To start with, a short historical résumé
John Amos Comenius (1592-1670) called for a school that is open to all and that teaches "everybody everything in every way/comprehensively/universally" ("omnes omnia omnino").
Time and again these thoughts were taken up anew and developed through Enlightenment (Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Herbart), Romanticism (Froebel), and Progressive Education ("Reformpädagogik") (Lichtwark, Montessori, Berthold Otto, Peter Petersen - foundation of Jenaplan School). "Pedagogics/education from the child" was supposed to pick up the children where they are (encouraging and challenging).

Essentials of Progressive Education were school community, new methods of teaching, classroom design, school-related trips, school-related country hostels.

After World War I, on the 16th of May, 1919, the "Act concerning Unity School" was promulgated in Hamburg. Two days earlier the city Parliament (called "Bürgerschaft": literally "citizenship") had passed the act on a common initiative of SPD (social democrats) and DDP (the liberal party). The conservative party DVP had also supported the motion. The compulsory elementary school was established, the triennial preparatory classes for grammar schools were abolished, free provision of school books and equipment was introduced, reform secondary schools from grade 7 on were installed, and the public vocational school became obligatory. (Source for this paragraph: hh-heute, 15 May 2009)

After World War II the conventional, estate oriented school system seemed to have compromised itself once and for all since it had not only done nothing to avert the fascist regime, but had saluted and supported it. It had brought human beings up to be submissive underlings.
Democratic behaviour for a democratically constituted polity should from now on be learnt at a school of democracy. The democratic achievement school was called for in order to re-educate people and to fully use the existing potentials of talent. These efforts, however, were reversed by restorative tendencies in the mid 1950s.
The social renewal and upheaval in the mid 1960s to the late 1960s put the topic 'school for all' again on the agenda.
In 1963/64, West-Berlin education senator Carl-Heinz Evers succeeded in bringing about four different model try-outs for the development and testing of comprehensive schools with regard to the grades 7-10 and 7-13.
By means of a so called School For All, Evers wanted to reform the educational system fundamentally. In 1966, he inaugurated the first German comprehensive school in West Berlin.
Accompanying books of the time were those of Georg Picht: Die deutsche Bildungskatastrophe (=The German Education Crisis ), Olten and Freiburg 1964, and Ralf Dahrendorf: Bildung ist Bürgerrecht. Plädoyer für eine aktive Bildungspolitik (=Education is a civil right. A plea for active education politics), Hamburg 1965.
The "Recommendations for the establishment of school try-outs with comprehensive schools" by the Education Committee of the German Education Council of 31 January 1969 are considered the birth certificate of comprehensives.
On 27 November 1969 the Ministers of Education of all German länder signed a recommendation to establish at least 40 comprehensive school models.
But, properly speaking, there were parents' initiatives whose pressure was strong enough to make politics adopt it and which led to the foundation of comprehensive schools. In 1968, Alter Teichweg School was the first to become an integrated comprehensive school and Heinrich Hertz School the first to be a co-operative or additive comprehensive school in Hamburg.
In several phases other schools followed up all of which transformed themselves into integrated comprehensive schools. The ARGE representing comprehensive school parents' interests and the interests of comprehensive schools as a whole has been escorting the development of these schools since the early 1970s.
Since 1979 the integrated comprehensive school has no longer been considered an experimental, but a regular school.

Comprehensive School Development in Hamburg Within three Generations/Phases:


• 1968 till 1973: 1st generation: 9 experimental schools: eight integrated and one co-operative comprehensives
• 1979 till 1981: 2nd generation: 15 newly founded integrated comprehensives after a School Act Amendment (a legal claim for a secondary level school form). The experimental stage was considered as closed, the comprehensive was a regular school. The basic model was introduced as an organisational form and for substantiating requirements.
• 1987 till 1999: 3rd generation: 15 new foundations

The integrated comprehensive school constitutes an alternative school system with regard to the threefold ("jointed") school system consisting of the Gymnasium (higher secondary school, grammar school), the Realschule (middle secondary school), and the Hauptschule (lower secondary school). When parents with their child in the forth form have to choose which secondary school to pick, it is a choice of two different school systems. Once they have chosen they are obliged to move within the chosen system when it comes to changing schools. A change from one system into another will only be allowed in well-founded exceptions (e.g. moving from another Bundesland with no comprehensive schools, psychosocial and pedagogic problems which stem from an unreflecting, uninformed choice of the school system and the like).
With good reason integrated comprehensive schools decline a later change of school systems: In the lower forms/grades it is pupils', the teachers' and the parents' task to calmly develop the principles of their co-operation for their future common life.

Integrated comprehensive schools start from the fifth form with no observation system, without bagging children, without the stress caused by selection. The kind of final exam you take is left open as long as possible. This is beneficial to the children's development. The structure makes the difference. Do you rise to the problems or just to a part of them? There is a differentiation on two proficiency levels, and each subject is reckoned up individually (profile shaping) in order to do children justice.
A lot of comprehensive school people strive for internally differentiated lessons for so many subjects as possible and as long as possible. In this way we manage that the children remain in their class community, learn together and still are encouraged according to their specific talents.
But this also calls for a different educational theory. Lots of teachers at comprehensive schools became comprehensive school teachers via learning by doing. We still have to demand the setting-up of a continuous course of studies for comprehensive school teachers-to-be, we still have to demand the extension of the university supply of seminars concerning the topic 'comprehensive school' (at the moment something between scanty and non-existent).

Further education for all these (teachers, schoolchildren, and parents) is imperative.
It is only this way the teaching personnel will manage to unlearn the deficit glance (which they most carefully learned during their school attendance and their university training) that is sharpened by the things children cannot do, and instead of this to reinforce existing abilities and to sensibly integrate newly acquired things into them.
It is only this way the schoolchildren and parents will be capable of articulating their interests and will be included in the developmental process of the school as partners with equal rights. About this the ARGE makes offers through events and seminars as well as via its projects.

Integrated comprehensive schools provide a credible offer as City District Schools (Community Schools). In so called social hotspots (but elsewhere too) integrated comprehensive schools do a political-socially important job against the de-mixing of society and pupils.

It can be proven - not least with available figures: By its structure the integrated comprehensive school helps pupils to take higher final exams.

As an objective some parents formulate the achievement of the best possible final exam at the best possible school. They overlook the fact that school careers don't always run straight. The jointed system offers blind alleys and ways of failing between lightly and seriously. Learning at school isn't everything in life, does not map out somebody's success in life or job either, but should be arranged so flexibly as to always provide points/switches where children/adolescents can "turn off". This is a principle of structure with the integrated comprehensive school.
Some people say there are good and bad schools. The truth, however, rather seems to be this: Schools reflect their social environment. Not least we parents (teachers, pupils) are called for to help the school of our district or of our choice to make a convincing offer.
At the same time we have to demand the education authority/school board to secure equal basic conditions for all comprehensive schools in order to grant equality of opportunity to all irrespectively of locational factors.

In order to grant a sufficient offer of courses some integrated comprehensive school have common Upper or Senior Classes (a school stage which leads to the Abitur, A levels, high school graduation). But there are also integrated comprehensive schools in Hamburg that have a common upper school department together with grammar schools. There were no differences to be found with regard to the Abitur average. In fact we were reported that in 1999 the comprehensive school graduates did slightly better. Yet we must not overlook the fact that a lot of these comprehensive school graduates would not even have come in proximity to the Abitur exam within the conventional school system.

Only at an integrated comprehensive school there is integration, both as a social integration of all and - in the narrow sense - as an inclusion of children with specific supportive needs.
The integrated comprehensive school will continue to be at the head of innovative, modernising tendencies in school affairs and will remain indispensable: without integrated comprehensive schools no polytechnic education (Arbeitslehre), no practical training, no integration, no autonomous school programme discussion, no project oriented lessons, no inside school discussion about participation, no opening to the district/community, and so forth.

The integrated comprehensive school and achievement/performance surveys: Klaus-Jürgen Tillmann of Bielefeld University, according to his own words a PISA specialist (PISA = Program for International Student Assessment), said at the SPD Conference "Comprehensive Schools in Hamburg - Development, Experiences, Perspectives" on 17 November 1999: "At the top of the most efficient school systems - according to the results of the survey - there are those of Sweden and Denmark both of which are genuine comprehensive schools systems."
This makes us renew an long-standing postulate: Let us eventually build such a system in Germany too, with equal educational opportunities, schools where - because of a genuine heterogeneity of the groups - desired key qualifications (wished for not only by the business world) such as teamwork and conflict skills can be learned in order to catch up internationally again and to fully use our reservoirs of talent.
Performance and prejudice (the allegedly higher school standards outside Hamburg): quote: "Some time ago we took the liberty of submitting a Bavarian Central Abitur subject in chemistry to the Hamburg school board. It came back with the remark they had never had such an easy subject for Abitur exams on their tables yet." (Bernhard Nette, representative of staff council of comprehensive schools, in: Hamburger Abendblatt, 13 July 2000, p. 19)
Comparative performance appraisals: There have always been comparative performance tests at integrated comprehensive schools. They pose a constituent element of comprehensive schools, in other words they are specific.
Achievement/Performance is spread according to social aspects. The heterogeneity of the grammar school is different from that of the comprehensive school. Comprehensive schools must grant integration upwards and downwards and, therefore, must be equipped better.

Integrated comprehensive school today - that is: one school for all children; a school in the focus of which there is the children's and youths' promotion, a democratic school, a live school, an open school, an alternative school (for further details in German see GGGinfo 2/99, Landesverband Hamburg, pp. 9-21, to be obtained via the ARGE Committee).

The overall balance for the integrated comprehensive school is positive.

The ARGE and its allied partners want one thing to be quite clear: Political-educationally and -socially there is no alternative to maintaining all locations of integrated comprehensive schools. The task of building up the comprehensive school as a replacing school form is here to stay. The parents' will (right to choose) is valid, but parents must know to be able to choose. And the parents' will to choose cannot replace the politicians' will to shape, e.g. location policy, e.g. equipment of schools in order to be able to meet the extended inherent requirements of the integrated comprehensive schools.

In 2002 a new middle-right-wing senate in Hamburg has determined that grammar schools and co-operative comprehensive schools should lead their students to the highest exams within 12 years. Seeing that different talents and gifts cannot be identified in an integrated school career the integrated comprehensive schools continue to lead their students to the A levels (Abitur) within 13 years.

Within the framework of the ecucational reform from 2008-2012 by the conservative-green senate, the Hamburg comprehensives and the secondary modern schools will be transformed into City District Schools at the beginning of the school year 2010/11. These schools offer exams at all levels and lead to the A levels (Abitur) within 13 years' time. If possible, they should be equipped with an upper school department of their own.

 See also
ARGE - what is it all about?
Co-operative Comprehensive School

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