Labour-supporting nuns criticise Hunt

SHADOW EDUCATION Secretary Tristram Hunt was this week accused of “breathtaking ignorance and bigotry” after he appeared to suggest that nuns were second-rate teachers without qualifications.

The gaffe came during an appearance on BBC One’s Question Time, during a spat with the Catholic writer Cristina Odone over teaching qualifications.

Odone said some of the most inspiring teachers she had ever known were not out of teacher training colleges, after which Hunt retorted: “These were nuns … these were all nuns, weren’t they?”

The following day, on Twitter, Mr Hunt said he meant “no offence to nuns” but two days later, on BBC TV’s The Andrew Marr Show, he refused six times to say whether an unqualified nun could be a good teacher. On the seventh occasion he admitted that they could.

But Marr’s question itself wrongly assumed that religious sisters in education did not have teaching qualifications. In Britain the vast majority of nuns who have taught in schools for generations have been trained, and through the twentieth century religious orders founded, and ran, large teacher training colleges.

Hunt’s remarks have been criticised by religious sisters, including Sr Jane Livesey, the leader of the Congregation of Jesus, an order with a teaching mission, founded by Mary Ward. She is the sister of Tim Livesey, Labour leader Ed Miliband’s chief of staff.

Sr Jane said she was “disappointed” at the lack of understanding of a Labour frontbencher, and that what Hunt said was an insult not only to nuns but to many generations of Labour voters, particularly in the north of England. “They were ‘enfranchised’ in the widest sense of the word by the education given to them by generations of intelligent, dedicated teachers who also happened to be nuns,” she said.

Sisters also gave “added value” in the sense of the “caught not taught” part of the curriculum which, in Sr Jane’s experience of teacher training, is not given enough time and attention at that stage.

Elsewhere Sr Maureen Tinkler, a Daughter of Charity of St Vincent de Paul, tweeted a message to Mr Hunt that said: “Shame on you and your lack of awareness of the great teaching sisters past and present.” Meanwhile Sr Gemma Simmonds, a member of the Congregation of Jesus, who is a trained teacher and lectures at Heythrop College in London, said Mr Hunt had shown “breathtaking ignorance and bigotry”.

Many Catholic state schools in this country, she said, are former convent schools, and they are consistently oversubscribed “because parents have confidence in the long tradition of highly acclaimed, intellectually broad and culturally critical education that they provide”.

Sr Gemma, a Labour voter since the age of 18, said her education by nuns was “challenging, broad and enormous fun”. She added they were all “highly trained”.

Maureen Glackin of St Mary’s University in Twickenham, a former Catholic teacher training college and the alma mater of many hundreds of teaching nuns through its 165-year history, said nuns had made an enormous contribution to the lives of millions of young people by giving them an excellent education.