A message from Dr Siva Kumari to the IB community

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Welcome to the IB’s Annual Review for 2018 - 2019.

For over 50 years, we at the IB have been successfully delivering our mission - a better world through education. We deliver it by making excellent education available to as many students, at as many schools, in as many countries as possible. Our focus is on developing young people who can and will make change in their world, our world. 

Working closely with our passionate community of educators (over 5,000 schools in more than 150 countries), our mission inspires us to continual improvement in all aspects of our work in our three business areas: curriculum development, working with schools, and assessment. 

The growing global appeal of our mission and philosophy is reflected in our key performance indicators. They show steady, continuing growth in the numbers of IB schools, authorized programmes, and students. 

This growth and the efficiency with which the IB is led and managed is also shown in our financial statement. In this financial year, the IB has delivered another strong financial performance, which guarantees our ability to maintain our intellectual independence in developing and delivering our curricula and programmes in the future. Most importantly, we have taken an approach of not raising fees and removing fees for professional development, for registration of students, while creating more services for no cost.

Our daily work delivers tangible benefits to our schools, our students, our stakeholders and communities in all three areas of our strategy: Innovation, Service and Community. We look at the impact of those benefits across areas where the IB makes a daily difference.

As the IB’s growth continues, our excellent education will benefit ever more students, of all backgrounds, at schools of all kinds, all over the world. Committed to our Mission, we will make a better world through education, responding to the impacts of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and a changing world that is more connected than ever. Together, we will deliver continuous improvements in education—developing and inspiring open-minded, independent thinkers to be the citizens and leaders of tomorrow, wherever they are, the future generations of IB influence.

Thank you,

Dr Siva Kumari

Director General