This is what we believe:

The most worthwhile journey of life is the one from ignorance to awareness, or understanding, or wisdom.

The journey from ignorance to knowledge is also a worthwhile journey, but can be wasted if the knowledge is of no significance.

A school should reinvent itself every day. A school should have a sense of humour.

A school should be full of surprises.

Relationships are at the heart of any meaningful learning experience.

A school should be open to the world, with daily traffic between the two. A school should seek to enrich the world, and to be enriched by it.

A school should be a community where adults and adolescents and children coexist in an affectionate atmosphere of mutual respect. The dominant culture should not be one where inexperienced young people determine the values and attitudes of each other, but one in which mature, thoughtful and creative adults set high standards and model appropriate behaviour.

Schools should nurture the spiritual, emotional, mental and physical health of students. Students should feel safe in school, but at the same time, schools should be adventurous. “Take care, take risks” expresses the idea of adventure without recklessness, looking after oneself and others without timidity.

We honour learning. We promote rigour in the classroom, high levels of academic achievement and intellectual work and discussion, and the development of self-disciplined study. At the same time we recognise that everyone has different abilities and that nothing is more degrading to the human spirit than constant failure. We have a broad definition of success and are committed to our students experiencing this.

We value the desire of every young person to become an affective adult and an effective one, and we appreciate the drive for growth that is in all young people. We accept our responsibility to nurture them and to support and encourage that drive. We also value the experiences, attitudes, thoughts and feelings that are unique to children, and we accept our responsibility to provide space, both in a literal and metaphorical sense, for these to flourish.

We honour the aesthetic. We look for powerful creative self-expression, recognising that beauty may not always be comfortable and that the dark and troubling can have its own beauty.

All members of a school are responsible for it. This responsibility includes the health of all who pass through the school gates, as well as the physical fabric of the school.

Contact with the earth is good. It’s fine to get muddy, wet or dirty.
Children and adolescents, like all young mammals, need play to grow into socialised adults. We reserve time for real play and resist the growing encroachment of screentime on child and adolescent leaning and leisure time.

Food is important. Good food is better than bad food. The preparation and serving of food is important, and it’s appropriate to have rituals for these parts of our lives.
We have no religious affiliation. We respect the belief systems of many faiths and we aim to give students a good understanding of world religions.

We recognise the importance of ritually acknowledging the growth of young people throughout childhood and adolescence.

We are responsible for conducting the school and caring for students in such a way that they can move from this school into, or back into, other schools, with skills that will enable them to succeed socially and academically; indeed, we expect that the strength of character, academic standards, generosity of spirit and self-discipline of our students will enable them to be more-than-successful in their further studies and in their lives. We teach the standard Victorian curriculum, leading, potentially, to the award of VCE at the end of Year 12. And then some. We perform exceptionally well in these areas, and our VCE are among the best in the state.

We try to do everything well. Competitive sport is part of the school’s program. When we play sport with other schools, one of our objectives is to win matches. Losing all the time is not good for human beings.