Renewing spiritual capital: the National Retreat for Catholic Headteachers and the National School of Formation: the impact on Catholic headteachers in the UK

Abstract

This paper draws on the findings of a small-scale research study based on interviews with twenty serving Catholic headteachers from the primary and secondary phases and from the maintained and independent sectors. The focus of the study was to explore the concept of ‘spiritual capital’ among the headteachers and to evaluate the impact of two major new initiatives in England and Wales: the National Retreat for Catholic Headteachers and the National School of Formation. Gerald Grace and others have raised concerns about the depletion of spiritual capital among Catholic headteachers as more lay people take on the responsibility and the Catholic culture which sustained such capital continues to decline. My initial conclusions are that Catholic headteachers are still drawing on spiritual capital from their own resources and the wider community, but these resources are maintaining rather than developing or deepening their spiritual lives. The new initiatives have had a significantly positive effect on the spiritual resources they draw upon in their role as Catholic headteachers.

Keywords:

• leadership formation
• spiritual capital
• vocation
• mission
• transformation
• renewing spiritual capital

Notes on contributor

Raymond Friel is the General Secretary of the Catholic Independent Schools’ Conference based in the UK. He was a headteacher in Catholic state secondary schools in England from 2002 to 2016. He is the author of a number of books on Catholic leadership and spirituality, including The Revolution of Tenderness: Being a Catholic in Today’s Church (Redemptorist Publications, 2016).

Notes

1. The ‘formation of the heart’ model of spiritual formation for teachers has only been suggested in outline in the 1988 document, The Religious Dimension of Education in a Catholic School. There has been no subsequent detail from the Congregation for Catholic Education about the contents of such a programme.

2. Marcus Stock, in Christ at the Centre, states that

the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales have collectively mandated that in Catholic schools certain key posts carry a requirement that they are held by ‘practising Catholics’. These are the posts of Headteacher or Principal, Deputy Headteacher or Vice-Principal, and Head or Co-ordinator or Religious Education. Additionally, there are other key leadership posts which directly affect the Catholic mission of a school. These too may be required to be filled by ‘practising Catholics’ with the requisite professional skills.

3. The pedagogy of the National School of Formation is derived from the 1982 document from the Congregation for Catholic Education, Lay Catholic in Schools: Witnesses to the Faith. There is tension within this document between the pedagogy it proposes for Catholic schools and the content of formation programmes it proposes for Catholic educators. The proposed pedagogy for pupils emphasises personal contact, openness to dialogue, and above all the witness to the faith seen in the teacher. The proposed content of formation programmes for teachers, on the other hand, emphasises the transmission of knowledge, which the document says is not the main purpose of Catholic education. The National School of Formation took its inspiration from the pedagogy of Lay Catholics in Education, which in turn drew its inspiration from Vatican II, especially the documents on the laity in the modern world. Hence, the programme featured a non-systematic exposure to scripture scholars and Catholic thinkers and social activists. A key feature of the programme was the opportunity for ‘immersion visits’ to projects of transformation on the margins of society. Visits included Fatima House in Birmingham, a residential centre for destitute female asylum seekers; the Lalley Centre in Birmingham, a day centre for destitute people; and the Corrymeela Centre in Northern Ireland, a residential centre dedicated to peace and reconciliation since the mid-1960s. Delegates from the NSF visited these places and encountered the witness and praxis of the staff and volunteers as well as the exposed needs of the marginalised who came for help. This had a much deeper impact on the delegates than textual study. In October 2017, a group of eight delegates from the NSF will visit Manila in the Philippines and see at first hand projects of transformation in a developing country.

4. The reading and rereading of written survey responses ‘to allow themes to emerge from the material, rather than rigidly imposing a structure on them from the outset’ (Stuart-Buttle 2017, 175).

5. The five patterns of discourse identified by Grace (2002) were: a discourse of the sacred and of faith leadership; a discourse of morality; a discourse of the option for the poor; a discourse of school effectiveness; a discourse of management and markets.

6. State schools in England are inspected by Ofsted, the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills. Ofsted is a non-ministerial department of government. Independent schools are mostly inspected by The Independent Schools Inspectorate or ISI, a body approved for the purposes of inspection under the Education Act 2002. Both state and independent Catholic schools are subject to canonical inspections by the diocese, sometimes referred to as Section 48 inspections, after the relevant section of the Education Act 2005.

7. According to the Digest of 2016 Census Data for Schools and Colleges in England published by the Catholic Education Service, 68.2% of pupils in maintained schools and colleges in England were Catholic, compared to 36.1% in the independent sector; and 62.3% and 41.9% of teachers in primary and secondary schools respectively were Catholic, compared to 35.4% in independent schools.

8. The pupil premium is additional funding for publicly funded schools in England to raise the attainment of disadvantaged pupils of all abilities and to close the gaps between them and their peers.

9. Adverts were placed in the Catholic press in the UK for the spiritual guides. There was then a selection process supervised by the Society of Jesus and EducareM, the Catholic educational charity. Those who were chosen were trained by the Society of Jesus at St. Beuno’s College in Wales. As well as this new cohort of spiritual guides, experienced spiritual guides were also used.