Gesamtschule Battenberg (2024/2025 school year )
Gesamtschule Battenberg (GSB) is a cooperative comprehensive school in the district of Waldeck-Frankenberg and has around 850 students in grades 5 to 10. As well as offering general secondary, intermediate and grammar school education, students are initially taught German language skills in three intensive classes before gradually moving on to mainstream lessons in existing classes. Given the school’s rural location on the edge of the Rothaar mountains in north-west Hesse, not far from the border with North Rhine-Westphalia, Gesamtschule Battenberg takes students from around ten primary schools and 20 different towns and villages.
GSB strives to create an innovative learning environment that meets the students’ needs while also reflecting the requirements of society. The focus here is on encouraging students not just intellectually, musically and creatively, but emotionally and socially too.
Under its slogan “Learning with your head, heart and hands”, GSB is a Profile 3 full-day school with some compulsory after-school activities (‘teilgebunden’), and alongside its regular timetable offers a diverse provision that allows it to provide special support to students with learning difficulties too. Sports activities are available in classes, such as climbing and volleyball, and in break-time games, supplemented by competitions in all kinds of sports.
In terms of languages, in the subjects of history, geography, politics and economics students are encouraged and supported bilingually in German and English. Regular exchanges with partners in Senonches and Lambesc in France or different programmes in Erasmus+ projects round off their language development and also boost social and intercultural skills. The school is particularly proud of its longstanding partnership with Tegemeo School in Tanzania.
Mediation and mediator training for students, paramedic training and the school’s own paramedic service, offering support as a volunteer reader, digital hero or in the school’s own library are just some examples of “social involvement” that encourages students to actively participate in and contribute to school life.
Career guidance and 3rd level orientation are extremely important at GSB. It offers a variety of cooperative arrangements, including placements in local companies for students in all levels of the school, and personalised career advice all the way to the school’s own offer of practical classes in workshops (including woodwork, metalwork, technology, 3D-printing, programming, sewing, ceramics and film). In all areas, its high-quality career and university course advice are intertwined with its certification as a STEM-friendly and digital STEM school. Since the start of the 2023/2024 school year, Battenberg School has also been an official “Digital World” pilot school. GSB has also been re-certified as a specialist music school.
“We really hope and anticipate that the joint artistic projects that come out of the class will expand and enhance our students’ artistic perspectives and horizons in the next two years at school.”
Reinhold Gaß, Schulleiter
„We’re delighted to have the opportunity to host the flying artist’s room on our playground and are excited and keen to see the eyes of so many lit up by it.”
Reinhold Gaß, Schulleiter
