Outside In

In this essay, I will build on the history outlined in Part 1, where we explored the battles we had to fight, first to be able to have schools, and then to be treated as equal partners with the state in the provision of education. What follows in Part 2 is an overview of the sector as a whole and the trends observable within it, and should not be assumed to apply to any particular circumstance, school, or leadership. You can read the first part here

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‘Guard the good deposit that was entrusted to you – guard it with the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in us’ (2 Tim 1:14)

The Drift

One key thread running through the first part of this series was stated plainly in the final paragraph: that, in the most basic terms, our forebears wanted a Catholic education for their Catholic children. This sounds axiomatic, though I would gently suggest that – in an age of increased sensitivity toward anything that might sound exclusive – it is perhaps an expectation now more intuitively held outside the Catholic educational community than within it. To state things more plainly, to say that our schools exist to provide a Catholic education for Catholic children is for many people no longer as obvious as it once was, or at least is only true in so far it can be held alongside a more palatable positioning, which is that they are also for all children, and thus for society as a whole.

In making this observation, I should be clear that I am referring more to culture and wince-factor rather than anything legislative. In policy terms, we retain a robust position: Catholic children get an absolute priority for places in our schools, since it is for these for whom they are provided. But the difference between a policy and its implementation can at times be large, and I know there are plenty who feel uncomfortable with this prioritisation, and perhaps even see it as a betrayal of our Catholic values, particularly if it comes up against the needs of vulnerable children, for example those with SEND, or looked-after children.

This is a neat way into looking at this first section, and what some might describe as ‘mission drift’, even down to our understanding of who our schools are for and why we have them. Whilst I would be hesitant to accept the term ‘drift’ if it is used to mean abandonment of mission – as some do, and which is overstating things – nonetheless if used to suggest a (at times radical) change of emphasis then it does capture something important. The Catholic education sector has adapted itself deftly to a rapidly changing cultural and political context, and it is perhaps unsurprising that this delicate work of maintaining mission and identity amidst sometimes dizzying change has at times proven a significant challenge.

Influenced by this wider cultural values shift, it is little surprise that we have become inclined to articulate mission in terms that better dovetail with the wider political climate of the last 30 years or so. The more exclusivist account – that natural articulation of a defined ‘tribe’ which was for so long the Catholic community – has found itself de-emphasised in preference of language more likely to emphasise values of openness, universality, and pluralism. This Hume-esque matriculation of the Catholic sense of self into the sociocultural mainstream means we tend toward highlighting our continuity with wider social mores, which for some has the added benefit of allowing a more seamless transition toward the new demographic realities within which our schools are operating, as well as making the political conversations we need to have just that little bit easier.

Whilst some of the more excitable members of the Catholic family may see this as a capitulation to secular culture, and may further wish to explain why this is all the fault of Vatican II, it is not an explanation I find particularly convincing. Not least because all Vatican documents on education since Vatican II have been remarkably clear on the fundamental mission and identity of our schools, even if this was accompanied by an added care not to reduce them into places of unwelcome for those who are not of the Faith.

Instead, it seems to me that a more plausible explanation is simple reaction to external pressures and social trends – both inside the Church (and this does include more localised post-Vatican II changes in culture and practice) and outside the Church, with a wider social drift toward progressive-liberal values, particularly amongst the professional gradclass which forms the majority culture within all the state professions, and no less education.1

Whilst the cultural nudge effect has thus been significant, the demographic transformation of our schools has been equally so, from both the society-wide and the local perspective. For example, on the most basic level, Catholic families often simply do not exist in the same places they were when the schools were built to serve them. Many of those original families have often simply moved on. I mean this both literally, as in they have been the beneficiaries of social mobility and moved off into the suburbs or beyond, or metaphorically, into new professional and thus social networks and away from the tightknit church-school-club identity that for so many generations defined Catholic life. (For those who are interested, Stephen Bullivant gives an excellent overview of these trends, and its impact on Catholic identity and practice, in Mass Exodus)

And with this thinning out – of population, of concentration – so the reality that identity markers have thinned out also. And into those places where our schools often still stand, into those communities, have come new people – and not all of them (and sometimes very few of them) are looking to bring up Catholic children.

This, of course, creates pressure, and pressure creates incentives, both welcome and unwelcome. In terms of our schools, it presents us with a challenge for how we best articulate our goals in a wholly new context, with families who may have different needs and different priorities. We still exist to offer Christ and the teachings of the Church to all – that is for sure – but creating and sustaining a normative Catholic culture clearly becomes more difficult if a majority (and sometimes a significant majority) of the families using that school are not Catholic, even residually so through grandparents etc, and more still if this is also true of the staff body.2

It is important to tread gently here, for it is a point that can be so easily misunderstood and interpreted as attack or criticism. We often talk about the school as a Catholic community, and we naturally intuit a community as shaped by shared norms – be that of language, place, values, expectations, habits, rituals, rites of passage or whatever else. Where this does not exist specifically in relation to the Catholic identity of school – that is where the shared norms, language, rituals etc in respect of Catholic ways of seeing and ways of being are not organically present – so the effort needed to create and sustain it within the school community increases proportionally. Many leaders do an excellent job of navigating this tension and their talents are a great gift to the Church. But in this context, it is a short step for school culture to begin to reflect the wider values and identity nexus of the community that does exist, be that the wider social mores, political priorities, ideological frameworks, or anything else.

Where this occurs, the lure of a more generalist Catholic identity – framed by the theological language of welcome, hospitality, and service – can prove difficult to resist, with some even going so far as to present this thinner account of Catholic identity as a more authentic articulation of Catholic mission, since it is a marker of hospitality and thus a sign of love thy neighbour as much as servant leadership. We can get into the reasons why I think this is a misreading of Church teaching another time, but it is an understandable impulse in a wider culture in which the values of openness and a smoothing away of difference have been the principal forces of sociopolitical change, as well as a more relaxed and ecumenical impulse within late twentieth-century western Catholic culture also. Or, as the old hymn we all sang at primary school sums it up (one of my felt-but-not-researched hunches is that the hymnal has been more influential in forming Catholic minds and hearts than any catechetical programme): ‘…and the creed and the colour and the name won’t matter, I’ll be there.’

I suspect it is for this reason that Catholic Social Teaching has become so much more prominent in our sense of Catholic identity in education. Not because it never was – or should not be – but because it offers a comparatively conflict-free rendering of the Faith that smoothes out the sharper demands of Catholic identity and thus allows it to sit above potential areas of conflict with wider society. After all, there are few competing identities – religious or otherwise – that can really take offence at the principal mission of a Catholic school as being about simply welcoming everybody and helping the poor.3

Whilst some may lament this as a dilution of Catholic culture, a sort of NGO-ification of the essentials of Catholic faith and action, nonetheless it does maximimse the welcome-impulse and draw the widest possible circle over our engagement with wider society. Those things more likely to highlight difference are, after all, also potential objects of resistance – what Lynton Crosby might have referred to as the ‘barnacles on the boat’ – and so one can see why it might be quietly de-emphasised, or left to individual piety rather than communal expression, in the name of smoother sailing. Whilst one can understand the (secularised) logic here, nonetheless on a personal level I have sympathy with the original lament.

This drift might, for some, be deemed a point of rupture, though I think it is better understood as changes of emphasis more than substance, an expression of Catholic identity that stands in continuity with our tradition and mirrors what has happened in the Church more widely. This is not to say that the dropping of the more prominent identity markers should be a point of indifference, and I am inclined to see them as a lost treasure to be recovered, but we could equally make the point that the capacity for prudence, to work within the system, is precisely what has enabled generations of poor Catholic children to receive an education in our schools, and non-Catholic children to be invited into a relationship with Christ and His Church.

And this is a social good. Indeed, from the outset there has been an explicit articulation within our understanding of Catholic education that the mission in schools contributes to the wider common good, the yeast in an otherwise unleavened bread. As the quote from Pope Leo XIII demonstrated in the first post in this series, we have always been acutely aware that if we do what we do well, everyone benefits.

For which reason, and playing the long game here, it is legitimate for us to see our schools as vital arks in a culture suffering its own bouts of philistinism and nihilism. As I have argued elsewhere, including in this talk, Catholic schools at their best can be little powerhouses of evangelization, the modern-day monks in the scriptorium, carefully preserving the fruits of truth, beauty, and wisdom that a hyper-secular world has recklessly cast aside. As expressed in The Catholic School, published in 1977 by the Sacred Congregation for Catholic Education, reflecting on the Church’s contribution to wider society in the midst of cultural pluralism: ‘The absence of the Catholic school would be a great loss for civilisation and for the natural and supernatural destiny of man.’

As such, keeping a foot in the door is vital and, we might reason, a mix of prudence and pragmatism is not too great an admission fee for such an outsized influence in wider society, since our ministry is civilisational as much as it is pastoral. As long as, that is, we can make an offer that is distinctively Catholic in both spirit and action.

Which is the key, since that conditional clause is the crux of the matter. To act as an agent of evangelization, specific conditions need to be present. Simply having the name Catholic – even upholding the superstructure of the identity, through rituals or iconography – is not enough. This would be a reductive view of education, if not risking performativity then certainly risking superficiality4. Rather, a Catholic school must be a living community, one able to create, and sustain, what Saint John Henry Newman would have referred to as the genius loci – a living, shared community, growing together in faith and shaping the intellectual and moral development of all who enter it. As (now) Bishop Stock wrote, in Christ at the Centre: our schools are ‘to be the communities where the spiritual, cultural and personal worlds within which we live are harmonised to form the roots from which grow our values, motivation, aspirations and the moral imperatives that inform our choices and actions as persons.’

Of Stewards and Stewardship

It cannot really be denied that the shift toward this more streamlined identity sits better at ease in wider sociopolitical culture, and to that extent is also convenient. Whilst, I should repeat, this does not mean it is deviation from authentic Catholic mission, it does constitute a change from previous generations and it is an open question as to whether this has been acknowledged or articulated well enough, certainly for faithful Catholic families wanting reassurance that their child’s education will be of a different measure to the values and worldviews which are delivered in other state-funded schools. As is proper, these families want a schooling that works in harmony with the home in matters of the faith and faithfulness; they are attentive to the risk that when a Catholic child enters a school as one of very few Catholics, they may feel more like a stranger in a place that should really feel like home.

It is probably true to say that this lingering ambiguity, not helped by a more narrow understanding of the role of a Catholic school that has flourished as anxieties over identity have deepened, has alienated some (particularly younger) Catholic families from our schools. Speaking anecdotally – I am not aware there is solid data on this, though I am yet to read Stephen Bullivant’s new book on trad Catholicism – the hunger for a robust and confident expression of the Faith (or rather an aversion to perceived compromised or ambiguous expressions of it) is leading a growing number to walk away from our schools entirely, and to undertake the education of their children in faith themselves, either through homeschooling or supplementary to a secular schooling provided by a non-denominational school. And the impulse that drives this is society-wide and epochal: in a worldview-shoot-out between the strong gods R R. Reno and the ‘fourth paradigm’ of Clifford Longley, they would generally choose Reno – and want our schools to display the same levels of confidence.

Navigating this tension – and with it the emerging distance between the institutional offer and pastoral needs – will be a difficult nut to crack. As a bit of a segue, to date the Church has employed what we might think of as a ‘comprehensive’ approach to mission in education, by which I mean the view that a single institution can cater for the intellectual, moral and spiritual needs of all its community, in one place, regardless of background, creed, priorities, or previous experience. This of course reflects the majority view in education in favour of a comprehensive model, but also the Church instinct that a school is ultimately a community, indeed an ecclesial entity, in which all can come to Christ. And when, historically, those same schools were primarily constituted of Catholic families, with the schools an extension and servant of a wider Catholic community, this seemed a reasonable bet to make. However, to put my head above the parapet a bit here, I see the growth in parent-led schooling and wonder if, as wider trends accelerate and the demands of faithful parents continue to grow, this instinct toward a singular offer may come under scrutiny, and the question of whether there may need to be differentiated articulations of mission for different contexts and spiritual needs might need to be considered. Or to put it another way, the prudential accommodation of different pastoral needs within our parishes might also become a model we should look at more carefully in our mission in education.

After all, if the Catholic school is a living community, then its constitution will be constitutive of its culture. And as schools become less culturally or demographically Catholic, so we can reasonably assume that fewer within them will have been brought up in Catholic households, or schools, or parishes, or have trained in Catholic training institutions, or have been given effective formation in the faith, or have attended Catholic liturgy, or catechism, or know key cultural markers, or ritual observances, or are likely to see with the eyes of the faith and view the work of the school through the lens of the Church’s unique mission in education.

This is certainly not to criticise those individuals, the vast majority of whom do a wonderful job in support of our schools and whom we are blessed to call our friends, and with strong leadership neither is this an insurmountable obstacle – to say it again, many school leaders do an excellent job in managing this tension – nonetheless it can also lead to the risk of ‘two masters’, where a school community sees itself as much in the service of the state, or indeed the local authority, as the mission of the Church. As you will gather from the first post in this series, I cannot express strongly enough how much previous generations would have been scandalised by any such possibility.

The result of all this is the understandable instinct – perhaps even the need – to minimise the risk that the drift goes too far, or that it should take a school away from the authentic mission of the Church.

I don’t think it is overstating things to say, then, that the old educational Auftragstaktik – a decentralised mission-command structure in which well-formed local leaders and governors are shaped with understanding of the wider goal and then given the operational latitude to achieve it – is undergoing a process of modification with the erection of much clearer guardrails. As the work of translating our mission into local contexts becomes ever more exacting, as identities and practices come under the strain of wider social and political trends and lack the internal formation or resources to resist them, so previous more localist iterations of leadership become strained. When this happens, the need for clarity becomes paramount, which at a system-level nearly always means a need for things to be more carefully codified, be that through policy or guidance or more explicit formation.

For the interested observer, this is perhaps the best way to understand the various developments in Catholic education over the last couple of decades; what was once a given through organic localised formation and parish oversight, now relies increasingly on central codification to preserve – and indeed define – identity. This has included robust and comprehensive articulation of what a good Catholic school should look like, with a newly updated (and rigorous) religious education directory, a robust new centralised inspection framework, a new document on prayer and liturgy offering real clarity on what is and is not legitimate expression of faithful worship, and a new outline of catholic life and mission soon to be published and which we can expect – if its predecessors are anything to go by – will be faithful, ambitious, and clear.

To some this will simply look like top-down bureaucracy and over-correction. I would argue that this would be to focus on the weather and miss the climate. In reality, something much bigger is happening.

And this is where I take issue with the claims of some in our community that the Church has been asleep at the wheel. In reality the opposite is true: there exists a very strong set of expectations, and a clear attempt to both articulate them and ensure their implementation. Far from the claims fears of some, the Bishops of England and Wales have been both attentive and vigilant to ensure the robustness and authenticity of our schools in the face of these significant social and demographic changes. This is not to say there are never issues, but it is to say that expectations are incredibly high. Indeed, as an exercise we once sent out copies of the GCSE RE paper and the religious education directory to various clergy, and more than one commented how ambitious the content was. For those who are doubtful, I urge you to read the Religious Education Directory and judge for yourself.

Which brings us to the crozier, both hook and stick. Since, to deliver this ambition, there needs to be both the willingness and the capacity to govern in the name of protecting the incredible inheritance we have been gifted. At Diocesan level, this is officers nudging, cajoling, forming, guiding, training, sharing, and intervening where necessary. At national level, it is a committed group who work wonders at protecting our position, with staffing levels and budgets that are mere shadows of those whom they regularly better.

And all know that we are always just one loss away from losing everything. As Winston Churchill definitely did not say, despite frequent misattribution, ‘we sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.’ Clearly it would be absurd to take this literally, and I hope you will forgive me the rhetorical flourish. But I mention it here because something like it is true. Namely, that the reason we still have our schools (and the freedoms that we enjoy in respect of them) is because behind the scenes is a group of men and women who understand how easily it could all be lost, and who work diligently to preserve that freedom, often without knowledge or recognition of those who benefit from its continuance.

This is the thin blue line.

The Watchmen

When training diocesan leaders, I often draw on St. Gregory the Great’s reflection on Ezekiel 33, part of the office of readings on his feast day of September 3rd, and specifically his reflection on the concept of the Watchman. It is a beautiful reflection on leadership – one that, in my view, should be on all courses serious about spiritually preparing leaders for leadership – moving from his inadequacies to his ultimate dependence on God, He who can elevate His humble servants to perform for Him this definite service. As the reading starts, ‘Now a watchman always takes up his position on the heights so that he can see from a distance whatever approaches. Likewise whoever is appointed watchman to a people should live a life on the heights so that he can help them by taking a wide survey.’

I should stress from the outset of this section, that for all the challenges I document here, the majority of the people we work with are of goodwill. There have always been people not of the faith ready to help us, good and kind people, who recognise and value the wider contribution we make. We are endlessly indebted to these kind souls and could not run our schools without them.

But, regrettably, we still encounter challenge toward denominational education; the old battles have not entirely gone away. Sometimes this is in the guise of an individual with an axe to grind; sometimes from a group with a policy goal to which they are committed. At other times it is the blindness of a system not configured to understand our needs or interests that, without constant counter-pressure, naturally defaults to standardizing everything into a single secular mould. As I have said previously, but which cannot be repeated often enough, we are only ever one legislative shift or one legal precedent away from losing the rights our forebears fought so hard to secure. So from whichever direction the threats come, the thin blue line exists to ensure that whilst the rest of the sector gets on with the job of educating children in the Faith, the boundaries of Catholic education remain intact

What does this look like? Well, the examples are almost endless and continually evolving – as laws change, or attitudes change, or personnel change, as new risks emerge and require fleet-footed response. They are neither perpetual nor universal; they come and go and appear at different times in different places, and are as much influenced by specific contexts as the news cycle. Sometimes they build into a crescendo and we have a national issue to address; more often they are localised events that require local response. They most often arise out of lack of awareness rather than any sense of malice, though the impact is the same for all that. The key point here is that, whatever the origins, they always need attending to.

A small selection of examples might perhaps be helpful.

It could be the local admissions office not assigning second-choice parental preferences to a Catholic school, or the school place application forms that do not offer ‘Catholic’ as a faith criteria, or the admission office choosing not to recommend Catholic schools to newly-arriving Catholic families (since closer schools exist elsewhere), or the changing home-to-school transport policies that make it more difficult for families to attend our schools, or the place planning strategy that seems inexplicably keen to close Catholic schools in response to falling pupil rolls, sometimes even using the same language our forebears faced from the Board schools, that since there are places in non-Catholic schools so the Catholic places are not needed.

Or it could be the school improvement advisors urging schools to use resources inappropriate to a Catholic setting in the name of passing an Ofsted, or indeed the poorly-formed Ofsted inspector taking issue with what we teach and how we teach it and letting this influence their inspection judgements, or the resource providers, charities, agencies, or local authorities sharing resources or pursuing initiatives incompatible with our identity and ethos, or safeguarding bodies insisting on materials whose underlying values (and thus understanding of risk) is deeply at odds with our own.

It could be an apparent disparity between capital investment in state maintained schools and Catholic schools, or legal squabbles over the use of playing fields, or boundaries on deeds, or access routes, or lease arrangements, or it could be the clerking services, legal teams, or HR providers giving advice to our schools that lacks understanding of our rights and governance frameworks, or leaving a school high and dry when an issue arises that touches on Catholic ethos and identity, or it could be those same services advising schools to act against their Diocese, or their Bishop, or their charitable Trust Deed, either wittingly or otherwise.

It could be the politicians fronting local campaigns to increase places at non-Catholic schools whilst our schools are undersubscribed, or using time in Parliament to advance policies harmful to our schools, or visiting schools for photo opps whilst espousing views deeply at odds with our ways of seeing the world, or making comments to our pupils that are either deeply provocative to the Catholic identity of the school, or else ignorant of it.

It could be the advisory boards, or schools forums, or review committees without Catholic representation, or challenges as to what counts as Catholic really, or what should count as Catholic really, or who should get to decide, or it could be the journalists writing a poorly-judged story about our schools, without taking the time to do even basic research regarding our beliefs, legal rights or governance frameworks.

It could be the legal challenges, or threatened legal challenges, about our rights to appoint Catholics to leadership positions, or prioritise Catholic children in our admission policies, or determine what and how we teach, or appoint a majority of governors, or the continual challenge and undermining and questioning of these same rights in endless meetings, each needing rebuttal lest any misconceptions grow legs and gain wider momentum.

Or it could be unions formally adopting policies committing to strip us of our legal protections, or the targeting of our schools by activist groups and lobby groups, with targeted FoI requests, or hit-and-run public campaigns, often by people who do not understand – or do not agree – that we have control of our schools in the first place.

I could go on, and on, and on. It could be all or any of these things, and much more besides. I often say the only reason we manage to get through reasonably unscathed is because we work so very hard to make friends and influence people or, where that does not work, to go and be incredibly tenacious in meetings.

As such, if I could make our internal detractors see anything it would be the small miracle that we still have schools at all, and just what extraordinary grace it is that this is so. If Belloc was right in his conviction that providence must be behind the Church’s survival through 2000 years of history, I think we can make a similar case for the continued operation of our schools. Ultimately, they are part of His plan, and will be until they are not.

And so I would invite all those committed to our mission in education into this way of seeing and understanding our schools. I will give the final words of this essay to St Gregory the Great, whose words I would encourage all Catholics in education to reflect on daily: ‘Who am I — what kind of watchman am I? I do not stand on the pinnacle of achievement, I languish rather in the depths of my weakness. And yet the creator and redeemer of mankind can give me, unworthy though I be, the grace to see life whole and power to speak effectively of it. It is for love of him that I do not spare myself in preaching him.’

1

This mirrors wider social changes, extensively documented elsewhere, relating to the growing values-alignment amongst the educated classes. For a reflection on this clash as it relates to social mobility, listen here

2

Vatican documents have consistently laid great emphasis on teachers as the principal means of a Catholic school delivering its aims, even to the extent that ‘the service of the teacher is an ecclesiastical munus and office’. See the Identity of a Catholic School for a Culture of Dialogue, published by the Congregation for Catholic Education, and its remarkably robust approach to Catholic identity and the protection of it

3

As Clifford Longley put it, writing in The Tablet; ‘But Catholic Social Teaching does not have that disadvantage [provoking hostility from non-Christians]. The concept of the common good, allied to universal human dignity (meaning value and respect), is easily understood in a secular world.’

4

See Identity of a Catholic School for a Culture of Dialogue, 69