The German school
Bandiera animata flag Germania RFTWe are a comprehensive school in the county of North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany. The school’s funding body is the town of Lüdenscheid. We are about 100 teachers plus 2 social pedagogues, 2 special needs teachers, 2 secretaries. We have about 1250 students, from class 5 – 13, aged 11 – 19. As a comprehensive school one of the basic principles of our school is that children of different origin learn together – so they are not sorted into different schools after primary school but stay together at one school where they can obtain different levels of qualification. We have a certificate of being a “school without racism” , as well as an award for "job counselling", and "language sensitive teaching". At the moment we have three current exchanges running with schools in Poland and England, and with a university/teacher training institute in Russia. For more than 25 years we had a lively student exchange with a school in France. For students in class 11 we offer a one week or two weeks work experience abroad in cooperation with our partner school (in Myslenice, Poland) and the University of Taganrog (Russia). We offer preparation courses for the Certificate of Advanced English every year, and almost all students who sit for the exam pass, often with very high scores. At the moment we are in the application process for the renowned certificate “Europaschule”. The participation in our first Erasmus-Plus-Project (2015-17), which dealt with the topic of preventing early school leaving, was a boost of motivation to become more active in the field of European cooperation. We have been trying to enhance the European dimension in our school, e.g. by introducing a “Europe class” in years 5 and 6, projects on Europe Day in May, inviting local and national politicians and MEPs to our school for discussion panels with senior students. More than 60 % of our students have a migrational background of some sort or another. This great variety of ethnical and cultural backgrounds offers a wide range of starting points for an international project. Especially topics related to migration and refugees are important for our school and for the town of Lüdenscheid. The small town of Lüdenscheid put up about 1,000 refugees in 2016, and our school established two extra Go-In-classes to help their children to have a promising start in our educational system. The project will be taken care of by the headmaster, Mr Frank Bisterfeld, an ardent supporter of the European idea. The main work will be done by Astrid Ebnicher, our Head of English and by Ralph David, our Coordinator of Modern Languages. There is a wider team of about 4 colleagues who will work with our students on the topic and take an active part in in preparing, conducting and evaluating the project.