This new year marked a new path in my professional life. I took a position as Assistant Head of a school which, for the first time in my career, was not a Catholic one. It is a temporary placement; I want to remain on the right side of the Tiber. However, my hiatus has given me cause to reflect on the value of our Catholic schools.
There is a belief held by some that these schools have become part of the “woke” system, replacing Catholic values with “British” ones. It is true that, due to over-reaching governments, Catholic schools are being compelled to stretch the boundaries of what “loving thy neighbour” and “being made in the image of God” mean in order to allow for a permissive attitude towards what is sin and what is not sin. I remember instances of not being happy with the content of a year 7 PSHE lesson and taking my class to the chapel to pray the rosary instead. But aside from this, Catholic schools, in my view, remain very much Catholic.
At my previous school in east London, the Lenten liturgies are beautifully conducted, in a way befitting to the good intentions and limited attention spans of teenagers. Ashes are administered, the lay chaplain gives a reflection and students half bow, half curtsey to the cross as they leave.
Every year, during Lent and Advent, the entire student cohort is given an opportunity to attend Confession. Class by class they are accompanied to the chapel for a reconciliation service, with a local priest waiting in a corridor which serves as a confessional. Some need a gentle reminder: “Conor, would you like to go to Confession?” But in the end, most will attend. The school is permeated with its faith. Student artwork depicting the saints, Bible study and altar servers’ clubs, and a perfectly positioned chapel in the centre of the school, remind everyone of the school’s purpose: to love God and promote the common good.
These schools are the jewels in the crowns of our Church communities, but since 2010 successive Governments have prevented their opening. The faith cap, introduced under David (now Lord) Cameron’s coalition government, stipulates that newly-established academies with a religious character that are oversubscribed must allow 50 per cent of their places to be given without reference to faith. This instantly meant that no new Catholic academies could be opened. The Bishops of England and Wales have argued that Catholic students must not be turned away from their own schools. These buildings are the property of the Church, and their upkeep is, in part, paid for by the Church. Therefore, parish communities directly contribute to their existence.
Bizarrely, the coalition’s “inclusive admissions policy” still allows for places to be administered based on academic ability, a sort of postcode lottery, sibling priority, children-of-staff priority and other criteria an academy would like to apply.
For the sake of this “inclusivity”, plans for new Catholic schools have been shut down. This is despite Catholic schools having a significantly more ethnically diverse intake than the national average. Academically, they outperform the national GCSE averages for English and Maths by five percentage points and operate in more disadvantaged communities than their non-Catholic counterparts. About 850,000 children are educated in Catholic schools across England and Wales, making it the largest provider of secondary education and the second largest provider of primary education in the country. 37 per cent of students who attend are non-Catholics.
With this in mind, it is surprising that the Government is not asking the Catholic Education Service to help draft educational policies, particularly on diversity and inclusion. Instead, however, the Government has stuck to a decade-old policy that found its way into the Funding Agreements of the implementation of the Academies Act 2010. This policy was introduced as a way to include some of the tenets of the 2010 election-losing campaign of the Liberal Democrats and placate them into supporting the premiership of David Cameron. Those who lobby and fund campaigns to support it today, such as the British Humanist Association and the National Secular Society, have no interest in faith-based education and see its implementation as a successful way to suppress Catholic schools.
All my training and experience in education, up to this point, has been in a Catholic school. I have taught students who are now studying at Oxford and Cambridge and students who are now serving life imprisonment for murder. In all its beauty and confusion, the young mind is at its most recipient to discover the things of God, and we must do whatever we can to protect the institutions that make these discoveries possible. Scrapping the faith cap would be one very welcome step towards acknowledging the immense good of our Catholic schools, but Catholic and non-Catholics alike must go further and treasure these institutions for the jewels they are.
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