After Authorization: What the 2020 Evaluation Model Actually Checks

Authorization gets a school through the door. Evaluation is what decides whether it stays inside — and since September 2021, every IB evaluation has run against a materially different framework than the one many coordinators trained under. If a school’s leadership team is still picturing evaluation the way it worked before 2020, that gap is worth closing early rather than at the preliminary review.

The same five-year clock, a different rulebook

The five-year cycle itself hasn’t changed. Every IB World School is still evaluated at least once every five years, and the self-study remains the mechanism at the centre of it. What changed in 2020 is what that self-study measures against: evaluations from September 2021 onward are grounded in the revised Programme Standards and Practices, not the 2014 version many coordinators originally trained on. Schools currently going through initial authorization are still working against the 2014 standards — the 2020 version applies specifically at evaluation, which means a school’s first real encounter with it often comes years after authorization, not at it.

The self-study questionnaire now has two parts

Under the 2020 model, the self-study questionnaire splits into two distinct sections rather than one combined document. The first, self-assessment, functions much like the old self-study: a structured reflection against each standard and practice, with schools now choosing between three levels of implementation — highly developed, developed, or developing — rather than the four-point scale used previously. The second section, programme development, is genuinely new. Schools produce a case study showing how they’ve developed, analysed, and reflected on a specific aspect of their programme over the evaluation period, rather than simply reporting compliance.

That second section is the real shift in emphasis. It asks a school to demonstrate a process of deliberate development, not just a snapshot of current practice — which rewards schools that have been treating the standards as a continuous improvement cycle all along, and penalises schools that let documentation lapse between visits and reconstruct it under deadline.

A preliminary review, four months earlier

The 2020 model also introduced a preliminary review step: schools now submit documentary evidence for feedback roughly four months ahead of the site visit itself. In practice, this means the pressure point in the evaluation calendar has moved earlier. A school that treats the preliminary review as a soft deadline, rather than the point where gaps actually get flagged, loses the exact window the IB built in to let schools act on that feedback before the visit that counts.

The action plan has changed to match. It’s now built as an interactive document schools work from as they self-assess, rather than something produced at the end and filed away — and the IB can add to it directly after the preliminary review, giving schools a second, IB-informed pass at closing gaps before the visit.

What this means for schools preparing now

The practical implication is straightforward: evidence-gathering now has to be a habit built years before the evaluation window opens, not a project undertaken in the months leading up to it. A school that keeps its programme development documentation current — unit plans, reflection records, the reasoning behind curriculum changes — is simply producing the programme development case study as it goes, rather than reconstructing four or five years of decisions from memory under a deadline.

The standards themselves ask the same underlying question the authorization process did: is this school genuinely living the IB’s philosophy, or documenting compliance with it after the fact? The 2020 model simply makes that distinction harder to fake — which, for a school that was already doing the work honestly, is very good news.