Preamble
The Secondary School curriculum aims to deliver a broad, balanced, coherent and consistent programme of learning with clear and smooth progression routes designed for the needs of all students. The curriculum supports the development of students and teachers who are confident, responsible, reflective, and innovative and engaged. Students who, in other words, are developing the attributes of the IB Learner Profile.
Students are provided with inspiring and relevant content, and a breadth of subject knowledge and skill development appropriate to their developmental stage.
The language background of each student is key to the support they need to access the curriculum. A first priority is to ensure that, because all subjects (with the obvious exception of modern foreign languages) are taught in the medium of English, they are openly accessible to those students with English as their second or third language. When students with almost no facility in English are enrolled, it is a continual source of inspiration, professional satisfaction and, frankly, delight to witness how smoothly and rapidly they integrate into the mainstream, and can then unleash their academic potential.
Clear and meaningful educational standards are essential to ensure accurate measurement of progress and achievement and allow for international benchmarking and comparability. Assessment, therefore, is considered to be an intrinsic element of the curriculum, having a number of purposes that are essential to the educational process. These include assessment for learning (providing feedback in support of the learning process), and summative assessment (determining a student’s level of performance).
The quality of pedagogy is a critical determining factor in our students’ development. To maintain and improve the quality of our pedagogy, ongoing professional development, both self-directed and sourced from external providers, such as the International Baccalaureate Organization, is an essential, prominent and continuous part of an ARIS teacher’s life.