The Catholic Education Service appears to have signalled its opposition to Government plans to turn all schools into academies by 2020. Chancellor George Osborne announced that schools must become academies by 2020 or have plans to do so by 2022.
But a spokeswoman for the Catholic Education Service said any decision to convert to academy status should be made by local dioceses in collaboration with parents. She said: “There are 2,142 Catholic schools in England and more than 430 of them are academies. The Catholic Church has more than a century’s worth of experience running schools in England and has pioneered many of the academy models in use today.
“However, no two schools are the same. Therefore the decision about academisation must be made by the local diocese in collaboration with parents and the wider community.”
But Michael Merrick, who teaches in a Catholic school, said the new arrangement might give Catholic schools more autonomy. He said: “At the moment, it’s just about waiting for the dust to settle. It will, of course, allow dioceses to push ahead with plans for multi-academy trusts, and these bring with them the potential for a certain strategic coherence across multiple schools which could prove to be an advantage.
“Freedom from the national curriculum might also allow more latitude with curriculum design and allow our schools the space, in theory at least, to craft a truly Catholic, integrated curriculum,” Mr Merrick said.
Academies were first introduced under Labour. They have expanded rapidly since 2010.
Catholics urged to lobby against death penalty
The Bishop of Clifton has called on Catholics to join the global campaign against the death penalty. Bishop Declan Lang said that, although the last judicial execution in in Britain was in 1964, “we nevertheless all share a responsibility in furthering the cause of abolition wherever a state uses judicial processes to take the lives of its citizens”. He mentioned Pakistan, Japan and Belarus as countries which still impose the death penalty.
In his column for The Catholic Universe, the bishop described instances of the death penalty as “gross violations of human dignity that undermine the common good and present an affront to our shared humanity”.
Bishop Lang, who earlier this month called for Catholics to support the human rights of persecuted atheists, said that more than 600 people are known to have been executed last year, and the actual figure – including China, which does not publish details – “is likely to be far higher”. Bishop Lang urged Catholics to contact their MP to express concern that the Government is “not making the abolition of the death penalty a priority”.
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