Teach Secondary -Issue 15.1

The end of an era? The International Baccalaureate is dead – long live the spreadsheet…? ‘I Teacher’ reflects on what we might have lost in the name of cost savings... A great stone façade looms high aboveWhitehall, swallowing the street below in its shadow. There it stands, the Department for Education – a monument to bureaucracy and beige carpeting, towering proudly above the grave of genuine learning. A shrine to ‘value for money’, an ever-present reminder that in the pursuit of endless improvement, we’ve simply managed to perfect the art of inexorable decline. Requiescat in pace , education in England... Act ofvandalism All right, yes – I might sometimes be guilty of the occasional dramatic flourish. Inmy defence, however, the government’s decision to withdraw its funding for additional teachers so that schools can offer the International Baccalaureate (IB) isn’t ‘just another policy tweak’. It’s a deliberate act of vandalism, and, frankly, there’s no metaphor too grand for that. For those fortunate enough to have studied or taught it, the IB isn’t just a qualification – it’s a philosophy. Six subjects. Theory of Knowledge. A 4,000-word extended essay that often outpaces undergraduate work. 50 hours apiece of community service, physical action and creative endeavour. It’s not about cramming content or gaming grade boundaries, but about learning how to think . It’s the gold standard of sixth- form education, in that it’s global, rigorous and humane. Most crucially of all, it produces students who are ABOUT THE AUTHOR ‘I, Teacher’ is a secondary teacher, teacher trainer and writer challenging binary teaching narratives; for more information, visit tinyurl.com/ts-ITC or follow @i-teacher.bsky.social more than the sum of their exam results. Nothing in GCSEs, A Levels or the broader National Curriculum even comes close. Plus, universities love it. Admissions tutors practically drool over IB candidates. Faced with two equally bright students, who would you rather take? The one who’s memorised parts of three subjects? Or the one who’s actually learned how to learn , and can demonstrate that they’re a fully-rounded human being? The price of excellence So why kill it?Why snuff out something so successful, so respected and so fundamentally enriching? I’ve trawled through the relevant government documents and Hansard debates, and come to a depressingly simple conclusion: money . Each IB student costs the state an additional £2,500 – the funding required to cover the extra teaching hours needed for six subjects instead of three. On paper, cutting that looks like a tidy saving. Except it’s not. Around 3,000 students took the IB in 2024, about half of whom came from state schools. For fairness, let’s go with a figure of 1,750. Double that for two years of sixth form, and what’s the grand total saved by cutting the programme? £6.75 million. That sounds like a lot, until you realise the DfE’s schools budget is over £67 billion . So let’s do the maths – that’s a saving of 0.01%. That’s the price of excellence, apparently – the cost of giving state school students access to the kind of broad, international education that the world’s top universities and employers value most. And yet, this government, the same one that consistently likes to talk of ‘shattering the glass ceiling’, has decided that 0.01% is simply too steep a price for a decent pebble. Absorbing the cost So what’s the justification? Schools can apparently ‘ Absorb the cost themselves ’ – because of course they can. In between plugging SEND gaps, paying supply staff and patching up the roof with duct tape, they’ve got plenty of money lying around. Some schools have already given up. Others are hanging on by their fingernails, offering the IB for one more cohort before the axe inevitably falls. Give it a year or two, and it’ll vanish entirely from the state sector. This ‘gold standard’ will become just another independent school luxury and postcode privilege. Oh, but don’t worry. The DfE’s spreadsheets will balance, for which – so they’ll tell us – we should be grateful. Because we managed to save 0.01%. Because efficiency is the new excellence. Because nothing says ‘world class education’ like cancelling the one qualification that still tries to educate the whole person. “The IB isn’t just aqualification – it’s aphilosophy” 17 teachwire.net/secondary O P I N I O N