Just before Covid, the little old lady who lived next door to us sold her 3-bedroom house to a Bulgarian couple who had plans to turn it into a house in multiple occupation. In order to maximise revenue they were going to extend it, but then lockdowns hit and they couldn’t get the personnel. They weren’t going to let a little thing like that stop them, so they got on with it anyway, making use of the people who had already rented out existing rooms. They had a chef do the drawings, a warehouse manager lay bricks and another amateur fit windows. It came as no surprise that, without the right people for the job, the rear extension collapsed. This seemed to me to offer a cautionary tale about the emergence of Catholic Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs).
The Catholic Church has been a provider of education in England for centuries. The very first schools in the country were established by the Church and, prior to the Reformation, it was the only provider of schools. Following the re-establishment of the Catholic Hierarchy in England & Wales in 1850 the priority was education, with Catholics encouraged to build schools before churches. The 1944 Education Act enabled the Catholic Church to become a key educational partner with the state in the provision of voluntary aided schools; thus was established the dual system which has provided Catholic parents with the choice to send their children to a Catholic school if they so wish. In the almost 80 years since that time, however, vocations have dropped off a cliff and disaffiliation rates have soared.
The nuns are gone, the priests are going and the lay labourers are few. As the new school year begins, many of our children will start at or return to Catholic schools facing this growing personnel crisis. In 2010 the Academies Act introduced the possibility of new style MATs, and the Catholic bishops saw an opportunity. It is easy to see the reasoning behind moving to an MAT model where resources can be shared and managed across a number of schools, and the few dedicated lay faithful leaders can be utilised to direct the vision for all schools in a trust. With the right people, working for the bishops’ agenda, MATS could work well. But with the wrong people, working for their own agenda, they are a disaster waiting to happen. A bad result under these conditions would be far graver than a rear extension collapse.
One concern is the sheer scale of such a project and how it conflicts with the principle of subsidiarity. Parents, already distant from their children’s education, are further sidelined as accountability narrows to one potential megalomaniac on the far horizon. By its nature the position of CEO does not tend to attract servant leaders. One of the many pitfalls of this transition to the MAT model is that it turns Catholic head teachers into middle managers, told by CEOs “it’s my way or the highway”. A good proportion of Catholic leaders are lost in this way.
All the problems that already existed in a floundering Catholic education system relying almost entirely on the right people have been scaled up and multiplied. It used to be that a board of governors would hold the head teacher to account. This was hard enough, with the challenge being how to know what was really going on and how to effect change if the school were to take an un-Catholic turn. There are few people with the time, expertise and stomach for a fight and when the bishops have many other pressing matters on their desks they do not want to be presented with another one. Now imagine a situation where all these problems are escalated, and instead of a head teacher in one school accountable to one board of governors, you have a CEO with an incredible amount of power in charge of 30+ schools with one board of trustees facing the perennial problems that governors have always faced. It’s almost impossible to know what is really going on and effect change.
The Catholic Education Service’s best hope is to work effectively with those who have the power (CEOs), but it now seems that there is a growing tension between the CEOs and the Diocesan Schools Commissioners (DSCs are tasked with implementing the bishops’ vision). The CEOs are grouping together and questioning the necessity of DSCs. The bishop can write all the directives and put as many trustees on the board as he sees fit, but the guy writing the cheques and pulling the trigger is the CEO. With the wrong person at the helm our children’s souls may well be in peril. With the keys handed over, is it time to burn it all down? The growth of home education and hybrid schools suggest it might just be.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.