For the above-mentioned reasons, our plan for school development in the next few years included, on the one hand, the further development and expansion of our CLIL offer and, on the other hand, extended staff development. The further training of staff members on linguistic, content-related, and intercultural levels should help them to be better equipped to prepare young people for the European education and employment market.
As a long-standing European school, we are faced with the challenge of adapting to continuously changing conditions. This concerns new content as well as teaching methods and concepts. In order to be able to keep up with the constant change, it is indispensable to develop conceptually as well as in terms of personnel in order to enable the pupils to deal with current European topics in depth and to promote their intercultural communicative competencies. This should enable them to participate in cross-border offers through better qualifications. We can already bring international cooperation closer to some of our pupils in the context of Erasmus+ projects and pupil exchanges and offer them some basics up to differentiated learning opportunities through a focus on foreign languages (certificates, EFF, CLIL), but we still see room for improvement and expansion for our school in the context of European mobility and cooperation. Thus, on the one hand, we would like to deepen and expand the awareness of common European values and opportunities for cultural exchange through further projects, and on the other hand, we would like to promote and challenge the skills and abilities of our students that are important for their future in the European education and employment market (key competences, etc.). Within the framework of the school's in-service training concept, we have set ourselves the goal of advancing staff development and qualification in order to secure and expand the multi-layered areas of European education at the Ratsgymnasium. In doing so, the linguistic and communicative skills, the linking with subject topics, and the development of the awareness of common European values were to be at the core of our in-service training interest. It was our aim that the multifaceted education of our pupils should again lead to recertification as a European School in Lower Saxony in four years' time. In addition, we hoped for suggestions for the establishment of further, as well as for the continuation and further development of already existing school offers, which would give the students a greater choice of current topics - keeping pace with social as well as scientific developments - and formats for the acquisition of credits for the school's internal European Studies Certificate.