The design of The School on The Wadden Sea focuses on the encounter between local nature, culture and value-creating educational visions

The School on the Wadden Sea will be a wonderful school. A school steeped in learning. A building that recognises the individual and the pupils’ different needs, while celebrating a sense of community and the importance of collaboration and teamwork. The School on the Wadden Sea will at the same time act as a local powerhouse: a valuable resource for the local community.

Our proposal is based on how the design of the school can foster a range of competencies in the pupils: competencies that are often referred to as ‘21st Century Learning Skills’. Business leaders and educationalists agree that this set of competencies will be crucial for future generations if they are to perform in the society of tomorrow that is largely characterised by its changeableness and rapid development.

We need to build a school that teaches the pupils to come up with hypotheses for tackling tangible problems and to be able to elaborate on, and apply these solutions in the real world. But perhaps most importantly we need to create a school, which ensures that the pupils remain curious about the world and retain their playful, exploratory approach to both themselves and the world.

Through the building’s design and spatial organisation and design, we have made it easy for the school’s staff to organise their teaching, in which they consciously apply a wide range of working methods in the course of a school day. Both working methods which are implicit in any learning context or that relate to specific ages and stages of learning.