After six very successful years of Europa School UK’s participation in the “Schools: Partners for the Future (PASCH)” network, we were delighted to welcome Pauline Wick, Lead Manager for Educational Services of the Goethe-Institut in London, and Thorsten Egner, Head of Language Courses, on Friday 20th March to evaluate our membership and commence the process of renewing it. We now can make public the fantastic news that we have been successful in our reapplication for another three years.
This renews our PASCH membership – a global network of schools with special ties to Germany. Launched in 2008 by Germany‘s Federal Foreign Office, it is a fantastic initiative to bring beacon schools for German together, offering their pupils and teachers unique opportunities to collaborate and to take part in exciting activities as well as allowing them to take their internationally acknowledged, gold-standard language exams at a very reduced rate. Almost 300 of our pupils have profited from this reduction over the past three years and gained qualifications which will make them stand out in university and job applications as well as facilitating studying and working in German-speaking countries.
As well as providing training opportunities for our teachers, our pupils have benefitted from generous scholarship programmes for languages courses in Germany each summer and football camps in Germany, as well as multiple fascinating workshops ranging from music to career events. They have also profited from a host of free materials such as the brilliant Wuschel books, a new learning resource for primary children, created by the Goethe Institut and illustrated by Alex Scheffler. The most recent initiatives include 2DE travelling to London to take part in the ‘Wuschel: An immersive exhibition for primary schools’, stimulating some of our youngest language learners in key stage 1, and a post card project with other schools which stretches across both our Primary and our Secondary School.
Dr Daniela Havenstein, PASCH-Coordinator