Throughout our school we offer a globally oriented curriculum ranging from the Foundation classes to Year 13.  We have implemented the International Baccalaureate frameworks across the school that consist of three programmes:

• the Primary Year’s Programme (PYP) from year 0 to year 6,
• the Middle Year’s Programme (MYP) from year 7 to year 10
• the IB Diploma Programme (IB Dip) from year 12 to year 13

In Year 11, students experience a range of subject options along with wellbeing and personal development initiatives that lead into the IB Diploma or NCEA qualifications.

The Middle Years Programme (MYP) is part of the whole curriculum at Dio but is specifically designed for students in years 7-10.  In recent years, changes to the MYP enabled our school to offer it as a 4-year programme across the middle years.  The MYP curriculum framework comprises eight subject groups, providing a broad and balanced education for early adolescents. Students learn the content of the New Zealand curriculum through the MYP framework.

The MYP joins together the Junior and Senior School with a coherent curriculum experience appropriate for each developmental level of the school.  The MYP has a focus on context-based learning that means foundational knowledge is embedded in real world contexts that are engaging and meaningful for students.  This will enable them to step into their senior qualification well prepared for the range of subject choices.

Through the MYP students experience service learning and grow their sense of identity during important formative years.  The assessment framework helps them to engage in receiving feedback using clearly set out criteria.  They learn to become self-motivated learners who can evaluate achievement and monitor their own progress.

The three IB programmes are linked by the one IB Learner Profile with the aim of developing internationally minded young people who, recognising their common humanity and shared guardianship of the planet, help to create a better and more peaceful world. The IB learners strive to be inquirers, knowledgeable, thinkers, communicators, principled, open-minded, caring, risktakers, balanced and reflective.

As part of our journey – in 2018 we set out to design a purpose-built middle-years programme.  We carried out consultation in 2019 and it made sense to build on our existing IB PYP and IB Diploma programmes.   We began implementing the MYP in 2020, and despite the Covid years, teachers continued to develop and refine the programme.  Next week we will be visited by IB evaluators as part of our MYP authorisation.  Once we are authorised formally, we will be very proud to be an IB World School.