Kochs Skole is today the city’s largest private school with space for 580 students, and with 150 years of history we are also one of the oldest private schools in Aarhus.
The Story
Kochs Skole was started in 1866 by Sofie Lindhard. It was a girls’ school and began with 3 students.
In 1916, when the school had 74 students, Sofie Lindhardt sold the school to Nicoline Koch. The school was on two floors of Christiansgade 18.
Nicoline Koch applied immediately and got permission to teach the girls up to middle school and the final exam.
In those days, there was a tradition for private schools to have their owner’s name, so for that reason, the school became named N. Kochs Skole. Nicoline Koch constructed the school building on Åboulvarden 67 in 1918 we we were situated until March 1989.
In 1932, Nicoline Koch died and Kirstine Nordby bought the school, there were almost 200 students. She admitted the first boys in 1937 and turned the school coeducational.
Under Mrs. Nordby, the school reached its highest student number in the 1950s – around 550 students. There were 36-40 students in the classes and seen with today’s eyes, it could have been described as overfull. It is said that the children couldn’t run around the playground at breaktime. There were so many of them, that they could only walk around, and only in one direction.
In 1963, Mrs Nordby sold the school to the parents. In the school’s first 97 years the school had been the personal property of the head teacher. In the last 50 years, it has been a self supporting institution, and that means that in that time it has been the parent group of the school who own it. The parent group decides the school’s terms and conditions and therefore its goals./p>
Since the school became a self supporting institution, there have been between 350 and 585 students. However, we only reached 500 students when we sold the school on Åboulvarden in 1989 and took over the closed municipal school on Finsensgade in Trøjborg.
In 2016, in connection with the school’s 150 years anniversary and new homepage including logo, the Board of Governors chose to call the school Kochs Skole, which is the name that most people know and refer to the school by.
The school has had six employed school leaders Eske Nielsen (1963-68), Erik Holm-Andersen (1968-77), Stig Madsen (1977-2010), Lisbeth Qvortrup (2010-2019), Jens Degn, (2019-2022), and Kate Dybdahl from August 2022.
