Global Perspectives

Cambridge IGCSE Global Perspectives provides opportunities for enquiry into, and reflection on, key global issues from different perspectives: personal, local/national and global. Global Perspectives encourages awareness of global problems and offers a range of opportunities to explore solutions through cooperation and collaboration.

The course is not about getting everybody to think identically; rather it is a matter of opening minds to the complexity of the world and of human thought, and encouraging empathy for the diversity of human experience and feeling.

Candidates will have opportunities to acquire and apply a range of skills, including:

• Researching, analysing and evaluating information
• Developing and justifying a line of reasoning
• Reflecting on processes and outcomes
• Communicating information and reasoning
• Collaborating to achieve a common outcome.

Cambridge IGCSE Global Perspectives is built around topics that have global significance; knowledge of content is not assessed. However, each particular topic encompasses issues of global importance.

Possible topics are as follows:

Component 1: Written Examination

• Demographic change
• Education for all
• Employment
• Fuel and energy
• Globalisation
• Law and criminality
• Migration
• Transport systems

Component 2: Individual Report

• Belief systems
• Biodiversity and ecosystem loss
• Changing communities
•  Digital world
• Family
• Humans and other species
• Sustainable living
• Trade and aid

Component 3: Team Project

• Conflict and peace
• Disease and health
• Human rights
• Language and communication
• Poverty and inequality
• Sport and recreation
• Tradition, culture and identity
• Water, food and agriculture

Candidates do not study all of the topics listed above. Teachers and candidates choose topics that have the most relevance for them.

• Component 1: Written Examination, 35% of overall grade (70 marks), 1 hour 15 minutes
  Candidates answer four compulsory questions based on a range of sources.
• Component 2: Individual Report, 30% of overall grade, (60 marks)
  Candidates research one topic area of personal, local and/or national and global significance and submit a report based on their research.
• Component 3: Team Project, 35% of overall grade (70 marks)
  Candidates devise and develop a collaborative project into an aspect of one topic.