Objectives defined in the school-year 2018-19: 1. to enrich our curriculum with additional projects; all secondary school classes will participate at least once in an international programme 2. the percentage of our graduates with a language certificate will increase from the current 25% to more than 50% on average over the next 5 years 3. age-appropriate media maturity and digital literacy curriculum for our pupils 4. further international connections, looking for partner schools: in three years' time, six schools, instead of the current three, with whom we are working closely 5. writing further proposals to meet our needs and objectives, and implementing them appropriately In order to achieve our objectives, we need to enable our teachers to gain further international experience in project-based teaching, in the use of informal and non-formal pedagogical methods, to develop new international contacts, to improve our digital education, to train ourselves in the most modern methods of language teaching. International projects are the most complex and effective way to achieve our objectives: they provide a simultaneous learning experience, exposure to other cultures and the application of language skills in a natural context.
Since founding our school, we have been following the developments in education. Before writing the application, we looked together, teachers, staff and parents, into where we had started, where we were going and what our goals were. We saw the need to focus on our secondary school, where we saw the most serious areas for improvement. When we founded our secondary school, we set as our primary pedagogical goal to educate young people who are creative thinkers, socially sensitive individuals, and who want to do something for the betterment of the world. To this end, we have created a learning environment from real life experiences, project-based education through the integration of subjects, international contacts to learn about other cultures, and aim for a high level of language and digital literacy skills. At the end of the 2010s we had to face cyberbullying as a new challenge at our school. Our students participate in agricultural, conservation, social and industrial placements. We organised several theme-weeks, some of them with our Italian and Latvian sister schools, partly with the help of E+ grants. English is taught in an increased number of lessons compared to the general curriculum for Waldorf schools. So we think we were on the right track, but we also see where we need to develop further.