The International Baccalaureate aims to develop inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect.

To this end the organization works with schools, governments and international organizations to develop challenging programmes of international education and rigorous assessment.

These programmes encourage students across the world to become active, compassionate and lifelong learners who understand that other people, with their differences, can also be right.

Millarville Community School reached a milestone through achievement of full status as an International Baccalaureate World School delivering the Primary Years Programme.  Working toward this end through the past three years, staff have attended a variety of professional development sessions in both Canada and the United States and put in countless hours in order to meet the rigour of working with the IB programme at the Primary Years Level (Kindergarten through grade six).  Millarville, being a K - 8 School, maintains the IB approach through it's Upper School.

Including Millarville School, only six schools in Alberta offer the Primary Years Programme, Millarville being the only Public School south of Edmonton, Alberta to offer this program.  

In July of 2008, the IB Programme marked its 40th Anniversary with a conference in Marrakech, Morroco.  There, the history and philosophy behind the Programme was well explained by founder Kurt Hahn:

"This IB education is meant to position students to further the advancement of knowledge in this world by making connections, finding similarities and complementarities, probing contrasts and conflicts not only in their own surroundings but in the global society we live in now. This is where for me, a well taught IB program is at its best when it combines an academic education with a sense of duty, a sense of service as responsible local, national and world citizens. "

Kurt Hahn first founded the international Outward Bound Program.  Later, he partnered with Alec Peterson, Director of Oxford University's Department of Educational Studies.  Peterson was fighting to end the practice of forcing young students to specialize into three narrow academic subjects at an early age.

These two leaders laid the foundation for the depth and breadth of the IB, including the emphasis on inquiry and research, exploring how we know what we know through the Theory of Knowledge course and making "creativity, action and service (CAS)" a requirement of the IB. Today, the IB Programme enjoys a worldwide reputation for university preparation. Students with inquiring minds, international understanding and compassion for others are just what university professors want and what our world needs.