A New Educational Partnership for Cairns (Sep 2020)

With funding now approved for the next phase, TPG Architects are excited to announce Newman Catholic College is to proceed to tender documentation. The school will be Australia’s first Catholic secondary college co-located within a university campus.  This tropical take on a contemporary vertical college will emerge alongside JCU from the Captain Cook Highway, ready for its first cohort of secondary students in 2022.

The College is named after the 19th century Saint John Henry Newman, canonised by Pope Francis in 2019. Newman spent half of his life as an Anglican priest and evangelical academic at Oxford University before converting to Catholicism. A prolific and influential writer who advocated for rational enquiry and pursuing objective truth, Newman was the author of The Idea of a University, a philosophical work endorsing a respectful relationship between a university and a church.

Newman Catholic College’s identity will embrace a Franciscan charism, while respecting its location within a secular tertiary institution. St Francis of Assisi was a ‘pioneering ecologist’ some 800 years ago, loved for his openheartedness and reverence for nature.

Tender for stage one will commence at the end of 2020 with construction commencing in 2021, and will see the development of administration, library, indoor multipurpose hall, science rooms and five state-of-the art design technology labs. Breezy undercroft spaces and pedestrian links to the University and rainforest fringed Atika Creek nearby will create a pleasant and connected school campus with ample opportunities for mutual learning and sharing of resources between the institutions. With its focus on design thinking and quick uptake of interest for teaching positions already evident, Newman Catholic College is well placed to emerge as an incubator of tropical innovation in the region.