The governing body of the Institute is the IBE council, composed of 12 representatives from Member States designated by UNESCO’s General Conference, for four year office terms. The council’s role is to approve the IBE’s draft programme and budget for each biennium for submission to the General Conference, as well as to ensure consistent and complementary activities in line with the education sector's strategy and programmes.
The curriculum is one of the most effective tools for bridging the gap between education and development. However, there is little to no normative guidance on what constitutes a well-balanced responsive curriculum at different levels of education.
Education systems and by implication curricula are under relentless pressure to demonstrate relevance and responsiveness to national, regional, and global development challenges.
Research evidence on the nature of learning is impressively accumulating and at a fast pace. However, this impressively accumulating wealth of knowledge is not being effectively applied to improve practice in the facilitation of learning.
While indispensable to quality improvement efforts, curriculum and learning depend on the effective and efficient functioning of other elements of an education system. A systemic approach is therefore required to analyse critical impediments and implement responsive interventions.
There is a need to deepen the understanding of curriculum and to reconceptualise it as a tool to enhance and democratize learning opportunities within a lifelong learning perspective.
In order to effectively carry out our core mandate and progressively become the UNESCO Centre of Excellence in Curriculum and related matters, we aim at constantly strengthening our delivery capacity.
Inclusive dialogue is a precondition for consensus on the value of the curriculum to global education and development efforts. The IBE leads in generating opportunities for intellectual discussion aimed at recognising the still understated potential of curriculum to democratize learning and to create lifelong opportunities for all.
Substantial curriculum investments must yield regenerative and sustainable results. This means over time countries must be able to strengthen their own curriculum development capabilities. Acknowledging this, the IBE provides enabling support through knowledge-sharing, skills transfer, policy and technical advice, and professional development courses, among other strategies.
Education stakeholders have come to rely on mounting research evidence on teaching and learning that, ironically, is challenging to obtain and often written in scientific language not easily understood in common terms. At IBE we identify, select, and interpret research findings for policy-making and practical application in curriculum and learning.
The IBE Documentation Centre collects and makes available documentation and information pertaining to the content of education, curriculum development and teaching methods. Resources collected at the Documentation Centre are part of the IBE knowledge base on curricula and education systems.
