New ideas for learning – The German School Award 2025 is entering its first selection round

• Twenty schools can hope to win prize money totaling over €300,000.
• German Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier will present the 2025 German School Award on September 30, 2025, in Berlin.
• For the first time, the Robert Bosch Foundation and the Heidehof Foundation will also award the “Democracy Education” prize.

Berlin/Stuttgart, April 7, 2025 – Many schools in Germany are doing outstanding work – despite major construction projects and challenges. With mostly limited resources, they inspire children and young people with new ideas for learning. Twenty of these schools are in the running for this year's German School Award. They have made it to the second round of the competition. A 50-member jury of experts from the fields of education, school practice, and education administration selected the schools from over 100 applications.

The German School Award is the most prestigious, demanding, and highly endowed award for good schools in Germany. It has been presented since 2006 by the Robert Bosch Stiftung GmbH in cooperation with the Heidehof Foundation. The ARD and the ZEIT publishing group are cooperation partners. The competition focuses on the quality of teaching and the question of how schools can best organize teaching and learning for their students.

In the coming weeks, jury teams will visit the award nominees to get a first-hand impression of the schools. The experts will talk to teachers, students, parents, and extracurricular partners. They will observe lessons and projects. At the end of June, the jury will nominate up to 15 schools for the final round of the 2025 German School Award. 

For the first time this year, a jury of experts has nominated five additional schools for the Democracy Education Award, which is endowed with €30,000. The award recognizes the best concept for promoting democratic processes, enabling participation, and transferring responsibility in schools—both in the classroom and in the school community.

The nominated schools will take part in the award ceremony with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on September 30, 2025, in Berlin. The winners of the coveted prizes will then be announced. The main prize is endowed with 100,000 euros, and five additional prizes are worth 30,000 euros each. Another 30,000 euros will go to the winner of the “Democracy Education” theme prize. All nominated schools that do not receive an award will receive a recognition prize of 5,000 euros.  

Since the program began, more than 2,700 schools have applied for the award. When selecting the winners, the jury evaluates six areas of quality: “teaching quality,” “performance,” “dealing with diversity,” “responsibility,” “school climate, school life, and extracurricular partners,” and “learning school.” These characteristics are now widely recognized as indicators of good school quality.

But the competition is just the beginning: the concepts developed by the winning schools will then be refined and made available to all interested schools through training courses, publications, and the online platform of the German School Portal. All applicant schools also have the opportunity to work intensively on their own teaching development for 15 months in the German School Award forum. Offers such as the observation program are aimed at all teachers in Germany and enable them to observe lessons at the award-winning schools (current application deadline: April 30, 2025). It's a cycle in which good school practices are reinforced and spread.