Feature Article

For whom the school bell tolls

Catholic schools were set up in Britain to educate Catholic children, but with rolls falling in ethnically diverse areas, some now teach more Muslim than Christian, let alone Catholic, children. One way forward, it is argued, is to reorientate them as missionary schools

Catholic schools are essentially for educating Catholic children is a notion that is ingrained in our system, and Catholics have fought hard to defend their educational establishments whenever politicians suggest that faith schools may not be a good thing.

However, recent experiences in the increasingly multicultural towns and cities of Britain suggest that there may need to be a rethink of the Church’s position if it is to avoid being perceived as contributing to problems of community cohesion rather than helping to deal with them.

Take Blackburn as an example. The Lancashire town has a population of 140,000 people, of whom about 27 per cent are from ethnic minorities. The vast majority of this group are Muslims from India and Pakistan. Community cohesion is a concern locally, although the town has worked hard to avoid the kind of race-motivated disturbances seen in recent years in similar towns.

At the beginning of the last century Blackburn was a mill town that attracted migrant workers from far and wide. A significant number of these came from Ireland and they founded Catholic churches, together with parish schools. As the Irish population became more prosperous they mostly moved away from their original inner-city settlements, and were replaced during the last 30 years by immigrants from south Asia who moved into some of the old Irish neighbourhoods. The result is that the Catholic schools that would once have been crowded with Irish pupils now have fewer Catholic families in their neighbourhood. As a result Blackburn has a surplus of Catholic school places today.

The Coventry-based Institute of Community Cohesion – better known as iCoCo – was recently asked to undertake a detailed study on community issues in Blackburn, and their recommendations included asking faith schools to rethink their admissions policies to allow more children of different faiths into schools. This was unanimously rejected by the faith-school sector, pointing out that most of them admit substantial numbers of children from other faith groups already. However it is not as simple as that.

Since the Schools Standards and Frameworks Act 1998, it has been illegal for any state school, having admitted all the children from its own faith group who applied, to exclude any other applicants from different faith groups or none. So if there are other children who wish to come to the school, it is not possible for a Catholic state school to be half full because there are not enough Catholics to attend it, or even for a Catholic school to hold a few places open for Catholics who may move into the area.

This has meant that most of the Catholic schools in Blackburn have a minority of Muslims. In some cases they have quite substantial numbers, and in one Catholic primary school, more than 90 per cent of the children are Muslims. I was chairman of the governors of this school for nine years, and was able to observe that there were major difficulties in running the school for reasons that are somewhat complex and were a direct result of the way in which the school was set up in the first place.

In Salford, the diocese that covers Blackburn, the trust deed under which Catholic schools are established and operated requires them to be run for the sole purpose of educating Catholics. This is in contrast to Church of England schools where the trust deed requires them to be run for the benefit of the community as a whole, and for any Catholic missionary school, including one I attended in Kenya, where the possibility of influencing the community rather than just educating Catholics is expressly allowed.

However helpful diocesan education staff are – and they were – their hands are tied by the conditions of this trust deed. As the proportion of ethnic minority children has grown – including the numbers of Muslims – parents of Catholic children have questioned whether the school is any longer Catholic, and have felt justified in moving their children away. This of course means that another set of parents can then claim that the school is even less Catholic given the numbers that have been moved out by their parents. And so it goes on, a cycle of removals and justifications.

So the Church’s policies are, even if not deliberately, supporting the polarisation of schools into indigenous and ethnic minority communities, as has happened in most of Blackburn, as well as legitimising white flight from schools. This could lead to Catholics being accused of being unwilling participants in the weakening of community cohesion in a way that does not deny a perception of racism.

There are other difficulties too of being a Catholic school without enough Catholics. These include being unable to attract leadership as well as teaching staff. The primary school mentioned above had five different head teachers in eight terms, and however good the stand-in head teachers are, it becomes almost impossible to maintain the full motivation of the team running the school. There is a shortage of head teachers nationally, as well as a shortage of Catholic head teachers; however good a school is, there always seemed to be more attractive jobs for the Catholic aspiring head teacher, and later even for non-Catholic candidates, than a Catholic school with a rapidly declining population of Catholic children.

Then there are difficulties with the governing body retaining links with the parents when by canon law foundation governors, who are a majority of the governors, are appointed by the bishop and are required to be practising Catholics. There is only provision for one elected parent governor.

When it has come to other Catholic schools in Blackburn, the diocese’s strategy has been to merge those with increasing ethnic minority percentages in federations with other schools with largely indigenous children, thus maintaining the Catholic majority in the new combined organisation.

However, this was not feasible with the primary school mentioned above. The ethnic minority percentage was already too high, and the school had run into the difficulty of being a Catholic school without enough Catholics.

Action was eventually taken to unwind the school’s relationship with the Church; the process was very structured, with the help of the local authority, but required the diocese to point out to the foundation governors that they were not fulfilling their tasks under the trust deed. The school, still academically successful, was then put in the hands of an Interim Executive Board (a device usually used for managing failing schools) as a means of divorcing it from its trust deed without embarking upon lengthy and controversial processes. Except for the issue of its Catholicity this was a successful school.

Running a Catholic school with lots of non-Catholics in it seemed to mean in practice being an inferior organisation to other Catholic schools, for example in recruiting staff. No one would say that it was the express intention that this should be the case, but the trust deed virtually says to foundation governors that the education of Catholics is more important than the education of non-Catholics. I was not the only governor to have had difficulties reconciling this with the second commandment.

The governors and staff have had a difficult time over the years when this situation was developing. The diocese could not take the simple step of closing the school down; the local authority needs the school and there are children needing an education.

Nobody seemed to want to let us compare notes with other schools in the same situation. We were “unique”, we were often told. Attempts to discuss our position with the bishop and the Catholic Education Service were rebuffed. But the “grapevine” leads me to believe between 30 and 40 Catholics schools in the North of England and the Midlands are in a similar situation.

This article is therefore a plea to the decision makers in Catholic education to allow some schools to adopt the missionary school approach to education, focusing on influencing the community rather than educating Catholics. This would mean that Catholics could avoid being required, or perceived, to regard educating non-Catholics as an inferior task.