boys play musical instruments

St Joseph’s prides itself on being a comprehensive College where students of a wide range of abilities are given opportunities to achieve their full potential. We focus on providing boys with a balanced education, incorporating a range of learning, spiritual, physical and recreation experiences. Joeys is renowned for its outstanding academic, cultural and sporting achievements and links to the local and international community and rural Australia.

The students are at the heart of everything we do at St Joseph’s. We are here to help boys, entrusted to us by their families, to find genuine fulfilment, happiness and security in their lives. Our support and encouragement goes far beyond the time students leave us at graduation. As a College community we take great joy and strength from our ongoing relationship with our Old Boys and their families. To be part of the Joeys family is truly a gift for life.

From the parents

“It’s not one of those schools where there are Rolls Royces driving down the driveway every day. You can have boys there whose parents are builders or teachers, anything really; there is a wide variety of backgrounds and that’s important when you’re trying to look at a balanced school. It’s got a great community. We’re a long way away, we rely on the College to look after our boys, and they do a great job – which is part of the reason why we sent them down. We could have sent them to a country school, but it’s all about getting some balance and we’ve had a great association with families in the city – they have looked after our fellas so well.

What I do find as a general rule is they show their mother a lot of respect and that comes from the Marist culture – they look up to Mother Mary and they do that to their mothers I find. We’ve found they are way more helpful and wanting to do things for you and part of that is being way from home all the time, so that they actually appreciate and enjoy being back at home.

Sending our five boys to Joeys was the best decision we made.”

Mr Danny Keady (1986)
Coonamble, father of five Joeys boys

From the staff

“We want to give our students the gift of confidence: to nurture in them through the support of their teachers the belief that they can achieve things they may not have thought possible. Here, you are going to get passionate teachers who know their content and their students well and build strong relationships with them; who do traditional and explicit teaching but also strongly believe in experiential, practical approaches to learning.

Joeys caters for all learners and our teachers will adopt a range of approaches to help move boys’ learning forward; we will extend students who are really high-potential learners, and give additional assistance to those who need it. And we enrich learning and make it relevant for boys by making connections to the real world.”

Mr Matt Bookallil (1992)
Director of Teaching and Learning