Pre-IB is a school's term, not the IB's
There is no IB programme called pre-IB. The phrase is used by schools for a preparation stage before the Diploma Programme, and different schools mean different things: a dedicated year, a set of courses, or simply the preceding grades taught with the Diploma in mind.
That matters for parents, who may find two schools both advertising pre-IB and offering entirely different things. Ask what the school actually teaches, and treat the IB's own programme documentation as the authority on what the Diploma requires.
The routes that lead to the Diploma
Some students arrive from the IB Middle Years Programme, which is designed to prepare them for the Diploma, though it is not a requirement. Others come from a national curriculum or from Cambridge IGCSE, and join the Diploma at about 16. Many schools run a preparation year or a bridging course for students on the second route.
What good preparation builds
The Diploma is demanding less because of any single subject than because of the concurrent load, so preparation is mostly about habits.
- Academic writing: structured argument, evidence and referencing
- Research: finding, judging and citing sources, which the extended essay depends on
- Critical thinking and the habit of asking how we know
- Time management across several long-running tasks
- Subject foundations, especially mathematics and the language of study
- Reflection: keeping the kind of record CAS and theory of knowledge ask for
Choosing subjects with the Diploma in mind
The Diploma asks for six subjects across groups, with a mix of higher and standard level, so students need to choose in the years before they arrive. A preparation stage is the right place to try subjects and to find out where a student's strengths and limits are, not to lock choices too early.
Where skodle fits
This section names our own product, so read it as that. A preparation pathway is a teaching design, and it works without software.
Where skodle helps is in making progression visible. Curriculum planning, assessments, student goals, portfolios and reports sit on one record, so a school can see whether a student is building the habits above and can show a student, and their family, where they stand before the Diploma starts. When students move on to the Diploma, the same platform tracks the extended essay, theory of knowledge, CAS and internal assessment as components per student, with a rule-based risk view for coordinators. See the IB Engine.
The limits. skodle does not define what a school's pre-IB stage should contain, does not decide whether a student is ready for the Diploma, and does not carry the official IB route for registration and coursework submission. The Diploma tracking holds supervisors, dates, milestones and drafts, not marks.
A sketch of a two-year pathway
Every school's pathway differs, and this is a sketch rather than a specification; the IB's documentation is the authority on what the Diploma itself requires. A workable shape has three moves.
- Early on, build the foundations everything else depends on: structured writing, note-making, referencing and the habit of keeping a learning journal
- In the middle, add extended tasks that resemble the Diploma's own: a research question, a longer piece of writing, an argument defended under questioning
- Late in the stage, make the Diploma's real demands visible: sample internal assessment tasks, the extended essay's research process and a realistic calendar for the two years
Signs a student is ready, and what to do if they are not
Readiness is less about grades than about habits. A student who can write a structured argument using sources, manage a task that runs for several weeks without daily reminders, explain why they chose their subjects and reflect honestly on their own work will cope with the Diploma's load far better than one with higher marks and none of those habits.
If the habits are missing, the answer is more practice at them before the Diploma starts, not a later start on the same load. Schools that catch it early can build them into the last year of the preparation stage.
Building a pathway as a school
Decide what the stage is for, map the skills above across the preceding years, and make the demands of the Diploma visible to students early. The curriculum mapping that supports this is covered in how to create a curriculum map for an IB school.
Advice for families
Ask the school what its pre-IB stage teaches, how it decides who continues to the Diploma, and what support exists for a student who finds the transition hard. A good answer is specific about skills, not just about the label.
