What is significant about any school is what is at its heart. The College's Mission Statement: 'Celebrating the Gospel, Nurturing the Individual, Empowering Lifelong Learners' stands as a firm statement about what St Andrews is on about and has been at the heart of our College since its inception.
St Andrews strives to provide high-quality education in a Christian context. We value a holistic approach and encourage students to develop values that enrich the intellect, nurture the spirit, develop social responsibility, and create healthy lifestyles.
Located on the Gold Coast's southern end, St Andrews has beautiful views of the Tallebudgera Valley. Our modern campus is growing all the time, opening a brand new state of the art Library Resource Centre for the Middle and Senior School in 2009, a highly functional Multi-purpose Hall in the Junior School in 2010, and a superb Covered Outdoor Learning Area in 2012. In the middle of 2014, the College opened 'The Learning Hub,' a learning space in the secondary school that clarifies that learning is our core business. In its design, the Learning Hub incorporates the best of formal and informal learning, independent and collaborative learning, ubiquitous anywhere, anytime learning, and visible learning. As well as learning spaces, 'The Learning Hub' also incorporates a new Tuckshop with indoor and outdoor eating areas for students to come together to eat and build their sense of belonging and connectedness.
Our Early Learning Centre offering Pre Prep and Junior Kindy opened at the start of 2015. With its well-equipped modern learning and play spaces for experiential and play-based learning, the ELC provides exciting and flexible opportunities to play, develop, and learn second to none. It truly is a child-centered facility. In 2016 we undertook a total refurbishment of the Junior School, including doubling the library's size and creating a STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Maths) room specifically for Junior School. In 2017 we opened a new Secondary School facility for music, dance, highly innovative Business Studies labs, and a 300+ seat Theatre.
St Andrews is a school that seeks to provide an environment where each person is valued and accepted as a child of God. Each is challenged to discover, develop, and use their gifts and abilities for personal growth and service to others. We hope that the enriching and fulfilling opportunities experienced in our community stay with students for life.
Our three sub-schools: Junior School (Prep-Year 6), Middle School (Years 7-9), and Senior School (Years 10-12), mean that teaching and learning are tailored to the developmental stage of students. The Junior School, using the International Baccalaureate's Primary Years Program (PYP) as its framework, places a strong emphasis on developing both the fundamentals of numeracy and literacy and critical inquiry skills. Middle schooling methodology, covering a broad curriculum, is practiced in Years 7, 8, and 9 to guide students through those early adolescent years. Encouraging students to take responsibility for learning enables them to move towards being independent learners in preparation for senior schooling. Senior School students select a pathway that reflects their academic and vocational needs. Information communication technologies are integrated across the curriculum for all year levels. Both the Middle and Senior schools use the renowned teaching and learning framework known as Dimensions of Learning to facilitate a constant focus on student learning.
The St Andrews staff are motivated by a genuine sense of helping each child realize their potential. As a learning community, our staff is engaged in ongoing professional development and refinement of our programs to ensure that we improve the quality of learning experiences available to our children and young people.
St Andrews is widely regarded as a caring school. We place a high priority on pastoral care. In recent times we have begun to implement Positive Psychology, an approach that seeks to build well-being and resilience proactively. Our staff works hard at developing nurturing relationships with students because encouraging and affirming relationships lie at the heart of effective learning.
At St Andrew's, we celebrate and share the "Good News" of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We see each student as a unique creation of God, as a person he loves and with whom he desires a relationship. Through regular worship and our P-12 Christian Studies program, we aim to provide students with a thorough understanding of Biblical Christianity and trust that the Holy Spirit will work faith in their lives. Christian teaching at the College is based on the doctrines of the Lutheran Church of Australia. However, students from a variety of church and non-church backgrounds are welcomed into the community.
St Andrews is known as a community where people matter. No-one is lost in the crowd at St Andrew's. Most of our enrolments come about through word of mouth: we are recommended by parents and students who, quite simply, love the College. Each staff member makes a special effort to know and care for the individual students in their charge. The staff does not follow a "one size fits all" approach but strive to develop individual pathways for students according to their particular interests and talents, especially in secondary school.
Because we believe that all useful knowledge and learning is a beautiful gift of God for our growth as human beings, we value academic excellence. We also recognize that each child has different but unique gifts that need to be identified and developed to the fullest. Thus we provide a wide range of curricular and co-curricular activities at all levels and empower students to strive towards their own personal best in their chosen fields. In our classes, learning how to learn is emphasized so that young people have the skills to become lifelong and life-wide learners.
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