People using the service at Kofoed's School are called students to emphasize the pedagogical approach to dealing with social problems.
Basically, the school approaches the students as ordinary human beings who experience social difficulties in their life.
Provided without expecting active interplay by the person seeking assistance, it may pacify people and make them dependent.
The concept aims at rebuilding and strengthening the students’ self-esteem while at the same time easing their social problems.
On working with the students, the primary focus is on their personal strength and abilities, and the method seeks to move people forward, not just to solve immediate problems.
H.C. Kofoed, made the slogan “hjælp til selvhjælp” (literally: “help to self-help”) the center of his work.
Kofoeds himself had experienced unemployment then he was young, and he had remembered since then that if one is being helped in the wrong way, it is possible to cause more damage than benefit.
When Kofoed found other collaborators, he opened courses in Danish, English, French, German, counting, humanities, gymnastics and singing.
Kofoed bought a farm in 1940 where a school for adolescents was developed, in which young agricultural workers attended an intensive re-socializing course.
At the present day, the school in Copenhagen offers assistance to those students who are in a temporarily difficult life situation as well as to those who are in a much deeper crisis.