Schools should make sure the charities they work with share the same values, says Gertrude Clarke.
This new term is something of a milestone. For my 16-year-old daughter, after five years in a Catholic state girls’ school, she’ll be joining a Catholic state boys’ school that’s coeducational in sixth form. She’s already talking darkly about institutional misogyny and sexism, her view having been well and truly coloured by the website Everyone’s Invited, which rattled practically every well-known school that takes in girls, by publishing accounts of alleged catcalling, assault and discrimination.
As far as I could see, much of the trouble it alleged took place outside school, and there’s not much teachers can do to police private parties except to discuss the issue of consent without – tough one – wholly compromising Catholic teaching on chastity. And the mindset behind the site was that of vindictive victimhood; I took a dim view of it. So I told my daughter that most of the boys will be perfectly harmless and, like spiders, more scared of her than she of them. She’s also complained that they’re very plain (there would be war if a boy said that), but tough; handsome is as handsome does.
My son, will, I hope, be going to university. He attended the school that my daughter may be going to (I’m writing before exam results come out, so it’s all in the hands of God), and his approach to the girls was to avoid them, with the exception of those he went to primary school with.
My daughter’s school is one of many that was formerly run by nuns, and since their departure has lacked any discernible Catholic ethos. Attendance at Mass is about once a term. The de facto chaplain is lay and pleasant, but there’s no regular involvement by a priest. The school is terrifically keen on mental health, having a centre specifically dedicated for this purpose, but spiritual health doesn’t really feature. Actually, there are no team sports apart from basketball, so the benefits of that discipline are lacking too. The school, admittedly, is in a diverse urban area, with all the associated problems, and the head’s ultimate aspiration is to make sure, as she says, that the street does not enter the school. Its formidable former head, an ex-nun, who preserved the discipline and mindset of the convent, had, I think, very different intentions, like turning out good Christians.
But the point at which I really despaired of the place was when my daughter got involved with a group of girls who did drugs and got into trouble herself. I was furious with her and entirely supportive of a robust approach by the school. What I got was an invitation for her to attend a series of one-to-one sessions with an organisation called Turning Point, which, I was told, “specialises in drugs education. They will be able to advise and support her to understand the short- and long-term consequences of engaging in drugs”. Fine, I said. Whatever helps.
But the online meetings began badly. She had a preliminary 40-minute interview with one counsellor. In the course of it, the woman did ask my daughter about drugs, but many of the questions were about sex. She was asked about her sexual orientation, whether she had had sex, what kind of sex (vaginal, oral, manual) and what she would do if a condom broke. She was taken aback.
All these, I felt, were not questions that 15-year-old girls should have been asked, based as they were on the presupposition of sexual experience, and they seemed egregiously wrong for girls from a Catholic school. The school did get in touch with the organisation to ask them to stick to the drugs issue, but it was troubling that a Catholic school should be using the services of a charity which is so alien to the thinking of the Church.
Indeed, it seems many schools are resorting to what are euphemistically called “specialist providers”, to offer the social and personal education that is now required by the curriculum. And these charities have an agenda of their own, one the school itself wouldn’t necessarily profess. But on this really important element of the curriculum, they subcontract some of the tough issues to outsiders.
One solution might be for the Church to establish an organisation of its own, which would help deal with these sensitive issues in a way that’s compatible with a Catholic ethos. No one is pretending it would be easy. But we should at least try.
It’s one reason I’m relieved my daughter is going to a very different school, which has its own priest-chaplain, whom everyone likes. Religious education is taught robustly there; the younger boys are taken to church on feast days. This isn’t to say that the pupils all practise the faith; most don’t. But at least it’s trying to turn out good Catholics – and that’s something.
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