What a scope and sequence actually is
Scope is breadth: the concepts, skills, knowledge and objectives a curriculum covers. Sequence is order: how that learning develops from one year group to the next, so that what a child meets in Grade 5 is built on something they met in Grade 4 rather than repeated from it.
It is a planning document, not a syllabus and not a timetable. A good one fits on a few pages per subject area, because its job is to let a whole school see the shape of the curriculum at once. The detail belongs in units.
Does the IB require one?
The IB does not prescribe a single format. What it expects is a written curriculum that shows what is taught and how learning develops across the years, planned collaboratively, and it assesses that through its programme standards and practices rather than through a template.
The PYP has historically published scope and sequence documents for its subject areas, such as language and mathematics, and the MYP and DP publish subject guides that set the content and assessment. Which documents are current changes, so treat the IB's own programme resources as the authority and check them before you build on anything in this article.
How each programme changes the shape
In the PYP the whole-school planner is the programme of inquiry, a grid of units across year groups and transdisciplinary themes. A scope and sequence sits underneath it for the areas taught more discretely, such as language and mathematics, and shows progression that the units alone do not.
In the MYP the planning is by subject group, tied together by key and related concepts and global contexts, with assessment against published criteria. A vertical plan across the five years of a subject group is the natural scope and sequence.
In the DP the content is largely set by the subject guides, so the school's sequence is mostly about pacing: how the two years are laid out, and where internal assessments, the extended essay, theory of knowledge and CAS deadlines fall against the teaching.
What to put in it
Decide the columns before anyone fills a row, and keep them few. Every extra field is something a busy teacher will leave blank.
- Year group and subject or transdisciplinary theme
- The concepts developed, and where each is introduced, developed and applied
- The skills, including approaches to learning, and their progression
- Objectives or criteria the year is working toward
- Assessment points, formative and summative
- An owner and a review date for each row
Building one in five steps
Start by auditing what is actually taught, not what a previous document says is taught. Collect current unit planners and read them against each other.
Then agree the spine: the concepts and skills every child should meet, and roughly where. Sequence them so each is introduced, revisited at greater depth, and finally applied. Check horizontally, across subjects in the same year, for overload and contradiction, and vertically, across years, for repetition and gaps. Finish by assigning owners and dates, because a scope and sequence without a review cycle is out of date within two years.
Four ways it goes wrong
It becomes a PDF that nobody opens, because it lives outside the place teachers plan. It becomes so detailed that it duplicates the units and contradicts them within a term. It is written once by a committee and never revised. Or it is never connected to assessment, so the school can say what it intends to teach and cannot show what was assessed.
The common thread is that the document and the teaching drift apart. Whatever you build, the test is whether a coordinator can tell in a few minutes what the school actually covers this year, not what it meant to.
Where skodle fits
This section names our own product, so read it as that. Everything above holds whatever software a school uses, including a shared spreadsheet.
skodle keeps curriculum maps by grade and subject, with their units and lessons, as records rather than files, and a map can be cloned into a new version and activated with the earlier one archived. For PYP and MYP units it also reads the plan back to you. The PYP programme of inquiry shows as a year-by-theme grid with the spread of key concepts, and a gap report flags concepts that are overused or never used, and objectives that are unmapped or unassessed, from the mappings a person approves. The IB Engine is built around the four IB programmes rather than one template stretched across them.
The limits. skodle does not write your scope and sequence or produce one as a document, and it has no year-by-year view of how a concept develops: the gap report counts, it does not show progression. Its coverage analysis covers PYP and MYP units against the standards your school enters, not DP, CP, Cambridge or CBSE units, and it is only as good as the mappings people approve. Cambridge and CBSE schools plan through the school structure and framework-tagged unit planning, and a Cambridge syllabus is not modelled the way an MYP unit is.
What to check before choosing software for it
Ask each vendor to show the same three things live, on a unit of yours rather than a sample.
- Can I see, for one subject, what is covered in each year and where a concept is repeated?
- Is the sequence a view over the units teachers actually plan, or a second document to keep in step?
- What happens to the history when the map changes: is there a record of the version that was in force last year?
- Who can change it, and is each change attributed?
Keeping it alive
Review it once a year, at a fixed point in the calendar, with the people who teach it. Change one thing at a time and record why. The sequence is meant to be argued with; a document that has not been amended in three years is not being used.
If you are also building the wider map, the step-by-step version is in how to create a curriculum map for an IB school, and the difference between the two documents is in scope and sequence versus curriculum map.
