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IB and Cambridge Schools in India Face a Shortage of Experienced Teachers
India's international curriculum sector has expanded rapidly over the past 5 years. But as more schools adopt IB and Cambridge programmes, educators with deep, curriculum-specific experience are becoming increasingly important, and rare! Sujit Kumar, Director of STEM Programmes at Academio, argues that the challenge is not simply finding more teachers, but developing enough who understand how these curricula require students to learn.
With the 2026 Cambridge IGCSE results now released, the conversation around student performance will inevitably return to familiar questions of preparation, examination pressure and academic effort. But there is another question that tends to receive less attention: whether the growth of international curricula in India is being matched by enough experienced educators who understand how to teach them.
The expansion of the segment is well established. Data from ISC Research shows that the number of IB schools in India increased from 192 in 2020 to 276 in 2025, a 44 per cent rise in 5 years. India also has more than 550 Cambridge-affiliated schools, making it the board's second-largest market after the United Kingdom. As the number of schools and students grows, the demand for teachers who have worked extensively within these curricula is also increasing, particularly in STEM subjects.
Sujit Kumar, Director of STEM Programmes at Academio, has spent more than 2 decades teaching Mathematics and Physics across IB, IGCSE and competitive examination preparation. An M.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, he began his career at FIITJEE before moving into international curricula. The transition exposed him to a different set of expectations from both students and teachers.
"A school can adopt an international curriculum relatively quickly, but curating a team of qualified educators with several years of experience within that curriculum takes much longer," says Kumar. "As the number of schools grows, the challenge is not only finding teachers who know Mathematics or Physics well, but finding teachers who also understand how those subjects are expected to be taught and assessed."
The difference becomes particularly evident when students move between India's examination-oriented preparation culture and the deep understanding-based learning of international curricula. Competitive examination preparation often rewards speed, accuracy and familiarity with different question types. IB and Cambridge, while rigorous in their own ways, can place greater emphasis on applying concepts in unfamiliar contexts and explaining the reasoning behind an answer.
"Both systems are rigorous, but they are rigorous about different things," Kumar says. "A student may be very comfortable applying a method they have practised repeatedly, but become less confident when they have to decide which concept applies to a new problem or explain why their approach works. That requires a different kind of preparation."
For Kumar, this distinction also helps explain why examination results can sometimes expose learning gaps that are difficult to see during routine classroom assessments. A student may appear confident when working through familiar problems but struggle when questions require synthesis, analysis, interpretation or justification.
"You can sometimes see it in the pattern of marks rather than simply the total," he says. "A student may know the method but lose marks when asked to explain the reasoning behind it. That is rarely something that can be corrected in the final weeks before an examination. Often, it points to a conceptual gap that has developed much earlier, in the classrooms."
The implications extend beyond recruitment. As international curricula continue to expand, Kumar believes schools will need to think more seriously about how teachers are developed and supported, rather than relying only on competing for resource from an existing pool of experienced educators.
"The longer-term question is not simply how many more schools can offer these curricula. It is whether the educator ecosystem that is qualified, is developed alongside them," he says. "If the sector is going to expand sustainably, teacher development has to become a much bigger part of that conversation."
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