“Caritas Christi Urget Nos: The love of Christ spurs us on.”
Inspired by our Christian faith, our mission is to provide the highest standard of education and opportunity for all our students, enabling them to live their lives to the full.
In pursuing this aim, we create an environment in which the intellectual, physical, social, moral and spiritual development of every student is able to flourish. As a result, students strive for the highest standards in all endeavours, being able to achieve success and prepared to make their own positive contribution to our world.
St Joseph’s school embraces our mission statement. Students are inspired by the gospel values which can be seen at the heart of our school prayer (mission & values page).
Living out Catholic Life and Mission
“For we walk by faith, not by sight.” 2 Corinthians 5:7
Faith is at the heart of our mission at St Joseph’s. Indeed, our school motto Caritas Christi Urgent Nos translates as ‘the love of Christ spurs us on.’ Every aspect of our school from spiritual, academic, pastoral and extra-curricular is centred on sharing Christ’s love with others. Our school mission, FLAME, has emerged in recent years to compliment our school motto and has become embedded in the daily fabric of our activity. These mission principles are, faith, learning, attitude, mutual respect and enrichment. We offer CPD to all staff across the school as we recognise that all teachers are ministers of Christ’s love first and educators second.
At St. Jospeh’s we live and breathe our Catholic Life and Mission in diverse and exciting ways. We have forged links with international students, this year welcoming American and Dutch students into school and sharing faith with them through in school retreats and more personal Q&A sessions. We have excellent relationships with our parish priests, Fr. Adrian Dixon and Fr Saji, who visit our classes to talk about their vocation in Q&A sessions, along with formally celebrating the Sacraments of Mass and Reconciliation with our students. We also invite military chaplains and prison chaplains into school to share their vocation stories. Further opportunities for our students to live the faith with other students across the diocese are given through inter-trust TOWIE debates. Additionally, we also welcome guest speakers from a variety of faith backgrounds to speak to our students, for example Jaswinder Singh for Sikhism, Deanna Van der Velde for Judaism and Wendy for Buddhism. We also promote inter-faith dialogue and have forged excellent links with the Anglican church who regularly work with us to build bridges between our Christian communities
Spirituality Days
At the end of every term, we drop the curriculum and come together as house groups to celebrate spirituality days for Advent, Easter and the end of our yearly spiritual journey each summer. Each spirituality day sees students engage in a Celebration of the Word in St. James’ church, a spiritual development session, kinaesthetic quizzes, form time spiritual reflections, games and awards FLAME assemblies. These are fabulous opportunities to celebrate our faith, worship as a spiritual family and celebrate the amazing community that St. Joseph’s truly is.
The Chapel and Multi-faith Prayer Room
We have recently renovated our school chapel which has beautiful pews, artwork of our house saints and serves as a lovely place for students to reflect, celebrate class Masses and Celebrations of the Word. We run Wednesday worship every Wednesday after school in here open to all staff and students. Our sacred spaces initiative has become embedded and staff are encouraged to create a reflective sacred space in their room which students contribute to through writing prayers and delivering morning tutor reflections from. We have a multi-faith prayer space which was launched in September 2024 for students from other faith traditions.
Sacramental Preparation
We are firmly committed to the spiritual formation of all our students and work hard to support them in their sacramental preparation. RE and chaplaincy staff are trained catechists and help students to prepare for Baptism, if they are new to the faith, Holy Communion (this year we prepared two sixth formers to undertake their first Holy Communion at Lourdes) and the sacrament of Confirmation. We plan and lead the Confirmation preparation course for the parishes of Jarrow and take students on the national pilgrimage to CYMFED FLAME day as our Confirmation away day. It makes us really proud as a school to see students want to explore their faith further and journey further along their own spiritual path and we will support them any way we can with their preparation for this.
The Sacrament of Reconciliation, feast days and holy days of obligation
Because of the fantastic support from our parish clergy, we are able to offer the sacrament of reconciliation monthly for students and staff. Students are keen to go and speak with our priest and receive spiritual absolution to wipe the slate clean. We are grateful to our parish clergy for being so dedicated to the spiritual needs of both our staff and students. We also celebrate the feast of St. Joseph, our school patron saint, our house saints, feasts like All Saints and All Souls, Epiphany, Ash Wednesday, the feast day of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Month of Mary.
St. Joseph’s is a spiritual community built upon Christ’s love. We believe that first and foremost we are all ministers of Christ’s love first and educators second. When Blessed Edmund Rice had his vision of Jesus, he was told by Christ “the young people are the Church” and we truly believe that at St. Joseph’s. We are a community that aims to be Church. We will provide our students and staff with every opportunity possible to worship together and live and breathe their faith.
Social Action
Service to others and living out Catholic Social Teaching is constantly promoted to our students who are involved in helping the vulnerable a wide variety of ways. Locally, we regularly support our community food banks, Hebburn Helps and Bede’s Helping Hand, though termly food donations. Students also create and personally deliver care parcels for elderly parishioners through our links with the local SVP at Christmas and Easter. On a national level, we support the Terrence Higgins Trust, Daft as a Brush and Cancer Research UL and internationally, we support Operation Christmas Child every Christmas. We have also fundraised for CAFOD, Orphan Child in Siera Leone and Ukraine. Our Faith in Action and Pope John Paul II groups often take a lead on these projects.
Our Parable of the Talents initiative has been enthusiastically received by staff and students where tutor groups are given £5 to plan, develop and carry out a charity event (and hopefully a profit) for a charity of their choice. We celebrate these exceptional acts of service with certificates, postcards home and through pastoral House assemblies.
