With new leadership, expanded academic pathways for older students and a community representing more than 60 nationalities, International School of Milan begins the new academic year with a strong focus on individual progress. Easy Milano speaks with Head of School Jonathan Taylor about educational continuity, academic pathways and what it means to prepare students for an increasingly international world.
For families comparing international schools in Milan, curriculum and examination results are important, but they rarely tell the whole story.
Parents also want to understand how a school will respond to their individual child. Will they be challenged appropriately? Will their strengths and interests be recognised as they develop? How will the school support them as they begin to make important academic choices? And, for families arriving from another country, how quickly will a new school begin to feel like a community?
Founded in 1958 as Milan’s first international school, ISM today welcomes students from Early Years through Secondary School at its Baranzate campus. Its internationally diverse community brings together students from a wide range of cultural and educational backgrounds, while its educational programme has been shaped over decades around international learning and the International Baccalaureate.
Jonathan Taylor joins ISM with extensive experience in international education and school leadership. His career has included Headships in London, Switzerland and China. He brings that experience to ISM at an exciting point in time for the school, as it expands its boarding provision and refines its educational offering in light of rapid advances in technology.
Supporting the Individual Student
One of the ideas increasingly shaping conversations about education is the difference between achievement and progress.
High examination scores can indicate strong academic outcomes, but they do not always show how far an individual student has travelled from their own starting point. For parents, this distinction can be important. Children enter a school with different educational histories, strengths, interests, languages and levels of confidence. A school’s role is therefore not only to produce strong final results, but also to help each student make meaningful progress.
How do you balance high academic expectations with recognising that students develop in different ways and at different speeds?
Jonathan Taylor: High expectations are an integral part of the culture at ISM. However, we measure that according to a child’s potential rather than a pre-determined goal. Some children excel on the sports field but struggle in the classroom, while others are the opposite. Expecting each child to obtain the same outcomes makes little sense. Therefore, we use baseline data alongside our teachers’ professional judgement to determine realistic but ambitious goals for each, individual student.
We also consider factors such as a child’s prior educational journey, their language needs, and for our younger children, their age relative to their peers. These factors help us determine whether a child’s current performance may not fully reflect their potential. Often a child can make rapid progress once specific learning barriers are removed.
In an international environment, this individual view matters because students may arrive from different curricula and may already have experienced several school systems. Teachers need to understand where a student is when they arrive while maintaining ambitious expectations about where that student may eventually be able to go.
One Educational Journey from the Earliest Years
Educational continuity is another factor families should consider, particularly when choosing a school for a younger child.
International School of Milan was the first school in Italy authorised across all three International Baccalaureate programmes: the Primary Years Programme (PYP), Middle Years Programme (MYP) and Diploma Programme (DP).
This allows students following the IB route to move through an educational framework that develops progressively from the earliest years through to the end of Secondary School.
For parents, the practical question is less about the programme names and how an all-through programme can deliver educational benefits.
What does continuity across the different stages of a child’s education give the student in practical terms?
When a curriculum is planned as one seamless journey rather than a series of disconnected phases, skills such as, independent thinking, collaboration and international-mindedness can be effectively embedded and layered throughout the course of a child’s schooling. This avoids the ‘shoe-horning’ of skills and concepts into the final years of study.
Curriculum continuity also ensures removes friction when moving from stage to stage. Children are expected to learn lots of new skills and knowledge already, so removing the additional burden of changing curriculum approaches is one way we can make their lives easier.
For internationally mobile families, that continuity can take on another dimension. Children may already be adapting to a new city, language or culture. A coherent educational approach can provide a degree of familiarity while the academic expectations evolve as they grow.
What Academic Progress Tells Parents Beyond Exam Results
Examination performance naturally remains part of the picture, especially when families are comparing Secondary Schools.
ISM began the 2026–27 academic year with another set of strong external examination results. Its 2026 IB Diploma cohort achieved an average score of 34.5 out of 45, placing it within the highest 50 achieving IB schools in Europe. However, it is the school’s value-added data -comparing predicted student outcomes with eventual results – that tells a fuller story.
For parents unfamiliar with the term, value-added looks at the progress students make relative to an expected starting point. Rather than asking only how high the final score was, it asks how much development occurred along the way. The 2026 Diploma cohort, for example, had a predicted average of 30.5 based on CAT4 data (CAT4 is an external predictive data tool, widely used by schools around the world). But ISM students ultimately achieved an average of 34.5 points.
This 4 point overperformance constitutes ‘value-added’ and reflects the positive impact of the teaching at the school.
For parents, value-added measures can provide a different perspective on academic effectiveness, particularly within a school that educates students with varied backgrounds and abilities.
Parents understandably look at examination results when comparing schools. What else should they consider when assessing how effectively a school helps individual students progress?
The best schools will have a detailed understanding of each individual child and how they are progressing on a monthly basis. This is achieved through a combination of dedicated teachers and well-oiled monitoring systems.
Additionally, while exam outcomes are important, they are only one strand of a holistic education. Skills like public speaking, cultural and linguistic fluency, and technological literacy are all important components too. Parents should probe the school on how opportunities are woven into the curriculum to explicitly develop these skills.
For parents, that broader view of progress becomes especially important as students get older and begin making more deliberate choices about subjects, qualifications and future direction.
IB, A Levels and Finding the Right Academic Path
As students move through Secondary School, their interests tend to become more defined.
A child who once enjoyed a broad range of subjects may begin to develop a clear interest in sciences, humanities, arts or another area. At this point, academic guidance becomes increasingly important because choices made during the final years of school can influence university options and future study.
From the 2026–27 academic year, ISM is expanding the academic options available to students in the final years of Secondary School by offering International A Levels alongside its established IB Diploma Programme.
How will ISM help families identify which pathway best suits the individual student?
The two routes offer different educational structures. The IB Diploma is characterised by breadth across several subject areas together with its core components, while A Levels allow students to specialise more intensively in a smaller number of selected subjects.
The question for families is therefore less about which qualification is universally stronger and more about which structure best suits the interests, learning preferences and future plans of an individual student.
The additional pathway introduces more choice at the point when individual academic interests often become most pronounced, while students who wish to continue the complete IB journey can still progress through to the Diploma.
Internationalism Beyond Language
Academic pathways are only one part of international education. For families relocating to Milan, a child’s school is often one of the first places where a new life begins to take shape. Friendships, confidence and a sense of belonging can therefore matter just as much as the curriculum.
Across the ISM community, students encounter different cultures and perspectives as part of everyday school life. The value of that environment goes beyond simply speaking more than one language. Children who regularly study, collaborate and socialise with classmates from different backgrounds become comfortable navigating different perspectives and cultural expectations.
In such a culturally diverse school community, what can students learn from one another that cannot necessarily be taught in a classroom?
The most important lesson our students learn is that, regardless of passport or birthplace, there is much more that unites us than divides us. Breaking down stereotypes and prejudices may seem like a secondary goal but it is actually one of the greatest values that education in a community such as ISM offers.
More practically, understanding cultural nuance is something that is hard to learn from a book. And in an increasingly mobile world, cultural fluency will arguably become a currency on which employers place ever greater value.
For newly arrived families, however, diversity alone does not automatically create belonging. Students need opportunities to build relationships and feel connected to their new environment.
At ISM, a rich extra-curricular programme makes this possible. After-school activities, lunchtime clubs, academic clinics and co-curricular opportunities across areas such as sport, arts, service and leadership each offer chances to develop and strengthen friendships.
These activities can be particularly important for students arriving from abroad because the spaces outside formal lessons are often where friendships begin to form.
Looking Ahead
Jonathan Taylor begins his first year at ISM at a point of both continuity and change.
The school’s established IB programmes remain central to its educational identity, while the introduction of International A Levels expands the choices available to older students. Recent improvements to the campus have included learning spaces, boarding facilities, the swimming pool and outdoor areas, while the wider focus continues to be on how students experience their education from year to year.
For families considering a school, facilities, programmes and examination results all provide useful information. The longer-term measure, however, is what happens to the child who enters the school.
At the end of your first year at ISM, what would you like students and parents to say has become stronger?
While I believe that there is always room for improvement – my mantra is to “be the best at getting better” – I expect this year to be more about continuity than change.
However, I will be pleased if at the end of the school year parents and students feel that their voice has been properly heard. We have wonderful facilities, a team of dedicated teachers and the support of a leading global schools group, so all the ingredients are in place. But it is the parents, and particularly the students, whom we serve and the more we can work in partnership the stronger the outcomes will be.
For International School of Milan, those questions place the individual student at the centre of the conversation. The educational journey may begin at age two or much later, and the final destination will be different for every child. What matters along the way is whether the school can provide enough continuity to create confidence, enough challenge to encourage progress and enough flexibility to allow individual interests to develop.
International School of Milan welcomes families who would like to discover how the school supports each individual student to thrive through education. Families can book a personalised visit to the school or explore upcoming Open Days at International School of Milan.
Article by Easy Milano editorial staff in collaboration with International School of Milan
