The International Primary Curriculum (IPC) is one of the only comprehensive curricula in the world equally committed to improving learning and developing international mindedness. It focuses on developing knowledge, skills and understanding of subjects set within child-friendly, relevant, cross-curricular thematic units of work that are creative and challenging for children of all abilities.
The IPC has over 140 different thematic units of learning; all modern-day topics appealing to all ages of primary children. This enables young children to remain motivated through the learning of science, geography, history and so on.
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. The IPC’s engaging approach also encourages parental involvement through a range of initiatives.
Each IPC unit incorporates most of the core subjects including science, history, geography, ICT, art and PE and provides opportunities to incorporate language arts and mathematics. 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. These learning goals are deliberately explicit, designed to make sure that teachers distinguish clearly between children’s learning of knowledge, skills and understanding.
Each IPC unit has embedded within it learning-focused activities that help young children to start developing a global awareness and gain an increasing sense of the ‘other’. Every unit creates opportunities to look at learning of the theme through a local perspective, a national perspective and an international perspective.
With schools in over 90 countries learning with the IPC, there are opportunities for children to share their local experiences related to an IPC unit with children in dramatically different environments.
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. However, the learning tasks are purely a guide and provide plenty of scope for creative teaching, personalisation to the class and locality, and development on the theme as well as linking with other schools learning with the IPC. With IPC member schools in countries as diverse as Swaziland, Malaysia, Qatar, Japan and Russia, this sharing of learning opportunities ensures that no school, however remote, feels isolated.
The IPC is part of Fieldwork Education. For more information about the IPC visit For more information about the IPC visit fieldworkeducation.com/curriculums/primary-years