Our School has a wonderful history and many stories that our community is deeply connected to. As we celebrate our 125 Year Anniversary, we invite you to step back in time through some of the many stories that make up the life at St Catherine’s.

“Few of those who talk so glibly about the importance of education today have any real knowledge of the problem. If we are serious in affirming, as we so often do, that we are fighting to overthrow for all time the threat to our democratic liberties, we cannot overlook the fact that if democracy means anything at all, it means a recognition of individual rights on the one hand, and individual responsibilities on the other.

(L-R) Miss Walker and Miss Borland, Sherren House, 1949

If we do not, in our schools, train citizens who can exercise those rights and assume those responsibilities, then we have utterly failed, and it is ludicrous to talk about securing democratic liberties. Education, therefore, becomes not merely a pressing problem, but the most pressing problem, and that upon which the solution of all our other problems depends.

If we agree that education means more than the mere accumulation of facts, and must concern itself with training for citizenship, for life in a free community, then we begin to realise that all educational planning must be two-fold.

There must on the other hand be the building up of a store of knowledge and the acquiring of a number of skills; our children must, so far as we can assure it, be equipped not only with such knowledge of material and scientific facts as will form the beginning of an understanding of the complexities of the modern world, but also with such as will enable them to share in and enjoy all that is part of the cultural heritage to man.

But all this is of no avail unless hand in hand with it goes the building up of an attitude of mind, that attitude which is marked by the desire of each individual to make to the welfare of society of which he is a member, the greatest contribution of which he is capable.

What we must provide therefore, is not merely a school curriculum, but a school life which is planned throughout to achieve this two-fold end.”