Keep the faith in schools

Catholic schools are among the best-performing and most popular in Britain but their position is being undermined, often by false accusations of exclusiveness. This week, as a new report criticises faith schools over admissions, others urge that it is time for the fightback to begin

Catholic education in England is in crisis. No new schools are being built because of government restrictions on reserving places for Catholic children, and a report on religion in public life this week recommended curbs on faith schools and an end to religious assemblies. Then there has been a vigorous campaign by the British Humanist Association (BHA) to try to damage the standing of faith schools.

The humanists’ influence can be clearly seen in this week’s report by the Commission on Religion and Belief in British Public Life (Corab) headed by Baroness (Elizabeth) Butler-Sloss. The chief executive of the BHA, Andrew Copson, is a member of the commission and some of its recommendations on faith schools could have been cut and pasted from the BHA website.

The humanists have long had particularly Catholic and Jewish schools in their sights. They work with broader coalitions to front their positions – Corab is but the latest one; the other is the Accord Coalition, which campaigns against faith-based admissions to schools. They are commanding more attention and undermining support for faith-based education in government, Parliament and the media. The humanist campaign is clever. They use legislation – the Freedom of Information Act allows them to tie up schools with detailed requests, which small and under-resourced primary schools find difficult to handle. And the 2013 Education Act allows them to complain about any school to the Schools Adjudicator for alleged breaches of admissions codes. They have no locus; they have no schools; they do not represent parents or a local community. Their complaints – often minor and technical – are vexatious.

I have seen it at first hand. The school whose governors I chair, Cardinal Vaughan in west London, was a victim of these tactics last year. A BHA complaint triggered a long process to review our admissions code. We conceded where minor mistakes had been inadvertently made but were then required to hold a meeting with the Government’s Schools Adjudicator and the BHA representative.

The head teacher’s office was an odd setting for our confrontation with the secularist ­warriors, surrounded by crucifix and icons, discussing the correct interpretation of canon- law provisions for early baptism and the implications for admissions policy.

The meeting was but a small skirmish in a war the humanists feel they are winning because they exploit what is seen as an anomaly. To an extent, it’s true. State-funded faith schools are anomalous. In most European countries, Catholic schools are privately funded and separate from the state. Yet the English model goes back over 200 years and has been highly successful for both Church and State.

In 1795, alarmed by revolution in Europe, the Government provided a grant to establish what was then called the Royal College of St Patrick at Maynooth in Ireland for the training of priests. Less than 50 years after Culloden, it was highly controversial, but was defended on the grounds that it was better to have priests trained under the close watch of the Protestant state than on the European mainland by seditious Jesuits, and infected with ideas of revolutionary France. An eighteenth- century Prevent strategy?

By 1847, the Government had gone further and established a groundbreaking partnership with the Church in England, which led to the establishment of a Catholic Poor-School Committee, three years before the restoration of the hierarchy. The Church secured money for schools. For the state, it had influence over the schooling of a potentially problematic group of immigrants.

The priority was schools before churches and the provision of Catholic education increased, with a particular focus on the children of poor Irish immigrants. Government financial support continued to grow, but it was the 1944 Education Act which brought Catholic education fully into the state system.

It was always controversial. “Rome on the rates” was resented as taxation to support Catholic schools. Yet it has always been a partnership. The Church contributes land and buildings, which today are worth hundreds of millions of pounds. There is no net cost to the state as Catholic children would have to be educated anyway. And almost one-third of pupils at Catholic schools are non-Catholic.

The campaign against Catholic schools is often based on deliberate misinformation. The Butler-Sloss report states, for example, that “selection by religion segregates children not only according to religious heritage but also, frequently and in effect, by ethnicity and socioeconomic background.”

Yet Catholic schools are more ethnically and socially diverse than their state equivalents: 37 per cent of pupils are from an ethnic minority background – 7 per cent higher than the national average. And 17 per cent are from the most disadvantaged households – 5 per cent higher than the national average. At Cardinal Vaughan, 40 per cent of children speak a language other than English at home. In London, schools are a microcosm of the Catholic population, with increasing numbers of children from African, Asian and Latin American backgrounds. What binds them together is their Catholicism, which gives them a firmer basis for integration with the rest of British society.

With demand rising and no new schools being built, many Catholic parents (almost a third in Westminster) are unable to secure a Catholic education for their children. The Catholic Church is one of the largest education providers and wants to build new free schools and academies but is prevented from doing so because ministers require a 50 per cent cap on places reserved for Catholic pupils where the school is oversubscribed. The ­bishops have rightly rejected this.

The cap seems reasonable in theory but impossible in practice. We cannot turn away Catholic pupils from Catholic schools on the grounds that they are Catholic. It would undermine the theological and communal basis of our approach to Catholic education. Parents would ask why resources were being used to support schools that their children were barred from attending. It would also, incidentally but not unimportantly, be against canon law. The cap would in any case only be the start. The BHA wants an end to all faith-based admissions, which would destroy Catholic and Jewish education in this country. So we have to reject the cap and argue afresh the positive case for Catholic schools and for the right to open new free schools. We need to defend our schools as comprehensive, and ethnically and socially diverse.

The humanists think they are winning. Though vocal, they are a small pressure group. We have thousands of parents and teachers in every constituency who support Catholic education. It’s time to mobilise them.

Mike Craven is a director of The Tablet and the chairman of governors of Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School, west London.

The Commission on Religion and Belief in Public Life this week recommended that faith schools should select fewer pupils and staff on the basis of religion.
Elena Curti asked the commission’s chairwoman, retired judge Baroness (Elizabeth) Butler-Sloss, about some of its proposals.

Do you look at things differently as a result of chairing this commission for two years?
Yes. I hadn’t realised the extent of the lack of communication between various groups. I didn’t realise the extent to which Muslims felt “other” and not trusted. I didn’t realise how important “Living with Difference” was, which is why we gave our report this title.

Why do Muslims feel excluded? They feel that the rhetoric behind the counter-terrorism legislation – they’re not objecting to the legislation itself – is making them be seen as people who should be kept down because they are the sort of people who will become radicalised and become jihadists.

Aren’t those Muslims who are contemptuous of Western lifestyles excluding themselves? Yes, but there are a great many middle-of-the- road Muslims who feel the same way. And we did meet some of the hard-to-get-to Muslims.

Who are the “hard-to-get-to” Muslims? Some of the Deobandi [Sunni revivalist movement]. Some of our group went to see them. I thought perhaps as a woman I wouldn’t go. I thought I wouldn’t carry the same weight. One has to be sensitive to other people’s feelings. You don’t have to agree with them.

What do you think of the Government’s handling of the Trojan Horse affair, when Muslim hardliners were accused of infiltrating some schools in Birmingham? The Government is absolutely right to find out what is going on. It should be brave enough to talk to groups that it doesn’t trust in order to get their viewpoint and to recognise they are part of the group that has got to stop young people becoming radicalised.

Why did you recommend that Catholic schools should take more non-Catholic pupils? We haven’t called for an end to faith schools. We wholly approve of faith schools, but we all agree, including the humanist on the commission, that faith schools should be more open. This is equally true of the Muslim schools, the Creationist schools, and so on.

Catholics are concerned that a quota of non-Catholic pupils may be imposed on Catholic schools. There is no quota. Actually, I said 50 per cent originally, but I think I’m wrong. We are saying they should be opening their doors to non-Catholics.

My two nieces went to a marvellous Catholic school and sang in the Church of England choir on Sundays and they had a first- class education. I am all in favour of Catholic schools; the ones that are open, we are not criticising. We want to be sure that all schools do this.