The International Baccalaureate (IB) Primary Years Programme is a curriculum framework designed for students aged 3 to 12.

It prepares students for the intellectual challenges of further education and their future careers, focusing on the development of the whole child as an inquirer, both in the classroom and in the world outside.

It provides schools with a curriculum framework of essential elements — the knowledge, concepts, skills, attitudes, and action that young students need to equip them for successful lives, both now and in the future. Schools work with the five elements to construct a rigorous and challenging primary curriculum for international education.

The curriculum is transdisciplinary, meaning that it focuses on issues that go across subject areas. Schools will develop students’ academic, social and emotional wellbeing, focusing on international-mindedness and strong personal values. The PYP nurtures independent learning skills, encouraging every student to take responsibility for their learning.

PYP students use their initiative to take responsibility and ownership of their learning.  By learning through inquiry and reflecting on their own learning, PYP students develop knowledge, conceptual understandings, skills and the attributes of the IB Learner profile to make a difference in their own lives, their communities, and beyond.

                                                                                                                                                                                      
The PYP is organized according to:

• The written curriculum, which explains what PYP students will learn
• The taught curriculum, which sets out how educators teach the PYP
• The assessed curriculum, which details the principles and practice of effective assessment in the PYP

The programme incorporates local and global issues into the curriculum, asking students to look at six related, transdisciplinary themes and to consider the links between them.
These are:

• Who we are.
• Where we are in place and time.
• How we express ourselves.
• How the world works.
• How we organize ourselves.
• Sharing the planet.

These themes are selected for their relevance to the real world. They are described as transdisciplinary because they focus on issues that go across subject areas.

The transdisciplinary themes help teachers to develop a programme of inquiry. Teachers work together to develop investigations into important ideas, which require a substantial and high level of involvement on the part of students.

Through the PYP curriculum framework, schools ensure that students examine each theme.