​The teachers of our Middle School (Years 5 & 6) integrate Middle Schooling philosophy and perspectives into their planning for student learning.  ​Students, in the middle years of schooling, share an array of rapidly changing, diverse and often challenging qualities.  Other than infancy, research identifies the ages of approximately 10 to 14 years as a time when children develop and grow more rapidly than during any other developmental stage.

These change processes have direct implications for student learning in the middle years of schooling.  This is a time when young people make choices that impact significantly on the rest of their lives in a rapidly changing world, where, for example:

​They have access to extensive and sophisticated informational sources outside of the school and family.

They are the target of mass media and advertising.

They are participants in a society which has a pervasive consumer culture.

They will participate in a world where the certainty of learning one set of job-related skills for a lifetime of employment is not sufficient.

Middle Schooling refers to practices that make education responsive and appropriate to the needs of young adolescents engaging them proactively in their learning through appropriate curriculum, pedagogy and school organisation.

The following aspects of learning are addressed in the Middle School program at St Joseph's.

Curriculum:  The teachers at St Joseph's plan cooperatively to develop units of work to provide learning experiences that connect with and are relevant to young adolescent learners and learning processes that explicitly develop reading, writing, critical thinking, decision-making and creativity.

Pedagogy:  Teachers work as a team to know and understand their students well and use powerful teaching strategies to challenge and extend students in a supportive environment.

School Organisation:  Middle School (MS) is a flexible grouping of students from Years 5 & 6.