KAE (Königliches Athenäum Eupen) is a general public secondary school with approximately 850 pupils and 110 qualified teachers. It is situated in Eupen, a small town of 20.000 inhabitants with slightly rural character in the eastern, german speaking part of Belgium ( 77.000 inhabitants). Eupen is about 5 km from the Wallonian part of Belgium, 10 km from the German border and 10 km to the Dutch border. Because of its specific geographic and historical situation ( it has belonged to Germany, France, Spain, Netherlands and Belgium at least) its inhabitants are used to and forced to speak more than one language, to be in close contact with other countries and open for their ideas.

The specific feature of KAE school is our multilingual and multicultural background. Our pupils’ education is based on five languages: the 3 national languages, German, French and Dutch, inevitably English and also Spanish in the past six years. We have a large amount of students in bilingual classes, German and French both mother tongue, where lessons are given in German and French.

In KAE school there are pupils form more than 20 nationalities, and 5 different religions. Not only “old“ immigrants, who arrived years ago from Spain to work in Eupen's factories, from African colonies and the ex- Yugoslavian or eastern countries, but also new arrivals, refugees and immigrants with special backgrounds and needs.

The school curriculum is based on bilingual teaching with a large choice of science courses and also new teaching methods, which are more adapted to the today’s needs of pupils, open classroom and pupils based teaching methods.