Running the IB Engine

Create the academic year first. Every IB record made afterwards is stamped with it, which is what keeps a past year reproducible once the current year's records start changing.

Then load the framework your programmes run against, along with any standards, objectives and policies your school adds on top of it.

• Curriculum library holds framework elements alongside your school's own standards.
• Concept library holds key and related concepts per programme. Its coverage dashboard stays empty until units are mapped in stage three.
• IB roles is where coordinators and supervisors are named. Do this now — later stages check it before allowing an approval.

Build the map before the units. PYP schools work in the programme of inquiry — central ideas, lines of inquiry and concepts across the transdisciplinary themes. MYP schools build units carrying a statement of inquiry, a global context and criteria-tagged tasks.

Curriculum maps keep version history, so a unit revised in March does not silently rewrite what was taught in October.

This is the stage schools most often skip, and the one everything downstream depends on. A mapping is a typed link from a unit to an objective or standard. Coverage, gap detection and accreditation readiness are all counted from these links.

Learning experiences are the activities between a unit and its assessment, tagged to the same elements. The gap detector reads all of it and reports unmapped objectives, under-assessed ones, and elements over-used across the school.

Criteria and strands are defined once per subject and versioned, so a judgement made in September can still be read correctly in June. Teachers record criterion levels from 0 to 8 against tasks, and the 1 to 7 grade is derived rather than typed in.

Where several teachers mark the same task, each records an independent judgement first. The standardisation session shows the variance between them and records the agreed position, so the conversation that resolved a disagreement is part of the record rather than a memory.

The evidence graph is the single store every other area links into. One artefact can support a unit, an ATL judgement and an accreditation practice at once without being uploaded three times.

ATL progression moves per student from introduced to demonstrated, each step carrying evidence. Growth and reflection show that timeline alongside learner profile coverage and the student's own reflections.

• Projects — the PYP exhibition, MYP personal and community projects, and service as action.
• DP and CP core — internal assessment, extended essay, TOK and CAS through their milestones, with the supervisors named in stage one.
• DP risk and drafts — where a component is slipping, plus the draft and supervisor feedback loop.
• Inquiry engine — student questions moving from wonder, to investigation, to answer.

The copilots draft; people decide. Unit plans, rubrics, feedback and report comments are generated from your school's own records and arrive as drafts with a named approver.

The AI Hub is the one front door: ask about your school, your documents, the research or a piece of writing, and it routes the question to the right specialist — the Writer, the Data Analyst, school knowledge or research — and cites what it used. Drafts are edited before anything is sent, and proposed actions become tasks only when a person approves them.

Intelligence, inside the hub, shows what is likely next if nothing changes: a weekly attendance projection with its assumptions and range, and early warnings that show their evidence before their severity, each one a click from a task or a grounded question.

School Copilot answers questions in plain language through permission-checked tools and cites the data behind each answer. Students to review surfaces school-observable patterns worth an educator's eye — it is not a diagnosis and makes no judgement about a child.

Report cards pull the whole graph — grades, ATL, reflections, projects — into one publishable card. Because the chain was built in order, nothing here is retyped.

The IB command centre is the coordinator's whole-school view, ordered by exception rather than as a list, and read-only by design. Accreditation runs practices, to linked evidence, to gaps, to actions, moving each practice from not started, to in progress, to met.