Our goal is to ensure all our students learn to be their best within a setting that encourages a high level of engagement, understanding, collaboration and reflection.
‘Barbreck’ – Where Girls Matter
Barbreck is a vibrant hub of learning that nurtures every girls’ ability and potential—academically, physically, creatively and emotionally.
During the all-important primary years, St Catherine’s ensures opportunity for our Barbreck girls to participate in a broad range of activities that enable discovery of her talents, her interests and her dreams; equipped for a lifetime of learning.
Purposefully small, our average class size of 17 students enables every girl to receive engaging learning experiences and personalised learning plans. In Barbreck, we ensure a daily commitment to prioritising academic time for the development skills in literacy and numeracy through a model of explicit instruction. The promotion of creativity, self-expression and self-awareness is also a key feature of a Barbreck education.
At St Catherine’s, we celebrate our care of students, both pastorally and academically. It is this nurturing, yet empowering approach, that epitomises a Barbreck education.
A Personalised Approach
Each girls’ academic strengths and areas for improvement are identified through a detailed analysis of her work, with tailored personalised learning plans established to accommodate each student.
We believe in the progress of every girl and our dedicated staff are committed to ensuring girls understand their progress through feedback, guidance and encouragement of the necessary growth mindset to accept challenges and persist in their efforts to improve.
Our academic programs are sequential in nature, developing a level of rigour that ensures each girl strives for her continual improvement and captures the personalised approach of a Barbreck education. We also pride ourselves on our consultative and collaborative approach of connecting with parents to ensure information regarding their daughter’s learning plans and academic progress is comprehensively communicated.
The St Catherine’s expansive curriculum is based on Best Practice teaching and is carefully planned with our students’ knowledge, needs, interests and varying abilities in mind. It is underpinned by the Victorian Essential Learning Standards (VELS) and is both rigorous and sequential.
Prep ready
Starting Prep is a time for young children to wonder, explore, discover and make meaning of the world. At St Catherine’s School, our Prep learners are offered rich learning experiences through an educational program with the depth of opportunities for your daughter to build upon her physical, social, emotional, personal, creative, cognitive and linguistic skills. Our Barbreck girls are supported by dedicated class teachers guiding a curriculum centered on Literacy, Numeracy, STEM, Humanities, Physical Education, Language, Visual and Performing Arts, Library and Learning Extension.
We know children require the time, space and opportunities to develop a range of skills, learnings, understandings and behaviour in their early years and our optimum class sizes ensure a strong foundation for the first year of school and successful lifelong learning. The high-quality and rich learning experiences offered at St Catherine’s School highlight our commitment to holistically support young children’s learning, development and wellbeing, upon which to build for future learning.
