At the heart of the Charter for Catholic Schools in the Edmund Rice Tradition is the call for us to provide a liberating education and to be of service to others. Much has changed in our 70-year history of educating by the sea, but what remains true is our commitment to ensuring a liberating education is relevant to the evolving nature of education and the world around us.

A truly liberating education today at St Patrick’s is much more holistic as we shape our young men into citizens of the future. It is in many ways a reimagining of how we educate our students to achieve this.

The College has been operating in an online learning environment since 2018, with all class work, subject delivery and assessment delivered through our online portal – REALM. The early adoption of this technology safeguarded our ability to pivot quickly to a fully functional online learning system at the start of the pandemic in 2020. Since that time, the platform has continued to grow from strength to strength, allowing our students to learn independently and collaboratively in a classroom environment. This reimagining of how a syllabus is delivered is testament to our commitment to delivering an education that liberates our learners and prepares them for a rapidly changing world.

However, a liberating education aspires to develop more than just intellectual capacity. Our aim is to develop good citizens of the future who are free from insular thinking, fear of differences, and narrowness or intolerance from the cultures and views of others. It will be their capacity to use their education and embrace an understanding and commitment to social responsibility to contribute to a more fair and just society.