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, southwest 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, 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 who 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 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 admissions 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 in the nineteenth century and became an academy in 2011. In a statement the school said was considering appealing the decision. “The Office of the Schools Adjudicator has made four determinations against this school in the past six years, the most recent of which was again challenged successfully,” it said. “The Adjudicator’s Office has now, it seems, found a further 105 aspects of our admission arrangements which apparently breach the School Admissions Code. The School Governors once again reserve the right to refer this determination to Judicial Review.”
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