A Catholic head teacher explains why children get a better education at a good comprehensive than at a private school

A Catholic head teacher explains why children get a better education at a good comprehensive than at a private school

On a whistle-stop tour of the Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School in west London, the headmaster, Paul Stubbings, guides me past two sets of boards. The first displays the names of pupils who have got into Oxford and Cambridge (this Catholic comprehensive routinely gets more Oxbridge offers than any fee-paying Catholic school), the second the names of old boys who have become priests. Which, I wonder, makes Stubbings more proud? “You know, I don’t think about it like that. The first boards show the spoils of honour in the world, the second the fruits of the Kingdom. Our job is to prepare kids simultan­eously for the world and the Kingdom. That’s the glorious challenge of Catholic education.”

A grammar school boy, Stubbings arrived at the Vaughan as a Classics teacher in 1989, aged 23. Aged 30, he became a Catholic, drawn into the Church, he says, “by the ethos of the school”. Tall, commanding, bald and irrepressibly good-humoured, he is deeply committed to his 1,006 pupils – most of them boys, though the Vaughan takes girls in the sixth form. As we walk round the school, he greets each one that we pass. Does he know all their names?

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