Similarities and Differences between PYP and CfE

The Primary Years Practice (PYP) and the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) are similar in a number of ways. Both PYP and CfE strive to make their students more involved in their learning and give them a choice of what they want to learn. This helps the students to become more engaged and enthusiastic about learning and motivates them to enjoy it more.

The PYP approach is transdisciplinary and aims to focus on various areas of their curriculum as they are learning to give them a broader understanding. The CfE can also be taught in a cross-curricular way, teaching more than one subject at a time to give the pupils more breadth and can also help them to understand the relevance at times if they can see the different areas which their knowledge can be applied in the real world.

The PYP strives to make connections with their learning, helping them to start understanding the world that they live in. This helps their students to develop a sense of compassion and culture and understand and appreciate their own culture and others around the world. While this is a main focus of PYP (and IB in general), the CfE use the curricular area, Religious and Moral Education to teach their pupils about the different cultures and religions around the world. In this way, this aspect of learning seems more of an importance and focus in PYP than it is in CfE.

In the CfE, teaching technologies is an area of the curriculum that can be taught by itself or can be taught cross-curricular, alongside other areas of the curriculum. In PYP, the technologies are not an area of their curriculum as they are expected to be taught them across the areas of their curriculum. So rather than subjects like ICT being individual lessons, the PYP tries to tie it into various lessons throughout their areas of curriculum.

Both PYP and CfE prepare their students for the future, teaching them how to apply their skills and helping them to become life-long learners who are motivated to have ambitions and take opportunities. They both strive to help their students to value themselves and others and build confidence; this is clear from looking at IB’s Learner Profile attributes and CfE’s Four Capacities.