At the heart of the bilingual education is the ‘one teacher-one language’ approach in which classes are conducted in the teacher’s native language - which is either German or English. In the Foundation Year, we start with a share of 80% lessons in German and 20% lessons in English to really immerse these young learners into the German language. The share of German then slowly decreases until we reach a 50%/50% split from Year 3 onwards. During the early primary school years, we work a lot with routines, repetitions, gestures and singing/dancing to teach children the German language in a playful, immersive way. New families are often surprised by how quickly their children pick up the German language even without any prior German knowledge or connection to Germany. We use German learning materials in the German-speaking classes and our library offers a huge collection of German books for children and teenagers. Our students learn to fluently read German books.

Deutsche Schule Melbourne follows two different curricula at the same time. The Victorian and German curricula have distinct educational approaches and structures. For each year level and each subject, we go through both the Victorian and the German curriculum to identity what they have in common and where they differ. We then fully cover both curricula - which means the bottom line is that our students learn a little more and sometimes in a different way than a student who learns according to the Victorian curriculum only.