Higher RMPS will be available for pupils in S6 from June 2023!!
More info from the RE department 
HIGHER RMPS Coming Soon!
Catholic Education Week Article 2022
At the end of Catholic Education week, we would like to share the article that was read at Mass in the parishes by our CREDO pupils.
CEW 2022: Communion, Participation, Mission
Catholic Education Week provides the perfect setting for two significant events in the life of Turnbull High School this year. Firstly, our Patronal Feast Day (21st November) gives us the opportunity to renew our consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary as our guide to knowing, loving and serving the Lord Jesus. Secondly, 2022 sees a significant review of our School Vision Values and Aims; the climax of several years of prayer and discernment involving all members of our school community.
As we consider the theme of Catholic Education Week – Communion, Participation, Mission – we reflect on how these headings give expression to our common identity and shared mission as a school with a uniquely Catholic identity.
Communion
As the young people, parents and teachers of Turnbull High School, we are united by our common choice for Catholic Education. In ‘coming together as a community’, as our school prayer says, we pledge ourselves to growing together in faithfulness toward our calling from God to be a ‘Community Of Faith Engaged In Learning’, ‘Centred on Christ’. The vision of Catholic Education put forward by the Church has been richly enhanced in Turnbull High School in recent times by the process of renewing how we articulate our shared identity. Guided by the Charter for Catholic Schools, input from Australian Catholic University, Notre Dame University (Ireland) and partners closer to home, we have all engaged with the key themes of what it means to be a Catholic school, bound together by our common values. Remembering that communion relies on love and that true, self-giving, sacrificial love comes from God, we are called to reflect on our level of communion with Him and how that unites us to each other as brothers and sisters of the Kingdom. This process gained new depth when, as a whole school, we engaged in the final consultation phase of our Vision, Values and Aims review as part of our feast day this week.
Participation
Our school brings together many people from varied backgrounds and offers a wide variety of opportunities for all of us to develop our academic achievement, skills and, most importantly, our life of virtue; that is, the habitual commitment to The Good.
The Second Vatican Council taught that the Holy Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life. It is in the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus that we learn the extent of love, a life laid down, a body broken and risen to new life. Just as many grains of wheat form the Host set aside for consecration, so Jesus’ Mystical Body in the world is formed from all who share the life of grace and are united with the Lord in Holy Communion. In this way, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and Adoration of the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament signify and bring about the deepest participation that we can have in our common life. Those who do not yet share this level of communion with the Church are no less called to participate in prayer as far as they are able and are invited to open their hearts to the Lord and one another.
Through our varied chaplaincy programme, the whole school community has opportunities to participate in the life and faith of Turnbull High School. Through formal and informal prayer, traditional and contemporary devotions and music, everyone is called to participate in prayer and discipleship.
Our policies and shared practice in our day to day work offers additional opportunities to participate in the shared mission of the Catholic school since everything we do should aim to reflect Jesus, to seek the face of Christ in others. Most recently our journey towards the use of restorative practice seeks to enable us to imitate the mercy of the Father, practice reconciliation and inspire virtue.
Participation in our Christ-centred community extends beyond our families, associated primaries and parishes and partners through our charity and outreach work. Through our commitment to upholding the dignity of others through meeting their physical and spiritual needs, our shared values impact all those who we seek to support through Mary’s Meals, Aid to the Church in Need, Pro-life work and most recently in our efforts to support the Shoebox Appeal and local foodbanks, to name only a few.
Mission
In Redemptoris Missio, Pope St John Paul II said that
“The time has come to commit all of the Church’s energies to the New Evangelisation. No believer in Christ, no institution of the Church can avoid this supreme duty: to proclaim Christ to all peoples.”
Turnbull High School is a centre of the New Evangelisation, a place where the Good News of salvation through Christ Jesus is proclaimed with renewed ardour, the only path to authentic human flourishing.
In every aspect of school life, we are called to help our young people to engage with the Gospel on personal and societal levels, to develop a life of discipleship and to become missionaries in whatever circumstances they find themselves, now and in the future.
At this exciting stage in our communal life, may we, by our reliance on the Holy Spirit speaking through the Church, continually grow in our fidelity to Jesus and in our enthusiasm for participating in the mission of bringing others to the joy of a life lived in Him.
Please pray for us as we continue on this journey to know, love and serve the Lord. Thank you.
CEW 2021- Celebrating and Worshipping
The theme for this year’s Catholic Education Week is designed to help us reflect upon how our schools are communities of faith and learning, characterised by our celebration and worship.
We can list many things that make Turnbull High School a distinctively Catholic place of learning, but they are summed up in three phrases that you can see around our school:
- We are a Community of Faith Engaged in Learning. Our Catholic faith is woven into all that we do from starting the school day with prayer to seeking to discover truth, beauty and goodness, the finger prints of God, in every subject that we study.
- We are Centred on Christ. This is not just a phrase that is mounted above the main entrance, but reflects our desire to witness to our faith in the Lord Jesus by living the sacramental life, by sharing a life of prayer and by reaching out to others in and beyond our community. Our Oratory is on the middle floor of the school and so Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament is close to us in all we do and living our consecration to the Immaculate Heart leads us to follow the Lord more faithfully.
- Our motto is Respice Finem– Look to the Goal. At Turnbull we have the opportunity to receive a spiritual and academic formation which prepares us for our short term aims- our exams, further education, careers and vocations but also for our ultimate goal which is to know love and serve God in this life and be forever happy with him in the next. We are a centre of the New Evangelisation which seeks to proclaim and witness to the Good News and walk in the path of discipleship.
The circumstances of the last two years have posed real challenges for so many in our schools, parish and wider communities. We saw the closure of our schools and parishes, and worked through the tentative attempts to reopen or to reimagine how we could function safely in an ever-changing landscape. Celebrating our Faith and Worshipping God have taken on new forms at Turnbull High School. We have responded to the difficulties around assisting at Holy Mass by exploring the richness and variety that is to be found in our Catholic devotional heritage. Online and in person we have rediscovered the power of the Holy Rosary and Novenas, the stillness of Eucharistic Adoration and the richness of Letio Divina.
In the preface to the weekday Mass we find these beautiful words:
Father all-powerful and ever-living God,
we do well always and everywhere to give thanks.
You have no need of our praise,
yet our desire to thank You is itself Your gift.
Our prayer of thanksgiving adds nothing to Your greatness,
but makes us grow in Your grace,
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
We see here that there is never a wrong time to turn to God in prayer and worship. There is never a wrong time to celebrate his unending love for us. Those words from the preface remind us that the purpose of celebrating and worshipping is to Adore God and to be Reconciled to him. ‘Ad Ora’ means to mouth and so to Adore God is to turn to him and be filled with the breath of life as was Adam in the garden. Giving thanks and praise is not only right and just but is the realisation of our destiny as beings made in His Image.
The Latin root of ‘Reconcile’ comes from the word for eyelash, meaning that by turning away from sin and towards the face of God through the sacraments, we are drawn into the most intimate of relationships with our creator. Indeed, in so doing, we strengthen our relationship with God, our loving Father, and with our brothers and sisters in Christ with whom we celebrate- ‘and to you, my brothers and sisters to pray for me to the Lord Our God’ We are made to know, to love and to serve Him; it is here that we find our purpose, and we can do that through joining together in celebration and worship.
This is why the prayer and sacramental life of our school is absolutely central to who we are and to how we grow as a community. It is also why the links we have with our parishes are so important to us.
Today, on behalf of all the pupils of Turnbull High School we would like to thank you, our family, friends and follow parishioners, for your support and prayers as we continue to encounter Jesus and discern God’s dream for our lives. We also offer our prayers for you who are united with us in Celebrating the Good News and Worshipping God on our pilgrimage through this life towards our ultimate goal.
All Saints Day 2021
It was a delight to celebrate All Saints’ Day with our young people again this year. Period 3, BGE pupils participated in a live-streamed Mass from St Andrew’s Bearsden and period 5 SP pupils participated in Mass streamed from our own Oratory.
The Caritas class read beautifully and the atmosphere of reverence was touching. Sometimes teachers don’t get to pray so much as supervise but yesterday it was a privilege to pray alongside our young people who participated with such love and respect.
New Placemats in RE
Over the last couple of years we have been sharpening our focus on what makes excellent learning and teaching in RE.
The Good Lesson Structure, Co-construction of Success Criteria using HOTS language, skills development and BLP strategies have all become part of our everyday learning- not just WHAT we are learning by HOW.
To make this metacognitive approach that bit easier and to increase pupil agency in their learning, we have developed a new placemat that has everything that we need to be successful learners right at our finger tips!
Let’s see what impact they make on the learning!
S5 & 6 disprove Arianism!
Our S5 and 6 pupils have been doing great work in RE! Whilst learning about the person of Jesus through the Creed they have studied the Arian heresy and formed and accurate understanding of Jesus by comparing the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed.
So many skills being applied and developed AND deepening our faith in the Lord Jesus! What’s not to love!
S3 Confessions
Please pray for our S3 pupils who had the opportunity to go to confession as part of our Sacraments of Healing unit.
May they always seek God and find their true identity in his loving forgiveness
National Pilgrimage at Carfin Grotto
On the 5th of September 2021, the Catholics of Scotland descended on the National Marian Shrine, Carfin Grotto. The National Pilgrimage is an annual Mass with the Bishops of Scotland which had been cancelled due to Covid and it was a joy to see families, religious and clergy arriving by the bus load. A delegation from our Caritas class attended the event as they always do, and seemed to be the only school group in attendance. The pupils were struck by the variety of the church in Scotland beyond their own parish experience and were impacted by the presence of the bishops- our living connection to the apostles.
S1 Retreat 2021
During September S1 were launched into our extensive retreat programme at Turnbull. In addition to assisting at class Masses during RE, pupils had a half day retreat that gave them the opportunity form a deeper connection to God.
The S1 retreat aims to take pupils from the point of their confirmation and help them to consider what it means to be a mature disciple of Jesus. Pupils reflected on what influences them and also explored what it means for Turnbull to be a centre of the New Evangelisation. The young people explored the strands of evangelistation- Witness, Proclamation, Discipleship and Mission- and how they relate to each of our house saints. We also looked at the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit which they received at Confirmation. Through a different range of games and activities S1 learned how to improve their connection to God and understand their prayer time. The retreat is designed as a day away from the usual timetable of the school which allows the pupils to work together, reflect and share together and pray. Pupils also took part in times of quiet prayer, culminating in an Ignation Meditation on the calling of the first disciples with our visitors from the archdiocese of Glasgow youth team. This retreat draws on the first topic in the RE curriculum and enables pupils to consider how they can use their God-given gifts and talents to share the Good News of the Gospel with others.
CREDO Club 2021
For years, an important part of our school community has been our lunchtime charity clubs. These clubs have not only been an important part of keeping the Catholic ethos alive within our student body, but it has also had a big hand to play in bringing pupils together, teaching them important leadership, organisational and communication skills, inspiring a charitable and compassionate spirit within them and educating them on worldwide issues and the importance and how we are all affected by them spiritually.
Unfortunately, these lunchtime groups were put on hold due to lockdown and then new COVID-19 related restrictions caused numbers to dwindle, and it seemed that some of them would be discontinued. However, thanks to an ingenious idea by Mr Pearce, head of RE, all the clubs would continue, as CREDO.
The name CREDO comes from the first line of the creed, and means ‘I believe’, and the club consists of previously independent clubs within the school. The club is made up of four departments: Aid to the Church in Need, Mary’s Meals, Baby Steps and The Holy Events department. Aid to the Church in Need’s mission statement is to help lift the oppression of Catholics all around the world, and famously holds the Red Wednesday Bakesale every year. Mary’s Meals’ mission statement is to promote education in underprivileged countries by feeding children at least one meal a day at school and has also been successful in twinning our school bathroom with another school bathroom in Liberia. Baby Steps is the only new and original club- it’s a Pro-Life club which aims to support pregnant mothers by doing things such as donating or fundraising for important items like baby clothes.
Finally, The Chaplaincy department helps organises events within the school, like important Masses or the recent S1 retreat. The different departments within CREDO are all run by the S6 Caritas pupils, and all are supervised by Mr Pearce. The club takes place on Tuesday lunchtimes for BGE pupils, while beforehand the S6 pupils prepare activities for the younger pupils during their earlier lunch break. New members are always welcome if you want to support the school ethos and learn more about Catholicism worldwide!
Murron, S6
