Writing for the people who run schools

The MYP unit planner asks for a specific chain of thinking, and most of the difficulty comes from filling it in the order the form presents rather than the order the thinking actually happens.

Approaches to learning are the part of the MYP most often written into planners and least often taught. The gap is not usually neglect — it is that skills are hard to see, so they are hard to evidence.

A programme of inquiry is a whole-school document, which is why it is so often a whole-school problem: it is built collaboratively, reviewed rarely, and quietly drifts out of balance.

Most of the pain of authorisation comes from collecting evidence backwards — assembling proof of practice in the weeks before a visit, about a period that has already passed.

The Holistic Progress Card is not a new report format with more boxes. It asks for a different kind of evidence, gathered by more people, about more than attainment — and that is why it is difficult.

The International Baccalaureate is four programmes covering ages 3 to 19, and a way of teaching that asks students to investigate rather than memorise. Here is what each programme involves, what an IB World School actually is, and the questions worth asking before choosing one.

Running an IB school is not running a conventional school with extra paperwork. This is what to evaluate — curriculum planning, assessment, portfolios, reporting and authorisation evidence — the questions to put to every vendor, and an honest account of where skodle fits and where it does not.

Most IB schools reach a point where the platform they started on no longer matches how they work. This is an honest map of the alternatives, the five questions that actually separate them, and a direct account of what skodle does differently — including the one thing it does not replace.

Every MYP subject is assessed against four criteria, each marked out of 8, and the total out of 32 becomes a grade from 1 to 7. The mechanics are simple. What takes teachers a year or two to get right is the judgement inside them: what a level 5 actually looks like, why you cannot average, and how often each criterion has to be seen.

Two teachers marking the same essay against the same criterion will disagree by a band more often than either expects. Standardisation is the routine that finds the disagreement before it reaches a report. Here is a way to run it that takes an hour, produces a decision, and leaves something behind.

Every IB World School is evaluated on a rolling cycle, and the heart of the process is a self-study the school writes about itself. Schools that treat it as a year-long collection of evidence find it clarifying. Schools that treat it as a document to be produced in the final term find it exhausting and learn less. The difference is entirely in how the year before is run.

The exhibition is the PYP's culminating inquiry: students in the final year choose a real issue, investigate it collaboratively, take action and share what they learned with the community. It is the most visible thing a PYP school does all year, and the schools that run it well have decided most things before the students walk in. Here is what to decide, and when.

The personal project is the MYP's final piece of independent work: a student picks a goal that matters to them, makes something, and writes about the learning. It is assessed against published criteria, standardised within the school and moderated by the IB. Most of what goes wrong is predictable, and most of it is the adults' to prevent.

A student needs 75% attendance to sit the CBSE Class 10 and Class 12 board examinations. The rule is simple; the arithmetic, the exemptions and the paperwork are where schools and families get caught. Here is how it works, what the board will and will not condone, and the records a school should be keeping from the first day of the session.

Affiliation is how a school earns the right to present candidates for the CBSE board examinations. The process is online, the requirements are published, and it still takes schools longer than it should, almost always because a document was missing, expired or in the wrong name. Here is the shape of it, the papers to gather, and the places where months disappear.

The IB Diploma Programme runs on a fixed set of deadlines: registration, the extended essay and TOK uploads, internal assessment marks and samples, predicted grades, then the examinations themselves. The IB publishes the dates each session, and a coordinator's real job is the internal calendar that sits weeks ahead of them. Here is the shape of a May-session year, and the dates a school should set for itself.

Every year of the MYP must include at least one interdisciplinary unit: a unit in which two or more subject groups combine their ways of knowing to understand something neither could alone, assessed against its own criteria. Schools tend to either dread it or reduce it to a shared topic. Neither is necessary. Here is what the requirement asks, how to plan a unit that meets it, and how the assessment works.

In CBSE Classes 9 and 10, 80 marks of a subject come from the written examination and 20 from internal assessment carried out by the school across the year. The 20 are split into named components, each with its own evidence, and the marks are uploaded to the board before the examinations. Here is what the components are, how to run them without a year-end scramble, and what the board expects a school to be able to show.

The APAAR ID is the permanent academic identifier every school student in India is meant to carry, created by the school with a parent's consent and linked to the student's academic records. The Ministry of Education and the boards have asked schools to generate one for every student, and most of the difficulty is a name that does not match. Here is what the ID is, how a school generates it, and the failures that stall the process.

Assessment in the PYP is not a grading scheme. The programme prescribes no scale, no percentage and no letter; it asks a school to monitor learning as it happens, document it, measure it against agreed goals and report it honestly, with the student involved at every step. Schools coming from marks-based systems find that unfamiliar. Here is what the programme actually asks, and what it looks like in a report a parent can read.

The theory of knowledge exhibition asks a student to pick one of the IB's prompts, choose three objects that bring it into the real world, and write a short commentary explaining how each object relates to the prompt. It is internally assessed, moderated by the IB, and worth about a third of the TOK grade. It is also the piece of the diploma most often misunderstood by students, who reach for beautiful objects when the task rewards specific ones.

The extended essay is a 4,000-word independent research paper, and its supervisor is the one adult the IB requires to walk alongside the student: to meet them, to check the work is their own, and to record three reflection sessions. Supervision is bounded on both sides. Too little and the student drifts for months; too much and the essay stops being the student's, which moderation can see. Here is the role as the IB describes it, and how to do it well.

Over successive sessions the CBSE has shifted its board examinations toward competency-based questions: items that ask students to apply what they know to an unfamiliar situation rather than reproduce what they memorised. The share of such questions has grown to half the paper, the formats have multiplied, and a school that still teaches to the old paper is preparing students for an examination that no longer exists.

Every CBSE-affiliated school must publish a set of information about itself on its own website, in a format the board prescribes, and keep it current. The board checks it before inspections, parents read it before admissions, and a page that is missing, outdated or wrong is one of the quickest ways to turn a routine affiliation matter into a query. Here is what the disclosure contains, what each section needs, and how to keep it right without a scramble.

The IB's inclusive access arrangements let a candidate with a learning support requirement, a medical condition or a temporary injury be assessed on what they know rather than on the barrier. Some arrangements a school may put in place itself; others need the IB's authorisation, with evidence, by a deadline. Schools that understand the difference request early and get what their students need. Schools that do not request in the exam term, and are refused.