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IB Systems Transformation

Leadership for just and sustainable futures

A future-facing model for education

Young people today are faced with some of the most complex challenges in human history: a global climate crisis; the rise of artificial intelligence; and economic, social, and political volatility on every continent. With the pace of change only accelerating, the world of work will look vastly different in the years ahead.
 
We believe that educational innovation is the most powerful way in which we can equip students to become catalysts for change and leaders in crafting the world of tomorrow. This is why we are proud to be one of four schools around the world tasked by the International Baccalaureate Organization to co-develop and pilot IB Systems Transformation: Leadership for just and sustainable futures, set to begin in August 2025. 

This 300-hour transdisciplinary course will replace two Standard Level courses in the Diploma Programme, and will also be on offer as a standalone IB course to students choosing Mulgrave’s Enriched Pathway. The development of IB Systems Transformation is central to the IBO’s multi-year review of its entire Diploma Programme, and will likely be introduced globally by 2030.
Olli-Pekka Heinonen, IB Director General

Olli-Pekka Heinonen,
IB Director General

"Student engagement has strong positive impacts, not only on grades and scores, but also on student wellbeing. Many factors contribute to engagement, including ensuring that students find what they are taught and what they learn in school meaningful. This pilot, co-created by Mulgrave and the International Baccalaureate, will offer students opportunities to engage with today's many pressing issues while developing the skills and dispositions needed to effect meaningful change. The topics covered are real-life challenges for the future of young people, the pedagogical approach emphasises student agency, and experiential learning happens in teams. To connect the learning to local context with Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies makes this pilot especially important in creating competencies to address complex systemic challenges." — Olli-Pekka Heinonen, IB Director General

IB Systems Transformation explained

Like all IBDP courses, IB Systems Transformation: Leadership for just and sustainable futures spans two years, during which students will be exposed to a rigorous core curriculum and develop expertise in responding to complex, real-world problems.

The course is guided by three key ideas: the power of experiential learning, the importance of 7th-generation principles to guide decision making, and the belief that systems thinking is necessary to effect transformational change. At the heart of the course is a cycle of experience that gives students the opportunity to be immersed in a complex system, identify impact areas within that system, and finally, design a practical and viable intervention for positive change

Ib Systems Transformation Framework

Curriculum

More than 100 hours of this course are dedicated to the core curriculum, which includes the following areas of exploration:

  • Constructing and deconstructing narratives
  • Complex adaptive systems
  • Ethics and ontologies
  • Theories and practices of power
  • Designing for ecopreneurship
  • Data processing and analysis

The course has been intentionally designed as transdisciplinary: each of the content areas above will draw together skills, dispositions, and knowledge from the humanities, arts, social sciences, mathematics, and physical sciences. 

Applied Learning

   At four separate points over their two-year experience, students will embark upon curated immersions into real, complex systems during which they will be assigned a specific impact area to focus on and gain expertise. These immersions will vary in length from a single day to one week, and provide students with incredible opportunities to collect data, collaborate with diverse groups, and interact with experts from a range of backgrounds and industries.
 
Upon returning to the classroom, students will share and present key takeaways, develop a learning resource, and design a safe-to-fail intervention that addresses a priority need within their assigned impact area. 

Immersion: A curated experiential case study in a location that involves multiple complex systems

Impact Area: Broad, complex systems (i.e. water, health, tourism) that lend themselves to investigation from multiple perspectives

Intervention: A thoughtful, ethical, and intentionally designed response to one or more complex problems within an impact area

Systems Transformation Timeline

Ib Systems Transformation Timeline

 

Assessments


IB Systems Transformation: Leadership for just and sustainable futures is assessed entirely through coursework. It is also a ‘dual award’ course that follows the standard DP 1-7 scale, and is doubled for a total mark out of 14 (i.e. 8/14, 10/14, 12/14, etc). 

As with all DP courses, IB Systems Transformation will incorporate both internally and externally marked assessment components: 50% of the course will be externally marked by IB examiners, and 50% will be internally marked by teachers of the course and externally moderated by IB examiners.

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