A city school will introduce an international curriculum in Classes VI to VIII from the next academic session, starting in April.

The Heritage School will offer Cambridge Lower Secondary, a curriculum of the Cambridge Assessment International Education (CAIE), and the middle school students have started opting for it.

The school has been offering an international curriculum in Classes IX to XII and is now expanding it to lower classes.

“We have NRI children who come to the school seeking admission in lower classes and the school will meet their requirements and demands,” said Seema Sapru, the principal of The Heritage School.

The school had started the IBDP (International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme) for Classes XI and XII in 2012 and the IGCSE (for Classes IX and X) in 2013.

“We are doing it step by step and next year we will move down another level and offer the international curriculum from Class V. We were looking for a certain number of students before we could start the Cambridge Lower Secondary (in Classes VI, VII and VIII) and once we had that we started. We have also recruited teachers for this curriculum,” said Sapru.

The curriculum is “holistic, experiential and it allows students to think and reason and question,” a school official said.

The school chose the Cambridge Lower Secondary, instead of the Middle Years Programme (MYP) of the International Baccalaureate, because there is no formal exam in the MYP.

“If you have a public exam, you get to know where you stand as a school. Also, parents in India want to know how their children have fared in comparison to others,” said a school official.

When the school started offering the IBDP nine years ago, it was because they were losing students to other schools — sometimes in other cities — offering the IB curriculum.

There are some schools in the city — such as Calcutta International School, The Cambridge School, Gems Akademia International School and Vidyanjali International School — that offer international curriculums like the CAIE.

Some schools offer the Cambridge Lower Secondary in some classes, while others have aligned their syllabi according to the international curriculum.

At least two of the schools offer the Cambridge Lower Secondary in Class VIII, instead of in lower classes.