‘Catholic schooling with a twist?’: a study of faith schooling in the Republic of Ireland during a period of detraditionalisation

ABSTRACT

The role of faith-based schools is increasingly debated within a context of school reform, rights and plurality in multi-ethnic societies. The Catholic schooling system in the Irish Republic (always referred to as Ireland in the text) represents an interesting case internationally because of the extent to which Catholic education is structurally embedded as normative across the education system. Yet, Ireland is in a process of detraditionalisation and wider societal change. Drawing on Bourdieu and Bernstein, and a mixed methodological study of Catholic secondary schools, the article presents a typology of Catholic schooling in transition. This identifies a continuum of Catholicity among the study schools that is mediated by dynamics of social class in an increasingly competitive and diverse system. It is argued this has implications for considering the role of a recontextualised model of Catholic faith schooling, underpinned by principles of social justice in a multicultural and more secularly oriented society.

KEYWORDS :

• Catholic schooling
• Bernstein
• Bourdieu
• culture
• leadership

Notes

1. Bourdieu (1991) uses the term religious capital in a narrow sense as religious language and access to the sacraments and sacred texts. Other authors – especially Grace (2002, 2010) – have built on this and prefer the term spiritual capital.

2. On the basis of gender, school composition (single-sex girls, single-sex boys, coeducational), school socio-economic status and geographic location.

3. While there were no strictly Faith-Residual schools among the case-study schools, elements of this school type were discernible among the participants in the wider interviews of school principals. (The sampling of the case-study schools was completed prior to the typology’s development.)

4. A key recommendation of the state-sponsored Forum on School Patronage (Coolahan et al., 2012) that some primary schools under Catholic patronage be divested to cater for a more diverse faith/belief population has met with considerable resistance at local level with very few schools being divested.

5. A new school admissions bill is currently being proposed that would require schools to give priority to local children rather than to those of the faith denomination of the school, which would be more akin to the recontextualised Catholic school identity model.