From the editor’s desk

Truth about Catholic schools

There are few areas of public debate so contaminated by prejudice and misrepresentation as the issue of faith schools, essentially church schools, Anglican and Catholic. The week in which anxious parents discovered the allocation of school places was a neuralgic one, therefore, for The Observer to leak some research purporting to show that church schools were creaming off more middle-class pupils than they were entitled to, thereby skewing the social composition of non-church schools in the other direction. The inference was that this explained not just church schools' middle-class appeal, but also the relative academic success of these schools as shown in national league tables. The inference behind the inference, so to speak, is that the effect of the religious ethos on which church schools put such emphasis was illusory, and not the secret of their success. And though subsidised by the taxpayer, church schools were not contributing anything of value and indeed they were socially divisive.

Given that the facts needed to rebut these myths are so readily available, it is astonishing that the Churches have not yet won the argument. The research quoted in The Observer was done by Rebecca Allen, an academic at London University's Institute of Education. She compared poverty among pupils measured by the take-up of free school meals, against poverty in the surrounding neighbourhood, and found a discrepancy. But because religious affiliation is relevant to school admission policies, the immediate neighbourhood is not a fair basis for comparison. In the Catholic case, the catchment area would be approximately 10 times the area of a non-denominational school, as only one tenth of the school-age population, on average, is Catholic. Once the take-up of free meals is compared nationally, the Catholic sector turns out to be typical. Indeed, some 30 per cent of the 800,000 children in its schools are not Catholic and Catholic schools take a slightly higher proportion of pupils from ethnic minorities, suggesting that the Catholic community is more than doing its bit to promote diversity. A report by the Catholic Education Service in 2006 using statistics supplied by Ofsted showed that pupils from poorer backgrounds in Catholic secondary schools do  better than their counterparts in non-religious schools.

Catholics additionally contribute £20 million annually towards the capital costs of their schools, money that would otherwise have to come from central Government.

The Observer's front page lead story went on to quote Andy Hibberd, co-founder of the so-called Parent Organisation, as saying: "I'd be surprised if you could find one Roman Catholic school that could categorically prove it did not select parents based on their socio-economic background." Challenged by The Tablet, he said he had no hard evidence for this apart from his own failure to get his own non-Catholic child into a local Catholic school, and the views of other parents he had talked to. But the myth is widely believed. But that is because newspapers repeatedly mislead their readers with such stories, and academics undertake research without always comparing like with like. Parents no doubt wish to know the truth of the matter, but unless the Churches shout louder, they are unlikely be heard above the din of axes being ground.