An IB school in India is two institutions in one administrative body. It is an IB World School, accountable to the International Baccalaureate for programme implementation. It is also an Indian school, collecting fees in rupees, running buses through Indian traffic, employing staff under Indian law and answering to Indian authorities.
Most software conversations conflate the two, usually to the vendor’s advantage. This page separates them, and is deliberately blunt about where a general Indian school system stops.
Authorisation is a multi-year project with no fixed deadlines
The IB’s authorisation process is unusual among school accreditations because the schedule belongs to the school. The IB states that there are no set deadlines or timeframes for any stage, and that the process is school-focused and school-driven, with each school determining its own readiness for each successive stage.
Broadly the stages run: an initial consideration and request for candidacy, then a candidacy period during which the IB assigns a consultant and consultancy begins, then — for PYP and MYP — at least one full academic year of trial implementation during which students actively experience the programme. For DP schools the shape differs: students are generally not enrolled in the Diploma Programme until authorisation is achieved.
When the school believes it has met programme requirements it submits an Application for Authorization, after which the IB conducts a verification visit to determine whether the school demonstrates sufficient readiness and capacity. Following the visit and review, the IB may grant authorisation, request further information, or identify areas requiring further development.
For a trustee, the operative implication is that this is a multi-year investment whose end date you partly control and partly do not, and one where evidence of implementation — not intention — is what is examined.
Evaluation every five years keeps the evidence burden permanent
Authorisation is not the finish line. Programme evaluation takes place at least once every five years, with the first evaluation visit typically four to five years after authorisation. The school engages in a self-study as a key element of continual improvement, and during the process students and teachers may be asked to complete surveys, participate in focus groups and meet IB representatives. Schools that do not meet the IB’s requirements may lose their authorisation.
A five-year rhythm sounds comfortable and is not. Evidence collected retrospectively in year four is thin evidence. Schools that handle evaluation well are those where documentation of practice is a habit rather than a project.
PYP, MYP and DP are three different administrative animals
Treating “IB” as one thing is the most common planning error in a school running more than one programme.
The programmes differ in how students are grouped, how assessment is structured, how work is documented, what reporting looks like to parents, and — as noted above — even in whether students are enrolled in the programme before authorisation. A school adding DP to an existing PYP and MYP setup is not extending a system; it is standing up a second one with different reporting expectations and different external obligations, including the annual assessment procedures the IB publishes for the Diploma Programme.
Any vendor that offers “IB support” as a single feature has not engaged with this.
What an IB school still runs that looks like any other school
Here is the part that gets underweighted in IB software conversations, and it is most of the actual daily work.
An IB school in India admits students and collects documents. It collects fees, in rupees, from Indian parents, through Indian payment rails, and has to issue receipts and chase defaulters. It runs buses with routes, stops and drivers, and parents want to know where the bus is. It employs staff, runs payroll, tracks leave and manages contracts under Indian labour law. It maintains attendance registers. It runs a library, a hostel in some cases, an infirmary, an inventory and a timetable. It communicates with parents, and in India that increasingly means WhatsApp. It holds personal data on children and is subject to the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023.
None of that is IB-specific. All of it is where the school’s administrative hours actually go.
Be clear about what a school ERP will not do for IB
This is the section worth reading twice, because overclaiming to international schools is common and expensive.
EdunodeX does not model IB assessment structures. Its shared library carries a board record for IB PYP, but the curriculum content seeded in the library covers CBSE, ICSE and a generic state-board structure — there is no PYP, MYP or DP syllabus, no IB-specific grading scale, no criterion-based assessment model and no IB-format reporting template shipped with the product. Its grading systems are a CBSE nine-point scale, a percentage scale and a five-point letter scale, plus whatever ranges a school defines for itself.
That means a school running MYP criterion-based assessment or DP subject grading will not find those structures pre-built. You can define custom grade ranges and build your own report card templates, but you would be constructing them, not selecting them, and no part of it is IB-endorsed.
We would rather say this plainly than let a school discover it in month three of implementation.
What EdunodeX covers for an IB school in India
The Indian half, thoroughly.
Admissions with document capture and OCR pre-fill, a public application portal with parent OTP login, and a configurable admissions pipeline. A unified fee ledger with sequential receipt numbering, payment gateway support, instalment plans, concessions and defaulter tracking. Attendance per class and per period, with parent alerts. Transport with routes, stops, vehicles, GPS tracking and a driver app. Staff records, staff attendance and payroll. Hostel, library, inventory, health records, visitor management and events. Timetabling, including automated generation by a constraint solver. Parent and student portals plus Android apps for parents, teachers and drivers. WhatsApp, SMS and in-app communication. Transfer certificates and other certificates with serial numbering. A document vault with per-document expiry tracking. School Groups, giving group-level dashboards and user transfer across schools. And a DPDP consent model with consent grant and revocation, data export, and an erasure-request queue that respects financial retention requirements.
For an IB school, the honest pitch is that this handles the school-as-an-Indian-institution layer well, and leaves the programme layer to whatever the school uses for IB curriculum and assessment management.
Questions to ask any vendor selling you “IB support”
- Show me a PYP report to parents generated by your system, from your templates.
- Show me how MYP criterion levels are stored and how a teacher enters them.
- What DP-specific data do you hold, and what do you do at the end of the DP cycle?
- Which of these are shipped configurations and which would we build ourselves?
- If the answer to most of the above is “you can configure it”, say so directly — we can plan around that. We cannot plan around a demo that implies it already exists.
A vendor comfortable answering the fifth question honestly is more useful than one who is not.