Religious life of our school

Our amazing year 5 pupil has created a wonderful master piece out of conkers. She has made a large rosary bead, which is now displayed in school for all to see. On Friday 19th September Father Jospeh blessed the conker rosary bead at our whole school mass. Well done Elizabeth!

Catholic Schools Inspection Report 2025

Catholic Schools Inspectorate - St John the Baptist 2025.pdf

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The Crowning of Mary Mass and Procession May 2025

Each week parent's will receive a copy of The Wednesday Word so that we can share the Sunday's Gospel with you and your family.

Through The Wednesday Word, The Gospel is sent out (as in the Parable of the Sower and the Seed). This creates an opportunity for God's Word to be present in each child's family home - sharing Sunday's Gospel, nurturing family faith and effectively enhancing the home, school and parish partnership.

The Wednesday Word

ST JOHN'S SCHOOL HYMN

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House Saints

At St John’s, we have six special saints who give their names to the house teams in our school reward system: St Cecilia, St John Bosco, St Teresa of Calcutta, St John Paul II, St Bernadette and St Francis. Each year, the children are allocated to a different saint’s team, and house points are awarded for amazing work and kind behaviour. Throughout the year, the whole school celebrates these saints on their feast days and in assemblies, and we ask for their prayers and intercession.

At St John’s, we have a set of virtues that are directly linked to our RE curriculum, Gospel values and behaviour curriculum. A new virtue is introduced each half term, and through whole-school and class collective worship, we teach behaviour through these virtues so that the children grow to become witnesses to God’s love. Our child-centred approach uses the imagery of bees and draws on Bible references, stories, hymns, songs and inspirational acts.

Please click on the 'school videos' link below to see videos of special worships, masses, assemblies and performances of our school family celebrating our school ethos and religious life.

School Videos

Please visit our Faith Friends page below to see all the hard work our wonderful Faith Friends get up to as they promote our school mission statement and ethos throughout the school year!

Faith Friends
Daily Prayers for Home Click the link to access daily prayers for home

We had a beautiful Ash Wednesday Mass in our school hall on 5th March. Our Faith Friends read the readings and prayers with great care, and our altar servers served wonderfully. Thank you to the parishioners and families who joined us to celebrate the beginning of our Lenten journey.

Year 6 had a special visit to Raza Jamia Masjid. The children travelled by train and were kindly met and escorted to the mosque. There, they explored and learnt about the prayer rooms, the washing area and the community centre. They asked some wonderful questions and learnt a lot about Islam and the role of the mosque. Everyone had a very enjoyable time, and members of the mosque commented on the children’s exemplary behaviour.

We had a beautiful Christmas Read Around in the hall. We read the Christmas story, sang hymns and said beautiful prayers. Thank you to all of our families that attended to reflect and pray with us.

STAY AND PRAY The children in year 3 planned and delivered a beautiful celebration of the word for their families with a focus of preparing for Advent. They said traditional and personal prayers, read and reflected on scripture, sang hymns and listened to music. Thank you so much to all our families that attended and prayed with us. The children loved reading all the kind and positive feedback that was left for them.

This morning, we held a special assembly to remember those who have served and those who continue to serve in the armed forces. Mrs McKeating led the assembly, and many of our children brought in poppies from home, filled with the names of loved ones and soldiers they wish to pray for and remember. The poppies were carried in procession and placed before our altar. Later, at 11am, the whole school gathered in the hall to observe the two minutes’ silence together.

All of our classes made beautiful poppies, wreaths and a Remembrance display to commemorate past and present soldiers in November. Our children have also organised and led celebrations of the word in classes and in the chapel with a focus of Remembrance.

Our Monday morning worship is a prayerful and respectful time for our school family collectively to pray, celebrate the Gospel, sing and reflect in silence. Each week, our new VIP children take part in a beautiful procession, carrying their class worship candles, to collect their VIP badges from the school altar.

This half term, we have planned and led beautiful acts of worship based on our behaviour focus, ‘Be truthful and a peacemaker’. The children have enjoyed planning and taking part in our worship. We have reflected in silence, listened to music, explored Scripture, said and responded to prayers, and sung hymns. Thank you also to our school governors for joining us for a special class worship.

We had a lovely time meeting Samantha today to deliver Judaism workshops for all of our classes! She brought lots of artefacts, power point presentations and videos to support her workshops. The children all listened intently and asked great questions.

Thank you so much to everybody who bought a raffle ticket to raise money for Mission Possible – As you can see, each chain was an entry into the raffle, and we managed to make a huge amount of money for the charity!

Our flowers gardens for Mary were proudly displayed to our parishioners and parents and are now displayed in the Church for the rest of our parish community to see!

Well done to everybody who entered and made a beautiful flower garden for Mary! Congratulations to our winners Archie, Lily-Ray, Colby and Lucy!

Thank you so much to everybody who entered our whole school competition to create a flower garden for Mary in May. We were overwhelmed with the amount of amazing and creative projects! It was a very hard decision for our two Governors and parishioners, Mrs Schofield and Mrs Bracken, to choose an EYFS, KS1 and KS2 winner! Please see all the gorgeous entries below.

We celebrated a beautiful Crowning of Mary mass in Church with our families and parishioners. Our 2023 pupils of the year processed down the aisle with flowers donated from our families and Rosie our pupil of the year, crowned Mary. It was a special service. All the flowers were then donated to church, local care homes, people in our parish who are poorly or suffering from bereavement and our past pupils who gained their angel wings.

A huge thank you to Imran who kindly visited our school to deliver an assembly and workshops all about Islam for all of our classes. The children and staff thoroughly enjoyed his visit and learnt so much about the stories of Muhammad, 5 pillars, prayer, Ramadan, the Qur'an, special objects and the Mosque!

We celebrated a beautiful Easter Read Around Worship in the hall with our families, Father Joseph and parishioners. Our teachers read the Easter story, and we all sat together to sing hymns together and say special prayers.

We had a lovely Easter Mass in school with our lovely families and parishioners.

Our school family took part in a huge Lent walk to raise money for Caritas, Red Nose Day and Mission Possible! All the children really enjoyed themselves and completed the full distance! Thank you so much to all of our lovely volunteers who gave up their time and helped us on our walk! We managed to raise lots of money for the charities.

We had a lovely Ash Wednesday service in our school hall where we all got ashes on our heads to mark the start of Lent.

Year 1 had a lovely time visiting Church to learn about signs and symbols as part of their RE topic. They asked some great questions and responded with brilliant and meaningful answers.

Congratulations to our pupils who offered their services to make wonderful altar servers. They had a lovely blessing mass to celebrate.

All of our school family surprised Father Allan with special class cards. We are so grateful for all he has done for our school and parish and wish him the best of luck in his new parish!

Thank you so much to our generous families who kindly sponsored our Year 1 and Year 2 children for their Bunny Hop walk for Pendleside Hospice! We managed to raise £820.38 for the wonderful charity!

We are enjoying our Monday assemblies learning and celebrating ways of being a good friend! Today we wrote a friendship poem together as a whole school after discussing the important qualities of friendship.

Our whole school celebrated a wonderful mass for the Ascension and Crowning of our Lady.

Our Year 1 and Reception children enjoyed a collective worship together celebrating Our Lady, in the month of May. We learnt about Mary and we all decorated flowers to make a beautiful altar display for Mary.

A huge thank you to our generous families for donating so many Operation Christmas Child boxes for children around the world this Christmas!

Our amazing Diwali display ⭐️

Our classes loved celebrating Diwali this week! We had RE lessons teaching and learning about Diwali, virtual online workshops with authors reading their story books on Diwali and live draw alongs to make Rangoli patterns, a visit from West End Schools teaching the story of Rama and Sita through dance, creating Diwali lanterns and Diya lamps and also sitting together to have a special Diwali celebration feast! Please visit our class pages to see pictures and videos of our Diwali celebration week!

Our classes have been busy making poppies for our whole school Remembrance display on the corridor to commemorate past and present soldiers during November.

Today we held a beautiful service to unveil our special friend Tia's memorial bench. Tia's mum, dad and grandad, Mrs Bracken, Mr Astin-Kilgallon and our year 5 and 6 children all joined the service. Lovely speeches, poems and prayers were all said, as well as Tia's favourite hymns and songs that were beautifully sang. At the end of the service, Father Allan blessed the bench. We look forward to our children enjoying sitting on the bench and showing it everlasting love and friendship, in memory of our wonderful Tia.

We enjoyed celebrating 'International Nurses Day' in our whole school worship today! Our children made beautiful cards, poems and messages to show and give appreciation to our inspirational and wonderful nurses.

Year 1 and Year 2 had a lovely virtual assembly with Leah from Pendleside Hospice to celebrate the amazing money raised by our generous families for this wonderful charity! The classes learnt a lot about Pendleside Hospice and were excited to meet the mascot in the assembly!

On the 23rd March, all our classes took part in a whole school teams assembly to reflect on the 1 year anniversary since our first national lockdown was announced, which our Bishop requested was marked with a National Day of Reflection and Prayer. Each class read a prayer for each colour of the rainbow. Each colour represented a different theme of prayer. These rainbows of reflection prayers were a beautiful way for our whole school to reflect and pray with each other. We then all held a 1 minute silence for the anniversary of the Coronavirus lockdown.

Over Christmas, each class adopted a 'grandparent' in our local community to support and bring some Christmas cheer to over the festive period. Each class made their adopted grandparent a beautiful Christmas card filled with messages and jokes, along with festive pictures. Our adopted grandparents were thrilled by this. They have been watching our Christmas plays online too! We look forward to keeping in contact with them in the new year.

All of our classes wanted to cheer up the staff and residents of our local care homes this Christmas, so we all made them Christmas cards filled with special messages and jokes inside. We managed to bring Christmas cheer to the Hilton, Woodside, Spring Cottages and Palace House! We wish them all a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

All of our classes enjoyed learning about Christingles and making their very own. We celebrated a beautiful whole school Christingle service outside with lovely readings, carols and prayers. Please see our school videos section for the service.

Our children wanted to help cheer up the staff and patients of Preston and Longridge Hospital so they made wonderful Christmas pictures with special messages on to display on their windows and wards!

As we are in the month of November, each class decorated a poppy for our beautiful, whole school Remembrance display to commemorate soldiers, past and present, who fought and continue to fight to protect our country. Lest we forget.

Here is our God's Wonderful World display, filled with photographs of what our school children treasured and were thankful for during lockdown. All the photographs are so precious and beautiful! Thank you to everybody who contributed to this lovely display. Can you find your picture?

Our KS1 and KS2 children and staff really enjoyed online learning sessions with Jeremy who extended our learning about Judaism and the day in the life of a jewish child. We learnt all about jewish artefacts, worship, food/drink and clothing. Thank you Jeremy for a wonderful and very informative morning!

Congratulations to our new GIFT Team members of 2020-2021, Holly, Sophie, Ruby, Amelia, Max, Rowan, Oscar and Alexander. We were so impressed with their letters of application and look forward to working with this academic year. Love, Miss Dewhurst and Mrs Taylor x

In school on a Monday morning, we would usually have a whole school assembly in the hall. However, we have been asking our children to watch weekly online assemblies at home to help us keep Jesus and His messages in our hearts. Here is Felicity and Sienna enjoying our 'You'll Never Walk Alone' assembly. We are so proud of how they sat and listened to the Gospel stories and answered the questions, just like they were in school. Beautiful girls, thank you for sharing this lovely video!

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Here are some pictures of beautiful Mary gardens that our children made to celebrate and honour Our Lady in the month of May.

Crowning of Our Lady

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In May, we would usually have a mass in church to celebrate and crown Mary. So our keyworker children in school decided to organise their own little ceremony and crown Our Lady in our school chapel.

As we are in the month of May, our children made beautiful Rosary bead creations at home to pray and give thanks to Jesus and Mary.

Here are just some of our teachers wonderful 'Chase the Rainbow' artwork and displays, hoping to bring about some happiness for their neighbours and community at this difficult time.

FRIDAY 27TH MARCH

We have a whole school project in place for this weekend and we would love it if our community would join in with us too!

Please could you create a ‘Chase the Rainbow’ piece of artwork for a front window in your house, to help brighten your neighbours, passers-by and community spirit during this difficult time. You can draw, paint, colour, make, or build any size of rainbow that you wish. You could even write an uplifting message to go with it.

Many families around the country have already taken part in this beautiful gesture, so we’d love it if you could join in too! The more, the merrier!

Let's make the world a brighter place. Stay home, stay safe, don't worry, we'll get through this.