What the IB requires, and what the policy is actually for
A language policy is one of the written policies an IB World School is required to have, alongside the assessment, inclusion and academic integrity policies. It is requested at authorisation and looked at again at programme evaluation.
The IB's own language policy guidance and the current programme standards and practices are the authority on what is required. Anything below describes what schools put in these documents and what a visiting team asks about, not a substitute for reading those.
The document has a narrower job than its length usually suggests. It is the school's answer to three questions: which languages does teaching happen in and why, how does the school treat languages a student already speaks, and what does a student who has neither yet get from the school while they catch up.
Why most language policies are a statement of belief with nothing underneath
The common failure here is not bad writing. It is a policy that describes an aspiration — the school values multilingualism and supports mother tongues — attached to a school where that support does not exist in any budget, timetable or named person.
A visiting team tests this the same way it tests an assessment policy: by asking a student. A student who has been in the school two years and cannot name anyone who has ever asked about their home language, or any resource in it, has just told the team more than the document did.
Write the policy against what the school is actually resourced to do, then either fund the gap or describe a smaller, true commitment. A policy promising a mother-tongue programme in every language represented at a forty-nationality school with no such programme is not aspirational; it is false in the file the IB reads first.
The philosophy section, kept short and specific
Every policy opens with a statement about why languages matter to the school, and most of them could be swapped between any two IB schools without anyone noticing. That is not a reason to cut it, but it is a reason to keep it short and make it answer something specific to this community.
The useful version says something about the actual linguistic makeup of the school, why the school chose its language or languages of instruction, and what the school believes a student loses if their existing language is treated as irrelevant to their education. A sentence equally true of a monolingual school in a different country is decoration.
Language of instruction: what the policy has to state plainly
Name the language or languages of instruction and explain the choice — historical, national-curriculum-driven, or a deliberate bilingual model — rather than leaving it implicit. State whether it differs by subject or by programme, and how a change of language of instruction, if the school has ever made one, was handled for students already enrolled.
For a continuum school this section has to do more work than a single-programme school's, because the PYP, MYP, DP and CP do not describe language the same way, and a policy that treats them as one will read as written for whichever programme the author knows best.
Mother tongue and host-country language: the section that gets thin
The IB's expectation is that a school recognises and, where feasible, actively supports a student's mother tongue, even where it is not a language the school formally teaches. It also expects a position on the host country's language, where the school operates outside a country where that language is dominant at home.
This is where most policies retreat into a general statement of respect rather than a description of practice. State plainly what the school actually offers: a taught mother-tongue programme in named languages, access to external examinations in a home language, library and reading resources in the languages represented, or — if none of that exists yet — say so and describe what a family can expect instead, such as being connected with community resources. An honest 'we do not yet offer this' is a better policy than a vague sentence implying everything is covered.
- Which mother tongues the school formally supports, and how
- What exists for a mother tongue the school does not formally teach
- The school's position on the host country's language, where relevant
- Where a family goes to ask, and who owns the answer
Additional language acquisition, per programme
A continuum school cannot describe language acquisition once for four programmes that structure it differently.
In the Primary Years Programme, language is a transdisciplinary skill running through the whole day rather than a single subject period, and the policy should say how that is protected against being squeezed into a slot. The Middle Years Programme separates language acquisition into phases a student moves through based on demonstrated proficiency rather than age or year group, and the policy should state how a student's phase is assessed and how a mismatch between phase and year group is handled. The Diploma Programme structures language as Language A — literature, or language and literature — and Language B, plus ab initio for a student starting a language with no prior experience, each at standard or higher level. State which combinations the school actually offers, because 'as per IB regulations' is not an answer a family can plan around.
Say explicitly how a student moves between levels or phases, and who decides. This is the same derivation-rule problem the assessment policy has to solve for grades: a family should not have to guess why a decision was made.
Admission, proficiency and support for a student not yet ready
State whether proficiency in the language of instruction is a condition of admission, and if it is not, what happens instead — because 'not a condition of admission' only works as a sentence if the next one says what support exists.
This is where the language policy and the access and inclusion policy have to point at each other rather than duplicate each other. The language policy should describe what support for a student not yet proficient looks like — additional language provision, in-class support, a defined period during which support is expected to reduce — and the inclusion policy should describe how that support is identified, resourced and reviewed for an individual student. Neither policy should try to do the other's job.
Say how and when support is expected to end, or reviewed if it does not. A student still receiving beginner-level language support in their final year with no review on record is the kind of gap a visiting team finds by asking a teacher a single question.
Whole-school responsibility, not a department's document
The IB's view of language runs wider than the language department: every teacher is understood to be a language teacher for their subject, because a student learns science partly through learning the language science is taught in.
State what this means in practice — expectations for subject-specific vocabulary instruction, scaffolding for a student working in an additional language, and what professional development exists for subject teachers rather than only language specialists. A policy that lives entirely inside the language department's binder is describing a smaller school than the one the IB is evaluating.
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.
A language policy usually goes stale in one of two ways: the document itself drifts out of review, or the practice it describes has nowhere to live and survives only as long as the people who remember it.
skodle's curriculum library holds a school's own standards, objectives and policies alongside the IB framework elements they map to, with version history, so the language policy sits next to the programme documents it has to stay consistent with rather than in a separate file nobody cross-checks. The accreditation module links evidence to IB practices — including the ones a language policy governs — and surfaces a gap rather than letting a stale policy pass unnoticed between five-year reviews. Every change carries an audit entry naming who made it and when.
The honest limit: skodle does not record a student's home language, mother tongue or additional-language-support status as a tracked field today. The mother-tongue and support provisions this policy describes are school practice the platform does not yet capture as data, and a school should not assume otherwise when writing this section.
Review, ownership and the date on the front
Name who owns the policy — usually the head of school with the programme coordinator, sometimes with a language coordinator where the school has one — and commit to a review interval. Annual is common; a continuum school changing its language-of-instruction model or opening a new mother-tongue programme should review sooner.
Put the review date on the document and keep it. A language policy is one of the most commonly checked at evaluation, alongside assessment, inclusion and academic integrity, and a stale date here reads the same way a stale date reads on any of the others.
The mistakes worth avoiding
Three recur. Writing the mother-tongue section as a value statement with no practice underneath, which fails the first time a visiting team asks a student directly. Treating language of instruction as too obvious to state, which leaves a continuum school's programme-by-programme differences undocumented. And writing the whole document inside the language department, which produces a policy the rest of the staff have never read and do not follow.
The version that works names what actually exists, says plainly where it does not yet exist, and is written with the people — including a student or two — who can say which parts are true.
