IB Authorization Series, Part Five. The Programme Standards and Practices: What the IB Is Actually Measuring During Your Authorization Journey

What are the IB Programme Standards and Practices for candidate schools? 

The Programme Standards and Practices 2014 are the requirements for implementing any IB programme. The standards outline what schools must establish to implement the programmes and what they must demonstrate in order to obtain and maintain authorization. The document organises these requirements across four standards: Standard A covering the philosophy and governance of the school, Standard B covering the organisation of the school, Standard C covering the curriculum and pedagogy, and the programme-specific requirements that sit beneath each standard for PYP, MYP, and DP respectively. Every practice within every standard is a checkable claim about what the school has built, and the verification visit is the process by which an authorization team determines whether the claims the school's application makes are supported by the evidence that exists inside the institution. The Programme Standards and Practices 2014 continue to be the standard framework for authorization services, while PSP 2020 is used by already authorized schools for the evaluation process. A candidate school working toward authorization is working against PSP 2014, and understanding precisely what that document requires, not just structurally but in terms of what genuine compliance looks like in practice, is the most important piece of preparation most schools never receive in adequate depth.

Why Most Candidate Schools Misread the PSP

The Programme Standards and Practices document is available on the IBO's website, and most candidate schools download it within the first weeks of candidacy. A significant number read it carefully. Fewer still understand what it is actually asking.

The misreading is structural. The PSP is formatted as a series of statements, each one describing something a school must have in place or be able to demonstrate. Reading it sequentially, a school can work through each statement, mentally tick those that seem to apply, note those that require development, and arrive at an impression of where it sits against the framework. This reading produces a compliance map, and a compliance map is useful but incomplete, because it answers the question of what the PSP requires without answering the more important question of what genuine compliance with each requirement looks like in the lived reality of the school.

The gap between a statement in the PSP and genuine compliance with that statement is almost always larger than a school reading the document for the first time estimates. The practice that requires the school to provide dedicated time for teachers' collaborative planning and reflection is a single sentence. What it actually asks for, timetabled protected planning time in which teachers across grade levels examine real student evidence together, adjust curriculum planning on the basis of what that evidence shows, and document their professional reflection in ways that show genuine collegial dialogue rather than individual teacher notes — is a cultural and structural undertaking that takes a full candidacy period to build properly and that schools arriving from conventional national curriculum contexts rarely have in anything approaching the form the IBO intends.

This is the pattern that repeats across the PSP. The standards are stated concisely. The genuine practice they describe is considerably more demanding than the statement suggests. And the verification team's job is to determine not whether the school can show a document for each requirement but whether the documents describe what the school actually does.

Standard A: Philosophy and School Governance

Standard A establishes the foundational philosophical and governance conditions without which the other standards cannot be meaningfully assessed. It requires the school to demonstrate that its mission and philosophy are aligned with the IB's, that the governing authority understands and supports the programme, that the school's administrative and pedagogical leadership have the capacity to implement and sustain it, and that the community, students, parents, and staff, has been genuinely informed about and engaged with the IB's approach.

The philosophy alignment requirement is the one most schools treat most superficially. Aligning a mission statement with IB language is a word-processing exercise. Demonstrating philosophical alignment in practice requires showing that the school's actual decisions about curriculum, assessment, professional development, and resource allocation reflect the IB's values rather than simply being described in IB vocabulary. An authorization team reading a school's mission statement alongside its timetable, its professional development calendar, and its resource allocation history is triangulating between stated philosophy and operational reality. The triangulation is rarely as tight as the mission statement alone suggests.

The governance requirement carries specific implications that school owners and boards need to understand clearly before candidacy begins. The IBO expects the governing body to have formally adopted the programme and committed the resources necessary to implement it to the standards required. This is not a ceremonial resolution. It is a substantive governance commitment that includes budget provisions for ongoing professional development, the coordinator's dedicated time, library and resource development, and the external costs of IBO membership, examination fees, and evaluation. A school whose board adopted the programme enthusiastically but has not formally committed specific resources to its implementation has met the philosophical standard while leaving the governance standard unaddressed.

Standard B: Organisation

Standard B addresses the structural and operational conditions that make genuine programme delivery possible. It covers the physical and human resources the school has committed to the programme, the timetable structures that allow the programme's requirements to be met, the professional development that teachers and the coordinator have received, and the systems the school has built to support students with learning needs, to guide and counsel students through the programme, and to ensure access to information on global issues and diverse perspectives.

The professional development requirements within Standard B are the most operationally specific in the entire PSP. For the DP, the requirement is unambiguous: all subject teachers must have completed Category 1 professional development in their subject, the TOK teacher must have completed Category 1 TOK training, and the CAS coordinator must have completed Category 1 CAS training, and all of this must have taken place before the verification visit. This is not a requirement to be working toward at the time of the visit. It is a requirement to have completed. A school that arrives at its verification visit with some teachers still awaiting workshop availability has a Standard B gap that the visiting team cannot overlook.

The timetable requirement within Standard B is equally specific and equally underestimated. The DP requires sufficient teaching time for each subject at Higher Level and Standard Level, and the timetable must demonstrate this concretely. For schools running a DP alongside a national curriculum examination structure, building a timetable that satisfies both sets of requirements while also preserving the collaborative planning time Standard B separately requires is a genuine structural challenge that has no easy solution and benefits significantly from having been worked through before the application for candidacy is submitted rather than during the trial year under operational pressure.

Standard C: Curriculum

Standard C is where the authorization team spends the most time and finds the most significant gaps, because it addresses the quality and coherence of the school's actual teaching and learning practice, the element that the programme most fundamentally consists of and the element most difficult to build quickly once candidacy has begun.

Standard C requires the school to demonstrate that its written curriculum, the documents that articulate what students will learn and how, is coherent, reflects the IB's approach to learning and teaching, and provides genuine evidence of collaborative planning. It requires the taught curriculum, what actually happens in classrooms, to reflect the same principles. And it requires the assessed curriculum, how student learning is measured and reported, to align with the IB's assessment philosophy and the practices described in the school's assessment policy.

The triangulation the PSP builds into Standard C is deliberate and worth understanding explicitly. The IBO is not asking to see any one of these three elements in isolation. It is asking to see coherence across all three, because a school whose written curriculum is impressive but whose classrooms operate differently from what the documents describe has a curriculum in name rather than in practice. The verification team's classroom observations, student conversations, and teacher interviews are all specifically designed to surface the degree to which the written and taught curricula are aligned. When they are not, the gap is a Standard C finding, and it is the most substantive kind of finding a visit report can contain.

For the DP specifically, Standard C requires evidence of the four mandatory policies, the course outlines teachers have prepared for every subject the school intends to offer, and documentation demonstrating how the three core components, Theory of Knowledge, the Extended Essay, and CAS, are integrated into the programme's overall structure rather than operating as parallel tracks disconnected from the subject curriculum. The integration requirement for the core is the element most often treated as a documentation task and least often built as a genuine pedagogical reality. A school that has written its core integration plan during candidacy without actually designing the professional structures through which TOK teachers collaborate with subject teachers will find the visiting team's conversations with those teachers revealing quickly that the integration exists on paper rather than in practice.

What the Verification Team Is Actually Doing

Understanding the PSP at the level of its individual standards and practices is necessary but not sufficient for genuine preparation. What a candidate school also needs to understand is the methodology the visiting team uses to assess the school against the framework, because that methodology shapes what the school needs to be able to demonstrate, not just document.

The verification team triangulates across three evidence sources simultaneously: the school's application documents, what the school's leadership and staff say in conversations during the visit, and what the team observes directly in classrooms, planning meetings, and the physical environment of the school. The purpose of the visit is to ensure that the educational principles, standards, and practices on which the IB programme is founded will be maintained and furthered. In practice, this means the team is looking for consistency across all three evidence sources. Where the documentation says one thing and the conversations say something slightly different, they probe. Where the conversations say one thing and the classroom observation suggests something else, they note it. Where all three are consistent, they have evidence of a genuine practice.

This triangulation methodology has a specific implication for how candidate schools should approach the application for authorization itself. The application is not a marketing document. It is a set of claims the school is making about itself, and every claim will be tested against conversation and observation. A school that writes an accurate, sometimes self-critical application, acknowledging areas still in development while demonstrating genuine progress and a credible trajectory, is making claims it can substantiate. A school that writes an aspirational application describing practices that are not yet fully embedded is setting up a verification visit in which the gaps between documentation and reality will be visible to an experienced team.

The schools that move through verification most cleanly are those that have understood this from the beginning of candidacy. They have used the candidacy period not to build documentation of a programme but to build a programme that documentation then describes accurately.

The Application for Authorization: The Most Honest Document the School Will Write

The Application for Authorization is the formal submission through which a candidate school presents its case for authorization against the Programme Standards and Practices. It is structured around the same four standards the PSP describes, and for each standard the school documents the evidence of its alignment, identifies areas still in development, and demonstrates the trajectory of its progress since candidacy began.

The application is not a marketing document. It is a set of claims the school is making about itself, and every claim will be tested against conversation and observation during the verification visit. A school that writes an accurate, sometimes self-critical application, acknowledging areas still in development while demonstrating genuine progress and a credible direction of travel, is making claims it can substantiate. A school that writes an aspirational application describing practices that are not yet fully embedded is setting up a verification visit in which the gaps between documentation and reality will be visible to an experienced team within the first hour.

The most effective applications read like the kind of honest professional account that a genuinely reflective school would produce for its own institutional purposes, not purely for the IBO's. They identify the standards where the school has built strong, coherent practice and point to multiple forms of evidence. They name the standards where progress has been made but the practice is not yet fully embedded, and they describe specifically what is still being built and on what timeline. They do not attempt to conceal the gaps that every candidate school has, because the gaps are not the problem. The problem is gaps that have not been named and therefore have not been addressed before the visit makes them visible.

A coordinator who has guided this process honestly, who has worked with the teaching staff to assess actual practice against each standard with genuine rigour, and who has produced an application that reflects that honest collective assessment, is in a fundamentally stronger position at the verification visit than a coordinator who has produced a polished document the team cannot verify against the school's reality. The PSP exists to produce the institutional self-knowledge that genuine programme quality requires. The schools that treat the Application for Authorization as a genuine reckoning with that standard emerge from the authorization process not just with a letter but with a programme that has been examined, tested, and built in the process of being measured.

This is the final article in Ameyaa's IB Authorization Series. The series has covered the four mandatory policies and the Programme Standards and Practices framework that governs how candidate schools are assessed against them.

Ameyaa has guided schools through every stage of the authorization process, from the earliest institutional readiness conversations through to the verification visit and beyond. If your school is in candidacy and wants experienced, honest support in understanding what the PSP actually requires and building practice that matches what your documentation describes, that is exactly the work we are built for.

References

International Baccalaureate Organization. (2014, updated 2016). Programme standards and practices. IBO. https://ibo.org/globalassets/new-structure/become-an-ib-school/pdfs/programme-standards-and-practices-en.pdf

International Baccalaureate Organization. (2020). Programme standards and practices. IBO. https://ibo.org/globalassets/new-structure/become-an-ib-school/pdfs/programme-standards-and-practices-2020-en.pdf

International Baccalaureate Organization. (n.d.). Becoming an IB school: Useful resources. IBO. https://www.ibo.org/become-an-ib-school/useful-resources/

International Baccalaureate Organization. (n.d.). Guide to school authorization: Diploma Programme. IBO.

International Baccalaureate Organization. (n.d.). Virtual visits guide to candidate schools. IBO.

International Baccalaureate Organization. (n.d.). Requirements for candidacy. IBO.

Yang, A. (2022). What is the point of IB evaluation? Building Learning Agility. https://alisonyang.com/what-is-the-point-of-ib-evaluation/