New international school opens for 300 pupils

Admissions for Luxembourg City’s new state-run international school are set to open in March, with 300 places up for grabs across the first two years of primary and secondary school.

The Gaston Thorn school will open in September across two sites, a primary school in the Cessange district of the capital and a secondary school at the so-called Geesseknäppchen campus in Merl, Education Minister Claude Meisch said on Wednesday.

Both primary and secondary schools will eventually move to a campus in Limpertsberg and will have an English, French and German section with pupils also able to learn Portuguese, Spanish and Italian.

While the existing state-run school in the capital - Lycée Michel Lucius in Limpertsberg - teaches the UK curriculum, the new school will follow the European curriculum. Luxembourg City “needs a European curriculum which is closer to the philosophy of the Luxembourgish system with its multilingualism and the different languages that pupils can choose”, Meisch previously said.

Over the past years Luxembourg has stretched its international school options in response to the growing number of foreigners moving into the country. There are now free-to-attend international schools across the Grand Duchy- in the capital, in Junglinster in the centre of the country, and one each in Mondorf-les-Bains in the south and Clervaux in the north.

The European School in Kirchberg is available free of charge only to children of staff from EU institutions or companies with an agreement in place. There is a fee in place for all other pupils.