London Oratory school criticised for favouring white middle classes

A prominent Catholic secondary school has been ordered to change its admissions procedures after the school’s adjudicator found it was favouring white ­middle-class pupils.

The London Oratory School in Fulham, west London – which is attended by the son of the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, and which educated two children of former Prime Minister Tony Blair – was found to have breached the admissions code on 105 counts.

In a highly critical ruling, Dr Bryan Slater, from the Office of the Schools Adjudicator, found that the Oratory was wrong to give preference to applications where children or parents undertook extra service in the Church such as altar serving, flower arranging, visiting or helping the sick and housebound.

The code says that schools are forbidden from giving priority to children on the basis of practical or financial support parents give to a school or associated body such as the Church, although the Oratory stressed the extra service was a religious activity and therefore allowed.

Heavily oversubscribed Catholic schools have used “extra service” when admitting pupils but this is strongly opposed by local dioceses. The adjudicator added that the Oratory was wrong to favour children who had been baptised within six months of birth, attended Mass on Holy Days of Obligation and had made their First Communion by the time of application as it breached the Archdiocese of Westminster’s guidance on the matter. The ruling also said the school had been wrong to request parental baptismal certificates.

The Oratory has used a point-based system that it says helps give preference to those who are committed Catholics drawn from a catchment area across London. It said it was concerned about giving preference to those who live closer to the school – a method often used by those that  are oversubscribed – as the areas near to it are “preponderantly white and middle class in contrast to the high level of diversity currently found at the school”.

But the adjudicator compared the Oratory with a dozen other nearby Catholic secondary schools and found that it had the highest proportion of white British pupils and the lowest proportion of those who were non-white or of African heritage. Furthermore, in 2014, just 6.4 per cent of the school’s pupils were entitled to free school meals compared to the local borough’s average of 25 per cent. Sacred Heart High School, in nearby Hammersmith, scored even lower with 4.9 per cent. “From the evidence I have seen, there is good reason to believe the admissions arrangements which the school uses have the effect of acting to produce at the very least a degree of social selection,” Dr Slater said. 

The latest ruling is part of a long-running dispute between the school and the adjudicator who last year ordered the Oratory to change its procedure following a complaint from the British Humanist Association. That decision was quashed in March but the humanists resubmitted their complaint a month later. The school was founded by the fathers of the London Oratory and became an academy in 2011. In a statement, the school said it was considering referring the decision to judicial review.