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Curriculum

A future-oriented curriculum

As the world becomes more and more complex and the volume of knowledge increases exponentially, the traditional package of knowledge and skills will not be enough to guarantee a successful career and a flourishing life. An individual’s future will depend on their ability to keep their leading-edge skills and knowledge relevant. They will need to ask the questions that will find problems we do not yet know exist and generate new procedures to solve them. For our students, future success will require agility and adaptability. 

At ISB we refer to this concept as ‘adaptive’ or ‘transferable’ expertise. Our curriculum is designed to support students to develop the understanding, skills and dispositions that will enable them to develop this expertise and, in doing so, to transfer what they have learned to unfamiliar situations and to continue learning throughout their lives.

At ISB our curriculum is designed with the future in mind.

A Curriculum that draws together the best from national systems

At ISB, our curriculum is reviewed in a regular cycle.

Each time we review a subject area, we analyse a sample of the latest research on teaching and learning in that area. We then examine some of the more recent examples of national curricula in English for that subject. As an international school, it is often not appropriate for us to simply use a curriculum from one national system because:

  • Our students return to move on to many different locations in the world
  • The content of our curriculum needs to use truly global examples
  • We need to ensure that our students are well prepared for the multiple pathways we provide for them in the final years of school
  • Our commitment to developing ‘adaptive expertise’ means we need to ensure that our curriculum contains the building blocks which can be used to achieve this.

We, therefore, select the most appropriate recent example to draw from and combine the highest quality aspects of each in order to best meet the needs of our international students. 
 

ISB students are studying