St John’s is very proud of its growing international links. The school is registered with the International School’s Award and hopes to gain the full award in the next two years.

For the past three years St John’s has been involved in the British Council’s Connecting Classrooms Project with NTC and St George’s, working with cluster of schools in Nigeria and Tanzania. This year’s themes were the Origin of Man and Cultural links between Tanzania and the UK. Our students had a very successful cross-curricular day in November working on this project.  Mr MacKenzie represented St John’s in Dodoma, Tanzania in January this year. He visited and taught in local schools during his stay.

This year St John’s, NTC and St George’s have collaborated on a BBC School Report project on Climate Change which now features on the BBC website. Currently the three schools have submitted a new bid to take part in a Connecting Classrooms project linking with schools in the Middle East.

St John’s has established very strong links with three Catholic schools in Mahenge, Tanzania, St Francis Junior Seminary, St Agnes’ Girls School and Regina Mundi Girls School. Following staff visits to the area last year, St John’s is committed to forging stronger links with these schools. The ‘Take it to Tanzania’ fundraising project aims to send school furniture and resources in shipping containers this July. Students are busy fundraising and volunteers from local parishes are assisting in packing the containers. Fr Deo Mshala is arranging the distribution of the materials in Mahenge.

Our new school will be open in July and the whole school community is buzzing with excitement. We have hosted delegations of senior educationalists from Sweden and Saudi Arabia in recently months and we hope to develop closer links.

From 2008 St John’s played a pivotal role in the British Council’s Challenge in Schools project where we worked with schools in Poland, Lithuania and Slovenia. St John’s hosted teachers and staff from these schools in 2009. In June, 2010 a delegation of students and teachers will visit St John’s where they will take participate in technology and drama activities.

This year Modern Foreign Languages organised three school trips to France to have place, involving day trips to both Boulogne and Lille and a three day residential trip to Paris. In February 2010 forty students took part in the annual technology/maths residential visit to Eurodisney.

St John’s hosts visiting schools from the US each year. In June we have two schools making day visits. In 2009 our E-learning subject has engaged in a common ICT project with a US school involving KS3 students.

Our Enterprise students arrange a number of day trips to the World War 1 Battlefields each November and December.

The school arranges success ski trips every other year to the Alps.

Three staff from the school successfully participated in the British Council’s Teachers International Professional Development (TIPD) programme in 2008 and we hope to avail of future opportunities.