Literate, Numerate, Curious, Kind.
Welcome to Living School – Northern Rivers NSW a kind co-learning school community offering deep experiences.
Our Term Times are intentionally different!
Our term times are purposefully designed to facilitate improved learning and teaching experiences. Having shorter, sharper blocks of time creates more focus and better retention. They do not match up with other school holidays apart from mid-year and end-of-year.
2025 SEMESTER ONE
TERM ONE – IDENTITY – 7 weeks
January 28 – March 14 (then one week holiday)
TERM TWO – NATURE – 6 weeks
March 24 – 2 May (then one week holiday)
TERM THREE – LIFE & LIVING – 7 weeks
12 May – 27 June (then two weeks holiday)
2025 SEMESTER TWO
TERM FOUR – CIVILISATION – 7 weeks
14 July – 29 August (then one week holiday)
TERM FIVE – PHENOMENA – 6 weeks
8 September – 17 October (then one week holiday)
TERM SIX – SERVICE – 7 weeks
27 October – 12 December (then six weeks holiday)
We are now the first school on the North Coast of NSW to offer the globally respected International Baccalaureate Diploma Program – learn more here
APPLY TO ENROL NOW.
Apply now for 2025 by using the button below – or contact enrolments@living.school
Our first HSC class graduated in 2023.
Living School is designed around age-focused character development. We nurture agility and creativity. Our intentional three-campus journey, grows good people for a good future by cherishing childhood.
Conway Street Campus
"The Heart”
Conway St is where our roots grow deep. It’s the warm, wonder-filled home of our younger learners, from Kinder through to Year 4. Walk through the gate, and you’ll feel it: curiosity in the air, creativity in the walls, connection in the rhythm of the day. Children here are known, nourished, and invited to become the fullest version of themselves.
It’s intimate, intentional, and infused with joy.
Curiosity
Brown & Jolly Campus
"The Pulse Point"
This is more than a building project - it’s a regeneration. At the heart of Lismore’s CBD, the old Brown & Jolly site is becoming something entirely new: a Middle School campus where adolescence is honoured, energy is channelled, and identity is explored.
Middle School (Years 5–8) will come alive here. It’s a space designed to meet the unique rhythm of this age - curious minds, shifting emotions, growing independence. In this hub, learning won’t just respond to the world; it will help shape it.
Urban, alive, and anchored in purpose.
A signal to the city that learning belongs here - and so do our young people.
Project Based
Southern Cross University Campus
"The Grove of Possibility"
SCU is our living laborator, a place where collaboration blooms. Nestled within a university setting, it invites our learners to think beyond the classroom, to walk alongside researchers, changemakers, and knowledge-keepers. Here, education is less about content, and more about context: real-world, relevant, relational. It’s where Year 5 to 12 students stretch into leadership, guided by purpose and pulled by possibility.
Our Middle School is located at E-Block
Our Academy is located at Z-Block.
It’s bold, brave, and beautifully integrated with the wider world.
Pathways
The Living School believes good learning is
- Knowledge gained through rich experiences and a curious disposition.
- Conceptual Understanding that springboards off the wisdom of others through effort and application.
- Practised Skills and Strategies (practical, cognitive and social).
- Attitudes sown and grown from aptitudes.
- The drive to see mistakes as the foundations of the learning process.
Living Learning
Living Learning is a unique focus on creating a curriculum that grows with the needs of a community. We focus on adaptation and agility. We want learning to be with the community in the community.
Every year there is to be a Festival of Thought: where interested supporters of progressive education come together to learn, adapt and grow the Living School curriculum. And our commitment is to ensure all our curriculum documentation is freely available online as open-source schooling.
Living Spaces
Aesthetics and green space benefit our health and well-being. Living School is designed to embrace the environment. Living architecture is based on structures that grow and are sustainable, allowing the students to design and build their own learning spaces! Classrooms do not have to be brick and mortar – they can be learning pods, cubbies, open spaces. The focus is to offer our community a chance to experience good design – building and design should be inspirational.
Living Food
Our focus is to feed the whole body – not just fill the mind. Living food is focused on nutrition and well-being by using ingredients that are home-grown and natural. Living School adopts these principles in developing ‘free-range’ kids: offering space, nature-based learning, and the opportunity to garden, play and explore the natural environment. Our focus is not to indoctrinate but to instil conscious understanding to evoke responsibility in the individual’s choices.
Living Well
Learning how to live well is vital. Wellness (also described as mindfulness) is a positive state of being. It is about living in the moment, conscious of our sub-conscious. With awareness we are able to manage our emotions, behaviour and reactions. Living School emphasises wellness by incorporating programs such as meditation, yoga, nutrition and positive psychology. As defined in the Somatic theory: intelligence is not happening in the brain alone.
Gurus Guide our Journey
Holistic teaching
Our children need much more than facts and content – they need to develop positive attitudes and responsible social networks! Our children need to find a purpose in this information age. We are committed to drawing out of each student a compelling desire, where interests become passion. And this is the historical origin of education – to evoke and draw out. We connect with our past to improve our future.
We aim to make schooling inspirational – a time in a person’s life when, years in the future, our children will discuss over a dinner table or social network their time at Living School with pride and humble humour at all they experienced, all they learned.
Living School’s aim is to nurture progressively and purposefully key elements of success (values, attitudes, skills) to foster competence without pressure or expectation alienating and destroying each pupil’s love of learning. And to do so as a kind, mindful, engaging and supportive caring community.
Living School celebrates our connection to nature and each other’s personal uniqueness: the fundamental principles for leading a fulfilled life. Celebrating our diversity allows us to respect our individuality.
Our intent and guiding question resonates:
Is learning life-worthy?
The Six KeyStones for integrated learning
Our unique curriculum design integrates throughout all the schooling years six KeyStones – identity, nature, life & living, civilisation, phenomena and service. Service is the culmination of each year.
The KeyStone Themes are explored via an Inquiry question – developed with the students to be age-appropriate.
Every year, the KeyStone Question explores the theme more deeply as the students’ awareness and understanding mature. This repetition each year intentionally links to memory, reiterating the learning from the previous year.
Understanding these themes provides our students with a broader awareness, or a greater consciousness of awakefulness.
The Living School is about the power of inspiring places…
Living School emphasises the belief our environment is the ‘third teacher’.
Train of thought
We converted our 1928 ‘red rattler’ into our primary school music centre. Our students have specialist music, art and drama lessons every week.
All our spaces have a sense of wonder – we promote learning engagement!
Media
When things take a turn for the worst – the very worst flood in our local history – the purpose is clear: community is our future.
If you would like to listen to John talking about the vision of Living School, please access the Happy Pear podcast.
John and Emma discuss the new plans for the Middle School building project in the Brown and Jolly department store.
Our Unique Model of Learning and Teaching
Living School is different – we view the future through a progressive lens. We adopt a new vision on how to teach with impact to empower and engage. We focus on the learning process:
- to form connections rationally and intuitively so each student can engage – independently and collectively – with the bigger picture (THINK);
- to apply effort to master concepts to understand (KNOW); and
- to learn in context so students experience the importance and relevance of what is being taught (ACT).
Real teaching focuses on what really matters, the threads that weave together the bigger picture beyond the specks of subject content knowledge.
How do we soulfully, with great care, wholly influence a person’s development positively?
As educators, how do we prepare the seeds for a positive relationship? How do we teach to the personal needs of each learner under our care?
Personal learning means we ‘know’ our students so we can guide them to know more about themselves. There is a difference between personalised learning and personal learning: personalised is what we do to them as individuals; personal is what they need to do for themselves.
Living School has purpose – and plans around intentional design to balance interest-based learning with guided challenges.
The basis of learning is to take a concept, make it resonate so the understanding is amplified. This involves elaboration: exemplifying the importance in real-life contexts. Within this understanding must be balanced awareness of a learner’s maturity. Living School adheres to biophilia principles for our younger students, meaning it is vital we teach children to love nature before we start informing (and frightening) them on climate change, pollution, extinctions and other environmental fears for the future, which are coined as ecophobia.
We are organised around the 3 Threads Frame. The first thread focuses on engaging learners by integrating subjects to address our five KeyStone themes (Connections) in a large block of time.
Our Concepts thread is where the specific subject concepts in English, mathematics, science and technology are targeted to develop mastery.
The third phase is the Context thread – where we develop purposefully hands-on activities (on and off site) to contextualise learning. Our aim is to give all students the ‘aha’ moment – where learning ‘makes sense’ in the real world. We incorporate our Onland Learning program – a day where the students explore outdoor education in our School of the Open Sky.
If you would like to explore more, navigate through our Pedagogy section on the main menu or by clicking on the Explore More button below…
