five. Fieldwork Education was founded by Martin Skelton and Graeme Brotherton in the late 1980s as a primary curriculum consultancy and developed the first version of the IPC for Shell international schools in the 1990s. The IPC entered the wider international school market from 2000 onwards and is now part of the Nord Anglia Education group, which acquired Fieldwork in 2013.

The IPC has been updated three times since launch, with the current version (often called IPC Next Generation or IPC 3.0 inside the network) introduced in 2020. The third edition refreshes the learning goals to emphasise sustainability, digital citizenship and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and adds new units on the climate transition, on artificial intelligence and on the experience of migration. Schools using the IPC re-licence the framework on a three-year cycle and receive the updated units, the updated learning goals and the updated assessment resources as part of the licence.

How the IPC is structured

The IPC is structured around three concentric layers. The outermost layer is the set of personal learning traits (sometimes called the personal learning goals), which run across the entire primary phase and include attributes such as adaptability, communication, cooperation, enquiry, morality, resilience, respect and thoughtfulness. The middle layer is the subject-specific learning goals, grouped under science, technology, history, geography, the arts, society, music, physical education, computing and international perspective. The innermost layer is the themes, the cross-disciplinary units that pull the subject learning goals together around a single question or context.

Schools choose the themes they teach from the IPC's published library, which currently runs to around 130 units across the three Mileposts. A typical IPC school teaches six to eight units per year, with each unit lasting four to six weeks. The themes range across the obvious (Egyptians, Romans, the human body, the solar system, plants and habitats) and the more contemporary (cities of the future, the global food chain, the great pandemic, machines and minds). Each theme has a published Knowledge Harvest (the launch activity), a sequence of subject lessons, a culminating activity (the Exit Point) and an associated assessment framework.

The three Mileposts

The IPC divides the primary phase into three Mileposts. Milepost 1 covers ages five to seven (Years 1 and 2 in the English system, Grades K to 1 in the American system). Milepost 2 covers ages seven to nine (Years 3 and 4, Grades 2 to 3). Milepost 3 covers ages nine to eleven (Years 5 and 6, Grades 4 to 5). At each Milepost the framework specifies learning goals that the children should reach by the end of that two-year band, with corresponding assessment criteria.

The Milepost structure is one of the IPC's distinctive features. Most national curricula assess at the end of each academic year, which puts pressure on the teacher to move every child through the same content at the same pace. The Milepost structure allows children to make progress at slightly different rates within the two-year band, with the assessment falling at the end of the band rather than the end of each year. Schools use this flexibility either to absorb late-arriving international school joiners (the IPC was designed in part for the highly-mobile international school sector) or to support children who need a slower start in Year 1 or Year 3 but can catch up by the end of the Milepost.

How a thematic unit works in class

A typical Milepost 2 unit, say on the Ancient Egyptians, runs roughly as follows. Week one is the Knowledge Harvest, during which the teacher elicits what the children already know about Egypt, ancient civilisations, the Nile, the pyramids and the wider context. This forms a baseline against which progress is measured. The teacher then maps the learning goals from history, geography, science, the arts and society against the planned lessons for the four-week unit. History looks at the dynastic structure, daily life, social hierarchy and religion; geography looks at the Nile and the role of the river in agriculture; science looks at the chemistry of mummification and the engineering of the pyramids; the arts look at Egyptian artistic conventions; society looks at the comparative civilisation question.

Across the four weeks the children produce a portfolio of evidence: a piece of historical writing, a science investigation, a geographical sketch, a piece of art, a presentation. The Exit Point at the end of the unit pulls the work together: it might be a museum-style exhibition for the parents, a presentation to another class, a short film or a piece of devised drama. The IPC's emphasis on the Exit Point is one of its strongest features and one of the things parents notice most about IPC schools: children regularly take ownership of presenting their learning to a wider audience, which builds confidence and articulacy from a young age.

Assessment in the IPC

The IPC does not run external examinations or formal end-of-stage tests. Assessment is built into each unit through the Knowledge Harvest baseline, the in-unit subject work, the Exit Point and the teacher's professional judgement against the published learning goals. Fieldwork Education provides a structured assessment framework that allows teachers to record progress against learning goals at three levels (beginning, developing, mastering) for each unit, and against the personal learning traits across the year.

The absence of external examinations is a deliberate design choice, not an oversight. The IPC's authors argue that primary-age children learn best in low-stakes environments and that the externally-referenced examination culture of some national systems is not well-suited to children aged five to eleven. The trade-off is that parents and schools must work harder to benchmark IPC progress against external standards. Strong IPC schools pair the framework with externally-referenced tests in mathematics and English (the GL Assessments suite, the InCAS battery, the Cambridge Primary Checkpoint or the standard CAT cognitive ability tests) to provide that external benchmark; weaker IPC schools rely on the internal IPC assessment alone, which makes it harder for parents to know how their child is progressing against the wider international school market.

What the IPC does well

The IPC has three strengths that have driven its adoption across the international school sector. The first is the international ethos. The framework is genuinely international in design rather than a British curriculum lightly internationalised: the units draw on case studies from around the world, the international perspective learning strand is built into every unit, and the personal learning traits are framed in ways that work for multicultural classrooms. For internationally mobile families, the IPC produces a primary-school experience that matches the family's wider life in a way that single-nation curricula struggle to do.

The second is the integration of subjects. Children who learn through cross-disciplinary themes build connections between subjects more naturally than children who experience subjects as separately timetabled blocks. The cognitive psychology evidence supports this for primary-age children specifically: integration helps younger children build understanding of how knowledge connects, which is harder to retrofit at secondary level. The IPC's Exit Point culture also builds presentation, collaboration and confidence in ways that single-subject teaching does less well.

The third is the curriculum design quality. The IPC's published units are well-designed, well-resourced and well-aligned to the learning goals. A teacher arriving at a new IPC school has a strong set of starting resources for every unit on the curriculum map. This makes the IPC particularly resilient to teacher turnover, which is a substantial issue in international schools where the average teacher tenure is two to four years. The unit resources also make it easier for less experienced teachers to deliver good lessons quickly, which matters in markets where local teacher recruitment is difficult.

Where the IPC struggles

The IPC has matching weaknesses. The first is the absence of an externally-referenced mathematics and English component. Schools have to pair the IPC with a separate mathematics and English curriculum (the English national curriculum, the Cambridge Primary mathematics and English, or a US elementary equivalent), and the quality of the resulting primary programme depends heavily on how well the pairing is implemented. Schools that take the IPC seriously and pair it with a strong mathematics and English curriculum produce excellent primary outcomes; schools that treat the IPC as a stand-alone curriculum and under-resource the mathematics and English side produce weaker outcomes, and the children arrive at secondary school behind their Cambridge or IB PYP peers in core literacy and numeracy.

The second is the variability of delivery. The framework's flexibility is a strength in capable hands and a weakness in less experienced ones. Two IPC schools running the same theme can produce very different learning outcomes for the children, and parents have less ability to benchmark the quality of teaching against external standards because the IPC does not publish externally-referenced assessment data. The third is the relative weakness of the assessment system. Without external tests or benchmarking, parents are reliant on the school's internal assessment, which is often less detailed and less informative than the equivalent assessment in a Cambridge Primary or IB PYP school. The IPC versus Cambridge Primary comparison covers this trade-off in detail.

IPC versus Cambridge Primary

Cambridge Primary is the other major international primary curriculum. Cambridge Assessment International Education, the curriculum authority based at the University of Cambridge, designed and maintains Cambridge Primary as a subject-by-subject framework with externally-referenced progression tests and an end-of-stage Checkpoint examination. Cambridge Primary is therefore the natural counterpart to the IPC: where the IPC is thematic and integrative, Cambridge Primary is subject-by-subject and externally examined. Many strong international schools combine the two by using Cambridge Primary for English, mathematics and science (the subjects with strong Cambridge frameworks) and the IPC for the wider topic-based learning. The head-to-head comparison covers the operational detail.

IPC versus the IB Primary Years Programme

The IB Primary Years Programme is the closest direct competitor to the IPC at primary level. Both are thematic frameworks, both run from ages three to eleven, both emphasise inquiry-based learning and both produce internationally-oriented primary education. The differences are subtle but real. The IB PYP is a more prescriptive framework with a stronger emphasis on transdisciplinary themes and a more developed inquiry methodology; teachers in PYP schools typically have more structured professional development through the IB's authorisation and accreditation system. The IPC is a lighter-touch framework with more flexibility for the school to adapt, which is a benefit in stable contexts and a risk in more variable ones. The IB PYP also benefits from the wider IB ecosystem, including the MYP and the Diploma, which produces a coherent ten-to-sixteen-to-nineteen pathway through the IB framework that the IPC does not provide on its own. The IPC's international mindedness strand piece covers the closest IPC equivalent.

How to spot a strong IPC school

The strongest IPC schools share four features. First, they pair the IPC with a robust externally-referenced mathematics and English curriculum (the English national curriculum or Cambridge Primary are the two most common pairings) and they sit the externally-referenced tests at the end of each phase. Second, they invest in IPC-specific professional development for their teachers, particularly the IPC's authorisation training and the regular Fieldwork Education refresher programmes. Third, they have a stable senior leadership team with deep experience of running the IPC, which is the single biggest determinant of the quality of delivery. Fourth, they communicate clearly and frequently with parents about how their child is progressing against external benchmarks, not just against the IPC's internal learning goals.

Questions to ask on a school tour. Which national curriculum does the school pair the IPC with for mathematics and English, and how is it timetabled? What external tests does the school sit, and what are the most recent results compared with the international average? How many of the teachers are IPC-trained, and what does the in-school professional development programme look like? How does the school report progress to parents, and what does a year-end report look like? The curriculum hub covers the wider primary curriculum landscape across the international school sector.

Fees at IPC schools

IPC schools cluster across the middle of the international school fee range. The framework's licence fees are modest (around USD 4,000 to USD 7,000 per school per year for the basic IPC licence) and the unit resources are included, so the IPC adds little to the underlying cost base of an international primary school. Fees at IPC schools therefore reflect the wider economics of the city and the school, not the IPC itself. In Dubai, IPC primary fees typically run AED 35,000 to AED 60,000 per year (USD 9,500 to USD 16,400). In Singapore, IPC primary fees run SGD 22,000 to SGD 38,000 (USD 16,200 to USD 28,000). In Bangkok, IPC primary fees run THB 380,000 to THB 720,000 (USD 10,500 to USD 19,800). The fees explorer covers city-by-city detail, and the Dubai city guide covers the Dubai market specifically.

Related guides

• IPC versus Cambridge Primary
• The IPC's international mindedness strand
• All curricula compared

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