What the IB requires, and what the policy is for
An access and inclusion policy is one of the written policies an IB World School is required to have, alongside the language, assessment and academic integrity policies. It is requested at authorisation and revisited at programme evaluation, and it is one of the few policy documents a family may ask to see directly, because it is the one that determines what their child is entitled to.
The IB's current access and inclusion policy documentation, and the assessment procedures for each programme, are the authority on definitions, required evidence and what a school can grant itself versus what needs IB authorisation. What follows describes what schools put in the document and what a visiting team checks, not a substitute for reading the current policy.
The document does two jobs schools often blur together: it states the school's philosophy of inclusion for every learner, and it sets out the procedural pathway for a student who needs an arrangement to access assessment. Both belong in the same policy, but they read differently and should not be written as one continuous statement of values.
Where most access and inclusion policies fail their first real test
The common failure is not the philosophy section — most schools write a fluent paragraph about valuing every learner. It is that the procedural half cannot survive contact with an actual case: a family asks for an arrangement, and nobody can say from the document who assesses the request, what evidence is needed, or how long it takes.
A visiting team, and more urgently a parent, tests the document by trying to use it. A policy that reads well but cannot answer what happens next for a specific student has the same problem an assessment policy has when nobody can say why a grade was derived the way it was.
Inclusion as a whole-school philosophy, kept concrete
This section should say what the school believes about educating a diverse range of learners in the same classroom, and — more usefully — what that means for planning and teaching rather than only for a named list of students with identified needs.
State the school's position on differentiated planning as the default rather than an accommodation, what training exists for teaching staff, and how learning support is resourced — a named team, a ratio, a budget line — rather than described only in principle. A school that cannot point to who does this work has written a belief statement, not a policy.
Identifying a learning support or access need
State how a need is identified: through a professional diagnosis brought by the family, through the school's own observation and referral process, or both, and who receives that information first.
This is also where the evidence rules belong. The IB's current documentation sets out what a psychological or medical report must contain and how recent it must be to be accepted, and it is stricter than many schools assume — a diagnosis with no description of the effect on assessment, or a report past its recency window, is not sufficient on its own. State the recency requirement the school applies and who checks it.
- Who receives a family's request or a professional report first
- What evidence the school requires before acting
- How the school's own observation, separate from a family-provided diagnosis, feeds in
- Who has the final decision, and who a family can go to if they disagree
The usual-way-of-working rule, and why it catches schools out
An arrangement the IB authorises for external assessment has to reflect the student's usual way of working in class and in internal assessment — not something introduced for the first time at the exam. This is the single most common reason a request is refused or delayed, and it is entirely within a school's control.
The policy should say explicitly that arrangements are provided in ordinary teaching and internal assessment before they are ever requested for an external one, and that the school keeps a record showing this rather than just a memory of it. A school that only starts providing extra time when the IB paperwork begins is describing exactly the pattern the rule exists to catch.
Access arrangements needing IB authorisation, and those a school can grant itself
Not every arrangement needs the IB's approval. Some — a separate room, coloured overlays, seating position — a school can decide itself and simply record. Others that change the actual conditions of assessment — additional time, a reader, a scribe, a word processor where not otherwise permitted, modified papers, extended rest breaks — need IB authorisation through the request process for the session.
State which category each common arrangement falls into, so a coordinator is not deciding that from memory under deadline pressure, and state the submission deadline the school works to internally, which should sit well ahead of the IB's own deadline for the session.
Inclusive assessment versus an individual arrangement
These are different tools and the policy should not conflate them. Inclusive assessment design — clear instructions, uncluttered layout, avoiding unnecessary language complexity in a non-language subject — benefits every student and needs no authorisation because it changes the task for everyone, not the conditions for one student.
An individual access arrangement changes the conditions for a named student because of an identified need. A policy that only describes the second has skipped the cheaper, whole-cohort improvement that reduces how many individual arrangements are needed in the first place.
Review, and what happens as a student's need changes
State how often an arrangement is reviewed, what triggers an earlier review — a change in diagnosis, a change in how the student is coping, a transition between programmes — and who is responsible for noticing a review is due rather than waiting for a family to ask.
A continuum school moving a student from MYP to DP should treat that transition as an automatic review point, not an assumption that whatever was authorised before simply carries forward. Programmes assess differently, and an arrangement suited to coursework may not translate directly to a timed written examination.
What a system has to do for the policy to stay true
This section names our own product, so read it as that. Everything above holds whatever software a school uses, including none.
The gap between a well-written inclusion policy and what actually happens for a student is usually not unwillingness — it is that the file a decision depends on is scattered across email, a shared drive and a coordinator's memory, and nobody can produce it quickly when a family, a teacher or a visiting team asks.
skodle's curriculum library and accreditation module hold a school's own policies alongside the IB practices they answer to, with version history and an audit entry on every change, so a review date does not go quietly stale between programme evaluations.
The honest limit: skodle does not currently hold individual students' access arrangements, learning-support plans or professional reports as tracked records. The identification, evidence and review procedure this policy describes is coordinated outside the platform today, and a school should not describe it here as something the system does for them.
Ownership and the date on the front
Name an owner — typically the head of school or a designated inclusion coordinator, working with each programme coordinator — and commit to a review interval, at minimum annual, with an earlier trigger whenever the school's population of identified students changes meaningfully.
As with the other three policies it sits alongside, the date on the document is one of the first things a visiting team checks, because a policy years past its stated review says something about the school's review culture no sentence inside the document can undo.
The mistakes worth avoiding
Four recur. Writing the philosophy section well and leaving the procedure vague, which is the half that actually gets tested. Authorising an arrangement for an exam the student has never used in class, which fails the usual-way-of-working rule. Treating every accommodation as needing IB authorisation, which overloads the coordinator with paperwork the school could have decided itself. And leaving programme transitions to assumption rather than a scheduled review.
The version that works names who does what, keeps the evidence a decision depends on somewhere findable, and treats a programme transition as a reason to look again rather than to carry forward.
