Some social benefits of English Catholic schools

Abstract

In recent years, the social benefits (or otherwise) of faith-based schools within the state-maintained system have become a matter for public discussion. Following the introduction of a new statutory duty placed on the governing bodies of maintained schools in England under section 38 of the Education and Inspections Act 2006 to promote community cohesion, inspectors from the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) have been required since September 2008 to make judgements on how well schools meet their new responsibilities. The published data from the first three full years of inspections show the Catholic sector, in both primary and secondary phases, to be more effective in this aspect of their work than other maintained schools. The significance of the findings is explored and areas for further research suggested.

Keywords:

• community cohesion
• school inspection
• Catholic
• leadership
• management

Notes on contributor

Dr Andrew Morris is the former Director of the Centre for Christian Education at Liverpool Hope University, UK and has published widely in the field of Catholic Education Studies.

Notes

1. It is quite surprising that there has been little comment about these findings in the media. It is even more surprising that they were ignored in the House of Lords debate on 20 July 2011 on an amendment to the Education Bill 2011 made by the vice-chair of the All Party Parliamentary Humanist Group, Baronesss Flather, and supported by Lord Lucas (Hansard 2011). In speaking to her amendment, Baroness Flather argued ‘We need to know whether faith schools in particular are encouraging community cohesion. One can be faithful to one's faith, but community cohesion is for all of us, of whatever faith we are. I would have thought that that was an integral and important part of any faith school. I am not speaking about Church of England schools’ bishops, because they are very good; I do not have much of a problem with them’ (Col GC 484). Lord McAvoy, the lone voice opposing her arguments, while remarking that it would be invidious for Ofsted to report the community cohesion promoted by some faith schools and not others, suggested that her amendment ‘shows deep paranoia and suspicion about Catholic schools that I just do not get’ (Col. GC 485). However, although he gave some examples of good practice by Catholic schools in rebuttal of her arguments, he did not point to the inspection evidence.

2. Judgements are valid if the accurately reflect what is actually achieved and provided by the school and reliable if they are based on a consistent application of the criteria in the inspection schedule. Gilroy and Wilcox (1997) argue, among other things, that the inspectors’ observational statements, which provide the data on which their consensual judgements are made, are inevitably conditioned by a particular theoretical or conceptual framework. Consequently, there can always be different interpretations of the ‘same’ school. They also comment that the inspection process is much closer to a (very brief and fleeting) anthropological exercise than a scientific collection of consistent, verifiable and objective data about what is happening in a school throughout an academic year and, therefore, supposedly objective factual data are being used to provide the basis for judgements of the complex social situation of teaching which means that the subtleties of inter-personal relationships within the school are being ignored. Similar critical views about the inspection process, although not necessarily expressed in academic language, can be found in recent Select Committee Reports (see, for example, Hansard 2010) and parliamentary debates (see, for example, Hansard 2011).

3. The overall findings, although based on no more than a consensus view of the inspectors’ partial observations of some of the events/activities taking place in a school during less than 5 of the 190 days of an academic year, represent what political and policy authorities take to be a description of the accurate and incontrovertible qualities of the school.

4. But see the criticism of this research in Grace (2009, 495–503).