St. Joseph's RC Primary School

St Joseph’s is a co-educational day school. As a voluntary aided Catholic School, the basic religious ethos is to be found across the whole curriculum and with the framework of the School’s Mission Statement in mind, the aims of St Joseph’s Catholic Primary School are:

• We aim, in partnership with our families and the wider parish community, to enhance the spiritual and secular development of all our children in the light of the gospel values and in accordance with the teaching of the Catholic Church.
• We aim to create an environment within the school that provides for spiritual growth. To promote an atmosphere that will enable “All” to relate to experiences that truly reflect faith, hope, charity, trust, forgiveness, compassion and understanding.
• We aim to recognize and respect the different stages of people’s faith journey and to foster a working environment that allows all the people involved in any respect, great or small, of the children’s education to feel valued as a real and important part of the whole process. We aim to constantly seek to improve the quality of learning and teaching which directly results in high standards of pupils’ achievement.

To enable each child to acquire knowledge, skills and practical abilities through the use of a variety of teaching styles and learning opportunities.

At St Joseph’s we have strong historical links with the local community that date back over 90 years. On 29 August 1927, St Joseph’s Infant and Elementary Schools opened their doors to 320 pupils. The building was situated on land, which had been given by the Marquis of Bute to the Institute of Charity (Rosminians). Parishioners worshipped in the adjacent temporary tin church and the priests lived in a neighboring end of terrace house in New Zealand Road. A permanent church was opened in 1936 and the present presbytery built later.

It is very important to realize that the Christian identity of our school is not exclusively related to religious instruction and the integration of academic studies into a unified whole. The Church School has a single Christian vision, an integrated concept of what makes a fully authentic and mature human being. The educational process is not confined to the curriculum or to the academic, technical, artistic and sporting achievements of the school. Such schools should be seen as offering the possibility not only of exploring the mystery that is God, but also of demonstrating the Gospel in action. It must be consistent throughout and in every aspect reflect the Christian faith that is its soul, its inspiration and its justification.

The curriculum, in all aspects, must reflect that the person of Christ, and the message that the Church has received from Him is the foundation of the whole educational enterprise in a Church school.