Moving to Berlin with Older Kids

A guide to enrolling in secondary school

Note: This post originally appeared on my blog on Sept. 4 of last year, the beginning of their second school year in Germany.

With my kids headed back to school this week and last, it feels like a good time to write about navigating the German secondary school system as an immigrant family, particularly a family with older kids.

If you Google ‘moving to Berlin with kids,’ you will be inundated with information about finding a kita placement or how to enroll in primary school (Grundschule). And those are very important things. But you could end up thinking that literally no one ever moves to Berlin with a kid between age 11 and 18. And that’s just not true.

My daughter, 16, just started Grade 11 at a private international school. My son, 13, attends a Berlin integrated secondary school (ISS). Before we even decided to move, I did a lot of research into how we would continue the kids’ education, since they both spent their whole lives in the U.S. public schools. And, neither spoke German o…