Volunteer member

Location: Hanover, Germany 

Web site: http://www.vhs-hannover.de

Volkshochschule Hannover belongs to the German network of no-profit adult education institution. Each Volkshoschule serves its local area and is organisationally autonomous.

Volkshoschule Hannover operates as a part of the Municipality of Hannover

All Volkshochschulen pursue shared educational aims and are linked through an umbrella organisation. They are financed through course fees and public subsidies - for which, however, there are very different local regulations.

The umbrella organisation for the Volkshochschulen of Lower Saxony – the federal German state (or Land) of which Hannover is the capital - was established in the autumn of nineteen forty-seven. Its membership today comprises seventy-seven local institutes.

The Lower Saxony Volkshochschulen are, with every year:

• almost 1 million students
• in over sixty thousand courses and other events,
• totalling over 2 million teaching periods of three-quarters of an hour taken together, the largest providers of official further education in the state.

With around five hundred central offices and branches, they cover the entire state and are open to all citizens. The Volkshochschulen employ around twelve hundred full-time staff (educationalists, administrators and managerial personnel) and about twenty-two thousand men and women work part-time or freelance as teachers and lecturers.

The Volkshochschule Hannover offers a programme each year of around a hundred and fifty thousand teaching periods, of which about sixty thousand are in vocational training. In total, around thirty-five thousand participants attend our further education courses and events.

As local further education centres, the Volkshochschulen are open all day every day including weekends. They offer daytime courses, evening classes, weekend seminars, study excursions and other events.

The further education programme of the Volkshochschulen includes all aspects of general, vocational, social and cultural education. It can be divided into the following areas:

• Society, Environment, Education
• Culture, Creativity, Design
• Health, Nutrition
• Languages
• Basic Skills, School-leaving Certificates
• Work, Career, Electronic Data Processing

It is our aim to promote:

• Multinational education, training and youth partnerships.
• Exchange schemes and opportunities to learn abroad.
• Innovative teaching and learning projects.
• Networks of academic and professional expertise.
• A framework to address across-the-board issues, such as new technologies in education and the international recognition of qualifications.
• A platform for consensus, comparisons, benchmarking and policy-making.”