Cambridge IGCSE Global Perspectives: Component 2 – Individual Report (0457)

This guide covers Component 2 – Individual Report, the second of three assessed components in Cambridge IGCSE Global Perspectives (0457), 2025-2027 series. Global Perspectives is a skills-based syllabus – its own syllabus states that “knowledge of content is not assessed” – so this guide focuses on what the Individual Report actually requires candidates to produce and how it is assessed, since there is no content taxonomy to learn in the way there is for a traditional subject.

Where this fits in 0457

All 0457 candidates sit Component 1 (Written Exam) and Component 3 (Team Project) alongside Component 2. The Individual Report is internally set and externally marked by Cambridge International, worth 30% of the qualification. Candidates devise their own research question and title – the teacher’s role is limited to guiding its feasibility, not setting it – and it is the component where candidates work most independently, since it must be entirely the candidate’s own work researched and written outside timed exam conditions.

Syllabus coverage

CAMBRIDGE IGCSE GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES (0457) — COMPONENT 2 INDIVIDUAL REPORT

• Format: an internally set, externally marked report worth 60 marks. Candidates choose one topic from the syllabus’s topic list, identify a global issue within it that divides opinion, and devise a global research question that becomes the report’s title. The finished report must be 1500–2000 words, excluding the bibliography or reference list.
• Skills assessed: research, analysis, evaluation, reflection and communication, applied here to independent, candidate-led research rather than exam-room responses. The syllabus’s full set of skills also includes collaboration, which is assessed in the Team Project; the Written Exam assesses research, analysis and evaluation only.
• Choosing the issue: candidates first explore the context of their chosen topic, then select a global issue with present-day impact – one that raises an ethical dilemma, causes conflict, damage, difficulty or hardship, or simply divides opinion – before formulating a research question with enough scope to explore a real range of perspectives.
• Perspectives required: the report must present local and/or national perspectives alongside global perspectives, showing that the candidate understands not just what different people, groups or nations believe but why their perspectives differ – for example, contrasting the views of local farmers and local politicians on the same issue.
• Analysis and a course of action: candidates must analyse the causes of conflict or disagreement and the consequences of the issue, weigh different possible courses of action, and then propose and justify a single course of action to change, improve or resolve the issue, explaining how it could be implemented and what impact it would have.
• Evidence and referencing: all material used must be explicitly cited with a clear, consistently applied referencing system (there is no single required style), and candidates must evaluate their sources – explaining their value to the research and whether each is reliable and credible.
• Reflection and conclusion: the report closes with the candidate’s own view on the issue as a whole, reflecting on their research findings, their learning, and the perspectives of others, before directly answering the research question they set themselves.
• The teacher’s role: teachers guide candidates to choose a feasible, manageable topic, help them formulate a genuinely researchable question, support their research and referencing skills, and monitor time management – but the report itself must be produced independently, since it is marked externally rather than by the candidate’s own teacher.

A useful way to picture the finished report is as a short piece of applied social science rather than a persuasive essay. A candidate investigating water scarcity, for example, might frame the question “Should upstream and downstream countries share responsibility equally for managing a shared river’s water supply?” – immediately setting up at least two perspectives (an upstream government prioritising its own agriculture, a downstream government facing shortages) that the report can research, compare and evaluate before proposing a specific course of action such as a joint water-sharing treaty or an independent monitoring body, and explaining realistically what implementing it would involve.

How to approach it

Because the Individual Report is not marked against subject content, the highest-scoring reports are the ones that satisfy the assessment criteria explicitly rather than simply being well-written on a topic. Start with the research question, not the topic: a question like “To what extent should [named country] restrict [named industry] to protect [named resource]?” already builds in a specific place, a specific issue and room for more than one perspective, whereas a broad topic title on its own (“Climate change”) does not give enough structure to organise 1500-2000 words around. Build the report broadly in the sequence the syllabus itself recommends – explain the issue and its different perspectives first, analyse causes and consequences second, evaluate possible courses of action third, and reflect and conclude last. Unlike Component 3, this component’s marking criteria are not printed in the syllabus; they are in Cambridge’s specimen mark scheme, which marks the report against eight level-based tables – the global issue, causes and consequences, perspectives, courses of action, and evaluation of evidence and sources (AO1, 40 marks); reflection (AO2, 5 marks); and structure and clarity, and referencing (AO3, 15 marks). None of them requires this exact order, but the recommended sequence maps directly onto them, and structure and clarity are marked in their own right, so following it makes each requirement far easier to evidence clearly. Keep a running reference list from the first source read, rather than trying to reconstruct it at the end, since the referencing criterion (AO3 Communication, distinct from the AO1 evaluation of a source’s own reliability and credibility) rewards citation and referencing that are complete, consistent and clearly linked.

Because assessment is skills-based rather than content-based, the same five skills – research, analysis, evaluation, reflection and communication – apply whatever topic a candidate chooses, which means past exemplar reports on entirely different topics can still be useful for seeing what a strong analysis or a well-evaluated source looks like in practice, even when the subject matter itself is irrelevant to a candidate’s own report.

Official syllabus

Cambridge IGCSE Global Perspectives (0457) syllabus for exams in 2025, 2026 and 2027 — cambridgeinternational.org. Marking criteria: Cambridge IGCSE Global Perspectives 0457/02 Individual Report specimen mark scheme, for examination from 2025 — cambridgeinternational.org.