Start with the whole school
Before creating anything, map the year groups and read what is already taught. A school that starts from a blank grid loses the units teachers already run well, and one that starts from a folder of planners can see at once what is repeated and what is missing.
Gather the current unit planners, the school's mission and the context of the community. The IB says each school develops its programme of inquiry to reflect its own community, so this context is an input, not decoration.
Decide who is in the room
The PYP coordinator usually leads, but a programme of inquiry written by one person is not the school's. Include a teacher from every year group, the specialist teachers, and someone from senior leadership who can protect the time.
Specialists are the most commonly left out and the most commonly regretted: language, arts, physical education and other specialist teachers work across the units, and a programme built without them tends to be delivered without them.
Work across the six themes
The PYP uses six transdisciplinary themes: who we are; where we are in place and time; how we express ourselves; how the world works; how we organize ourselves; and sharing the planet. Plan across all of them for each year group, while considering progression and the specific context of your school.
The IB's current PYP documentation is the authority on how the themes apply to each age range, including the youngest students, so consult it before fixing the number of units.
Write central ideas that can carry a unit
A central idea expresses a transferable understanding and opens more than one line of inquiry. Write them as a group, test them against each other, and rewrite the weak ones. Then identify the lines of inquiry and the key and related concepts. The craft of this step is covered in PYP central ideas examples.
Where skodle fits
This section names our own product, so read it as that. The process above works with a shared spreadsheet and a room of people.
skodle gives the programme of inquiry a home once it exists: PYP units with their central idea, lines of inquiry and concepts, and a year-by-theme grid read live from them, so that when a unit changes the grid changes with it. A gap report flags repeated concepts and unused ones from the links people make, which is the review this process ends with. See the PYP programme page.
The limits. skodle does not run the workshop, write the units or decide the balance; that judgement is the team's. Its AI can suggest central ideas and lines of inquiry as a draft, drawing on the school's most recent units, and a person accepts or rejects it. The report depends on the links your team makes, there is no family-facing programme of inquiry, and the platform does not carry the official IB registration and coursework submission route.
Connect units to evidence
Link each unit with its learning experiences, assessment, student work and reflection, so the programme of inquiry is a working structure rather than a poster. A unit with no evidence attached is a plan nobody has tested.
Check it as a whole before publishing
Read the completed grid for balance across themes, spread of concepts, progression up the school, and units that bunch in one term. Fix these before the programme is published, because after publication each change has to be argued for.
Then set the review: a named owner, an annual date, and a rule that a unit change is recorded.
A realistic timeline
For a school with existing units, expect a term to audit and draft and a second to test and refine, with the whole staff seeing it before it is fixed. For a school building from scratch, it is longer, and it overlaps with the IB's own authorisation process, which has its own documentation requirements. See the evidence checklist for IB authorisation.
