The International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme

An Introduction for Teachers and Managers

Tim Pound

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134309719
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The International Baccalaureate (IB) is a respected qualification gaining increasing currency around the world, and which has been adopted by a wide variety of schools, both public and private. In the UK, growing dissatisfaction with the A-level system has led to an intense debate about alternative qualifications, and in many schools IB courses have been introduced alongside conventional A-level courses. This practical introduction to the IB takes a balanced look at the pros and cons and features a wealth of advice from those actually involved in teaching and implementing it in schools. Providing comparative material on how IB courses differ from A-levels and a subject-by-subject account of best practice in teaching the IB, this book offers a rich source of practical advice for teachers, school leaders or managers involved in teaching or implementing the IB programmes.

Part I
In context

Chapter 1
The International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IBDP) and post-compulsory qualifications reform in England

Tim Pound

Contextualising the reform process

In the protracted, and occasionally acrimonious, debate about the reform of the post-compulsory qualifications framework in England, opinion remains divided on how best to match the needs of a heterogeneous mix of students with the demands of a modern skills-based economy. Within the contours of this debate, A levels have long been equated with the virtues of studying a limited number of subjects in depth. Originally conceived as free-standing and academically rigorous qualifications, A levels, according to their many admirers, have rightfully earned their reputation as the ‘gold standard’ of the post-compulsory curriculum. One obvious consequence of their formidable reputation for academic rigour, however, is that A levels have always been vulnerable to the charge that they are educationally exclusive and thus elitist. That the typical A-level experience has not included access to a broader range of knowledge and skills, increasingly demanded by both higher education and the contemporary workplace, has been a further cause for concern.

Such criticism has undoubtedly been thrown into sharper relief through comparisons between A levels and their international equivalents. What these have invariably concluded is that A levels are not simply out of step with other national systems, but, in terms of their narrow curricular focus, are little short of unique. For example, when set against the curricular breadth and balance of rival systems like the French baccalauréat and the German Abitur, the degree of subject specialisation inherent in A-level study becomes all too apparent. Yet since the former are effectively rooted in ‘foreign’ educational cultures, this has meant that their potential impact on the reform debate in England has hitherto been marginal.

The same cannot be said, however, about the IBDP. Perhaps the principal reason for this is that since the IBDP was originally devised as an international schoolleaving qualification, its adoption by a small network of home-based international schools and colleges effectively placed it on the very threshold, as it were, of state provision. From these early beginnings, the IBDP has gradually made its presence felt across both the independent and maintained sectors, and the fact that it is now offered in more than 60 accredited institutions in England and Wales is a testament to its growing reputation for breadth and academic rigour. Moreover, in the continuing absence of a national qualifications framework combining guaranteed standards and broader patterns of study, this figure looks set to increase further – and, if some media reports are to be believed, the IBDP’s growth may well be spectacular (Independent, 4 October 2004).

But while the IBDP has become synonymous with a degree of breadth and rigour that has arguably enabled it to eclipse the A-level system as the brightest star in the constellation of post-compulsory qualifications, few would dispute the fact that both qualification frameworks share a certain amount of common ground. Most obviously, each functions as a rite of passage between school and university or the world of work. Beyond this, however, the historical relationship between A levels and the IBDP becomes more complex. This is partly due to the fact that the conceptual origins of the latter are inextricably linked to the English experience of post-compulsory qualifications and curriculum development. Equally, as we shall see, the intrinsic merits of a baccalaureate model have long made their presence felt over the reform process in England. In this sense, it is not without significance that the various proposals to replace A levels with a broader qualifications framework, which have emerged over the last 40 years or so, have often shared a remarkably close affinity with both the content and structure of the IBDP.

One obvious starting point for a critical exploration of these issues is the controversy generated by the publication of the Crowther Report in 1959. While pronouncing in favour of retaining an examinations framework in which the study of three closely related A-level subjects had become the norm, the Crowther Committee clearly experienced some difficulty in defending its decision to ratify academic specialisation. In fact, it could only do so by asserting that specialisation satisfied a uniquely ‘English’ phase of post-adolescent intellectual development, which it subsequently defined as ‘subject-mindedness’(CACE 1959: 262). From a historical perspective, what this endorsement meant in practice was that, unlike their counterparts across the rest of the developed world, schools in England could continue to prepare students for a narrow permutation of either arts or science courses, secure in the knowledge that such a programme had been officially sanctioned.

Not surprisingly, the Crowther Committee’s justification of premature specialisation did not go unchallenged. One of the foremost critics of the report’s defence of the English system was Alec Peterson, whose appointment as the first director general of what would become the International Baccalaureate Organisation (IBO) in 1967 meant that he would later become involved in both the planning and the piloting of the IBDP in 1968. As we shall see, Peterson’s contribution to the debate about the upper-secondary curriculum in England in the late 1950s and early 1960s, following his appointment as director of what was then Oxford University’s Department of Education, was fuelled by a deep sense of unease over the fact that, in preparing candidates for single-subject honours degrees, A-level examinations effectively discouraged the pursuit of broader patterns of academic study. Sceptical of attempts to introduce greater breadth into sixth-form studies through the use of what had become known as ‘minority time’ – in other words, the small portion of teaching time that remained after the timetabling of three A-level subjects – Peterson maintained that the introduction of complementary courses such as ‘arts for science students’ and ‘science for arts specialists’ lacked both credibility and status. If such courses were not formally examined, he argued, then they would never be taken seriously by their users and end-users – succinctly, the schools, the sixth-formers and, perhaps more importantly, the universities themselves.

Peterson, however, did more than voice his opposition to academic specialisation. Following a period of research funded by the Gulbenkian Foundation, which resulted in the publication of what proved to be a controversial report – Arts and Science Sides in the Sixth Form – he proposed an alternative four-subject examinations framework based upon existing A-level syllabuses and supplemented by what he designated as a ‘unifying and complementary course’ (Peterson 1960: 16), in fact a precursor of the IBDP’s Theory of Knowledge (TOK) course. Formulated in the wake of the publication of the Crowther Report – which, as we have seen, gave subject specialisation its stamp of approval – Peterson’s proposals ultimately failed to attract the kind of support needed to initiate change, and thus the equation between the A-level system and narrow academic specialisation was cemented further.

None the less, mindful of the growing number of less academically motivated students who elected to continue their education beyond the compulsory schoolleaving age, successive governments throughout the remainder of the 1960s and 1970s grappled with the problem of how to broaden the post-16 qualifications framework as a whole in order to make it more responsive to a wider range of educational needs. Arguments in favour of greater breadth, however, would repeatedly collapse when confronted by a seemingly implacable conundrum – that a broader examinations framework could only be achieved at the expense of academic depth. The fear of a decline in standards would prove to be a potent factor in the rejection of all of the subsequent attempts to reform the post-compulsory qualifications framework – and, as we shall see, it undoubtedly played its part in undermining one particular set of proposals that were generally agreed to hold the greatest potential for a radical overhaul of the A-level system, those embodied in the Higginson Report of 1988.

While the IBDP continued to consolidate its growth not only in the context of international education, but also in a growing number of schools and colleges in England that had become increasingly dissatisfied with the lack of breadth and balance in the sixth-form curriculum, the narrow exclusivity of the English system continued to attract adverse criticism. Moreover, the expansion of vocational qualifications, which began in the 1970s and received additional impetus following the implementation of the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative (TVEI) in 1984, began to focus attention on the vexed issue of parity of esteem between the academic and vocational routes post-16. The crux of the problem lay with the A-level system and the value placed upon its reputation for academic excellence. This effectively meant that alternative qualifications that evolved under its shadow struggled to achieve status and recognition within an examinations framework in which A levels had come to function as some kind of benchmark, or ‘gold standard’, against which vocational qualifications in particular would be invariably judged and evaluated.

Official attempts to bridge the gulf between the academic and vocational routes began in earnest in the late 1980s, with the identification of a number of ‘core skills’ shared across each of the pathways, and the formal recognition of a number of ‘principles’ common to both. In practical terms, however, these initiatives failed to create a context in which students could confidently ‘pick and mix’ a combination of academic and vocational courses, let alone find themselves encouraged to transfer between one route and the other. Moreover, efforts to incorporate core skills into A-level syllabuses proved largely unsatisfactory both from the point of view of assessment and in the sense that concepts such as ‘working as part of a team’, to take but one example, sat uneasily alongside established academic assessment objectives such as those embedded in, say, English literature or history.

While the notion of parity of esteem continued to provide a focal point for those who criticised the divisiveness, lack of coherence and exclusivity of the English system, closely related issues – such as the country’s comparatively low participation rate in post-compulsory education and training – served as an additional reminder of the need for more fundamental reform. The cumulative effect of these concerns was reflected in a series of independently funded reports during the early 1990s, each proposing the development of an ‘overarching’ qualifications framework to end the division between general and vocational education and training, to raise participation rates and to provide a broad and balanced curriculum responsive to the social and economic demands of a new millennium. These reports, such as the proposal to introduce a ‘British baccalauréat’, mark a pivotal point in the debate about post-compulsory curriculum reform, in that they collectively present the case for an inclusive and unifying system to promote greater breadth of study and to recognise achievement across both academic and vocational routes post-16.

This discernible shift in the curriculum debate in favour of a unifying framework none the less continued to run counter to government policy, which tended to fall back on the less radical option of treating both routes as separate entities. Such an approach, for example, had resulted in the unsuccessful attempt to broaden academic study through the introduction of the Advanced Supplementary (AS) qualification, followed by the development of the General National Vocational Qualification (GNVQ) in the early 1990s, an award specifically devised to raise the status of vocational qualifications, but one that failed to become established as a viable alternative to A levels (Hodgson and Spours 1999: 112). It also underpinned the text of the Dearing Review, which argued for the introduction of a 16–19 qualifications framework that would equate levels of achievement across general and vocational pathways, and encourage breadth of study through the proposed introduction of an overarching award or ‘Advanced Diploma’. The fact that success in each route would still be rewarded by a fundamentally different set of qualifications, however, did not bode well for the development of a more unified system. In addition, given the text of Dearing’s remit, which stressed the importance the government attached to ‘maintaining the rigour’ of A-level qualifications, the chances of this benchmark of academic excellence becoming subsumed under a more generic qualifications label were remote.

This fragmented and incremental approach towards the reform process can also be discerned in the most recently implemented attempts to establish greater breadth and inclusiveness in the post-compulsory curriculum – those associated with the Curriculum 2000 proposals. At the core of these hastily implemented reforms lay a reformulated AS level, retitled the ‘Advanced Subsidiary’ and, in terms of standards, pitched midway between the General Certificate of Education (GCSE) and A level. This was accompanied by a revamped GNVQ, more tightly linked to the new A- and AS-level framework through three- and six-unit modular blocks and a shared grading scheme, which was given the title of the ‘Advanced Vocational Certificate in Education’ (AVCE). These revisions were introduced in the belief that the former would decisively counteract the problem of subject specialisation, while the latter would remove the stigma attached to vocational qualifications. Rather than achieving these long-coveted aims, however, the Curriculum 2000 reforms have achieved only limited success (Hodgson and Spours 2003a). Moreover, what they will probably be remembered for above all is the sense of disbelief and outrage over the setting of grade boundaries – together with the rash of demands for the remarking of candidates’ scripts – which greeted the first batch of results for the revised A levels in the late summer of 2002. An inadequate consultation process, coupled with a lack of detailed guidance from the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) over the precise relationship between the newly segregated AS and A2 levels, had, it seemed, resulted in the unthinkable happening – the ‘gold standard’ of the post-compulsory curriculum was in danger of becoming irreversibly devalued.

Perhaps the greatest irony behind the recent crisis of confidence in the A-level system is that it might never have arisen in the first instance had Peterson’s original proposals for overcoming subject specialisation not met with such implacable opposition. The point here, however, is not that students might have found themselves following some kind of Anglicised version of the IBDP, since the IBDP was specifically devised with international schools in mind. What they would have doubtless experienced would have been a further variant of Peterson’s proposals, in which the drive to introduce breadth and balance into the sixth-form curriculum could well have resulted in a truly integrated qualifications framework. The implications of such a model for subsequent attempts to incorporate more vocational areas of study into the field of post-compulsory provision can now only be the subject of speculation, but it is unlikely that a curriculum originally predicated on breadth would have provided the kind of barriers to systemic reform that have thus far characterised the English experience.

What, then, lay at the core of the Peterson proposals? How can they be related to subsequent attempts at reform, and why did their rejecti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures and Tables
• Contributors
• Preface
• Part I: In Context
• Part II: In Practice