In 2022 we offered families on one of our campuses a choice for Grades 9 and 10. They could take IGCSEs, which we knew well and which universities knew well, or a new programme that we had designed ourselves but never run before. One hundred and seven out of one hundred and ninety-two chose the new one. We were humbled by this level of trust, and delighted (honestly, a little surprised) that it came from parents from countries that use IGCSEs as well as those from countries that do not. The first group, the Class of 2026, finished the IB Diploma this summer, and we have had a lot of interest from other schools globally who are thinking about the same thing, and who want to know why we did it, what happened to the first cohort and where we are now.

Why did we do it?

We wanted Grades 9 and 10 to follow on from the inquiry-based learning our students know from their earlier years. We wanted assessment to be more varied, closer to what the IB Diploma actually asks of them. We wanted room to design courses around what a UWC education is for. And we wanted students to arrive in Grade 11 already practised in research, extended writing and managing their own learning.

IGCSEs are good qualifications; they have served us well – and I loved teaching them. But they ask students to spend two years preparing for a set of exams at sixteen, in courses written by someone else in a distant country. High-stakes exams at sixteen have a backwash effect: they shape not only the two years spent preparing for them but what comes before. A recent survey in England found that only 2% of teachers thought the current approach to the first three years of secondary school was satisfactory, and that some pupils were already deciding, at eleven to fourteen, that subjects they would not take at GCSE were not worth their effort.

Moving away from them didn’t mean we abandoned exams; … Moving away from them didn’t mean we abandoned exams; our students still sat them at the end of Grades 9 and 10. However, those without the long IGCSE exam season gained about nine more weeks of teaching (some 25% of the year!). For families, that is more teaching time for the same fees.

What happened to the first cohort

Students who took the UWCSEA Programme averaged 36.8 points in the IB Diploma, and those who took IGCSEs averaged 37.0. The two groups weren’t matched: families chose, and the students differed in their subjects, their prior attainment and the support they received. So this wasn’t a controlled trial – but the question we looked at was whether our new programme would be at least as good as the IGCSEs. On this evidence, it is.

We also looked subject by subject. No subject showed a difference large enough to act on, and the gaps went in both directions: the IGCSE cohort did slightly better in Chemistry, for example, with the UWCSEA Programme group slightly ahead in Maths AA (Analysis And Approaches). These differences are within what you would expect by chance, and a lot will depend on subject choices which are not random between the groups.

Here’s a striking detail: At the start of Grade 11, we used baseline tests to predict each student’s IB score. Those baseline tests put the UWCSEA Programme group well behind the IGCSE group, more than two points lower. They finished level. I’d love to say that that was because our UWCSEA programme prepared kids so well that they could learn faster when it got to the Diploma level. However, it may be that the tests simply predict less well for students who have not come through IGCSEs, perhaps because they reward familiarity with that style of exam. I don’t want to jump to conclusions on the basis of one set of results; we need to be careful about what this can and cannot show. But we wanted our programme to prepare students better for the Diploma, through design and teaching time. That was an explicit aim, and while we’ll know more with each cohort, the signs are good.

In Grades 11 and 12, students who came through the UWCSEA Programme gave 5.7 hours a week to activities and service, against 3.9 for those who came through IGCSEs. Nearly two extra hours every week for two years – into coaching, rehearsing, organising and serving, which are core parts of a UWC education, and perhaps where they learn the most valuable skills. They also attended more regularly, at 95% against 92%.

I have a hunch. It’s based on decades of experience, but it is a hunch – that spending time in this way is connected to them doing better than their predictions. Students who learned in Grades 9 and 10 to manage their commitments and time – which is to say, themselves – applied that learning in Diploma and will apply it after school too, at college and in work.  So as well as having more time, perhaps they were able to use it better too. Now, here is another possibility – that the kind of student who chose a new programme was already that kind of student. I can’t be sure – but either way, these students had a fuller two years. 

Our finding on balance rests on a small and self-selected group: 17 of 18 UWCSEA Programme students who replied to the question said their pathway gave them a healthy balance between work and wellbeing. Among IGCSE respondents, 13 of 21 said the same. 

The same survey told us something else too – only 10 of those 18 UWCSEA Programme students felt well prepared for the Diploma, against 14 of 21 from the IGCSE group. I’m not sure that’s a real difference, and their results turned out just as well anyway, so if there is anything here it is a gap in confidence rather than in outcome. Perhaps two years of exam practice simply feels like preparation, whether or not it is. But that still matters: a student who starts Grade 11 unsure of themselves has a harder year than they needed to. Perhaps it was simply being the first cohort through – either way the move into the Diploma Programme is something we’ll look at more carefully.

There’s also a broader question about balance and perceptions: why did so few answer that question? We don’t know the answer yet. 

In terms of life after school – students from both pathways went on to Oxford, Imperial, LSE, UCL, Edinburgh, Durham, Chicago and Berkeley. Yale and Stanford admitted students from the UWCSEA Programme; Princeton and Brown admitted students from the IGCSE group. No noticeable difference, and lots of great comments from universities about UWCSEA – which seems to matter more than the precise details of the programme. Slightly more of the IGCSE group went to universities in the QS global top 100 (64% against 56%). In groups this size that difference is small enough to be indistinguishable from chance, and the two groups were aiming at somewhat different places. So we need to keep track of this one very carefully. 

The Class of 2026 took the first version of the programme in 2022. Since then we have reworked several courses, especially maths and science courses after benchmarking them against external standards. We have also brought East and Dover onto a single College programme. This year’s review will draw more fully on our teachers and students to shape the next version. We are always iterating, in ways that we could not with the external fixed IGCSE syllabi.

Where we are now. 

Many families worry, as we do, about pressure, narrowing and disengagement in the teenage years. These are global worries, along with others about screens, the economy, AI, climate and more, and there’s no magic bullet. Robust psychological research (Ryan and Deci) shows that students’ motivation and wellbeing are supported by three things: exercising their autonomy, connecting with others inside and outside the school, and feeling a sense of competence. We also know that students engage more when their learning is meaningful to them. So we give them more choice and more freedom, and let them learn what matters rather than what is on the exam. The UWCSEA Programme lets us do all of this, because we design the courses ourselves.

Our current students’ survey responses point the same way. On UWCSEA Programme courses they describe discussion, group and practical work (which, as well as being better learning, actually mirror what happens after school), and feedback that comes through conversation; IGCSE students, reasonably enough, mostly ask for past papers, mark schemes and timed practice. That is what an exam teaches students to want.

We see the data as early, imperfect and genuinely encouraging evidence that a school can design Grades 9 and 10 around what it believes about learning. As far as we can yet tell, there has been no negative academic impact and perhaps a positive one, and they have gained time, balance and a fuller experience of what UWCSEA stands for.

Families at East seem to have reached their own view before the results arrived. The initial uptake was from slightly over 50% of the cohort. When we offered the choice again in 2023, 59% chose the UWCSEA Programme, and in 2024, 87% did. Parents’ wider view has also moved. We measure it with a Net Promoter Score (NPS), which asks how likely parents are to recommend the school, on a scale running from -100 to +100. For Grades 9 and 10 at East, that score has risen every year: from 33 in 2023, to 35, then 47, and 51 this year. We are grateful for that trust in the programme.

None of this would exist without our teachers, High School leaders and curriculum specialists. They wrote new courses from scratch, and for three years they ran them while maintaining an excellent IGCSE programme, often teaching both. They took the first results apart subject by subject and rewrote courses where the evidence said they should. Since then they have done much of that work again to bring two campuses onto one programme. It has been a great deal of work, much of it unseen by families, and it has been hard. I am deeply grateful to them.

More perspectives and details in this TES article by Emma Seith

A shorter, more visual account of the Class of 2026, with comments from students and parents, is in Marking a Milestone.

The programme itself, course by course, is set out on our website.

Thanks to Ellie Alchin, Damian Bacchoo and Gemma Dawson for the conversation, and to Daquan Li for the data crunching that led to this post.

References

Graphics by Gemini, as prompted by Claude

Ryan, R. M. and Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78.

Seith, E. (2026) Why we replaced International GCSEs with a bespoke curriculum. TES

Woolcock, Nicola (2026) Schools preparing children ‘as young as 11’ for their GCSEs, The Times, 13 October