Inviting Parents to Walk on Water

Economic freedom is great. Everyone is free to dine at the Ritz. Or buy a Rolls-Royce. Or go to the school of their parents' choosing.

My friends in the church music group have children at secondary (high) school or approaching that age, so the merits and defects of local schools are never far from their minds or words. One of the families is an exemplar of British middle class strategies for working the education system. They moved from Reading into the neighbouring school district of Wokingham, which has some of the best state schools in the country.

Wokingham's Maiden Erlegh School has achieved the highest honours that any British school can aspire to; local real estate agents advertise houses as being "in the Maiden Erlegh catchment area" and it has inflated house prices in its area. Thus it has a double appeal to the middle classes obsessed with schooling and house prices. Unfortunately, it is so successful that many of the teachers cannot afford to live in the catchment area of their own school.

But Wokingham offers a real choice to its parents and so my friends' daughter goes to the very highly regarded all-girls Holt School. Sadly, the all-boys Forest School is not held in quite the same esteem, so they are preparing to bite the fee paying bullet and send their son to Blue Coat School or the Salesians in Farnborough, 20 miles to the south. There is the Oratory School at Woodcote, only 8 miles to the north. The Oratory has huge prestige, dating back to its association with John Cardinal Newman. But it has equally huge fees, double those of the Salesians.

What if you want a Catholic education and cannot afford the fees for the Salesians (boys) or St Joseph's Convent School (girls)? Well, I'm afraid you have a horrible moral quandary. On the west side of Reading there is the mainly-state-funded Blessed Hugh Faringdon School, named in memory of the last abbot of Reading Abbey, decapitated under Henry 8th. But BHF could never be accused of inflating local house prices. It is not quite one of those local schools where, as I said earlier, middle class parents would rather eat their own livers than send their children. But its exam performance is, er, average or slightly worse and it has had a run of bad local media publicity. There is plainly a rough element among the male pupils and there have been incidents of threatened mass brawls with pupils at Prospect College, another dodgy local school. Worse still, there was a series of regular fist fights in a local road between BHF pupils with an audience of dozens of other BHF pupils.

So it is hardly surprising that many Catholic parents vote with the limited choice they are allowed by the Local Education Authority and send their children to the very good Little Heath School. Another of the music group parents sends his two older girls to BHF and puts a brave face on it, saying it is a good school. But his very bright older daughter has plainly lost out by going to BHF rather than to a seriously academic school where she would be properly stretched. A maths lesson was typical of what bright pupils have to endure within the "comprehensive" state system, Catholic or otherwise. She had quickly finished her 20 questions and was told not to go ahead while her luckless teacher helped those pupils still struggling with questions 9 or 11.......

I felt extra unhappy in view of reports from a teacher at BHF about the bureaucracy in a not particularly large school. It has a head teacher (Principal), a deputy head and FOUR assistant heads. What on earth do these four assistants do? In my schooldays, even big schools managed fine with a Head and a Deputy Head. These "Assistants" do not have responsibilty for particular subjects; there are separate subject Heads - Head of English, Head of Maths, etc. On top of that, there are separate Heads of Year - Year 7 (11/12 year old), Year 8 (12/13 year old), etc. The only activity that my friend could think these "Assistants" performed was driving BMWs with personalised number plates. Like the National Health Service doctors portrayed in the ludicrous Michael Moore's "Sicko", it is the service providers, not the luckless customers, who benefit from State services.

Well, what alternative do faithful Catholics have? There is always choice for the heroic, like the father I mentioned who cleaned toilets at midnight to send his daughter to a private school. But it is obviously grossly unjust that people should be forced to make such choices. Do you work a third or fourth job to pay the fees for your other children? If every local Catholic parent had real freedom of choice, BHF would almost certainly collapse in a week as parents sent their children to really desirable schools, secular or religious. You feel that the current unhappy compromises might be worthwhile if Catholic schools played a successful role in handing on the faith. But the statistics are grim; estimates of lapsation rates vary from 85 to 95%. You might as well choose the best secular school available.

It is not just that the quality of religious instruction at Catholic schools has been questioned repeatedly and searchingly over the past 35 years. The best school can do only so much without parental support. I went to a Christmas concert at a local highly regarded Catholic primary (elementary) school in 2001. A friend was carless for a day and needed a ride for him and his little girl, who was performing in the concert. The concert was wonderfully organized and there was hardly a dry eye in the school hall as the host of angelic 6 year olds sang "Away in a manger". Then the head teacher stood up at the end, thanked every one graciously, and urged parents to take their children to Mass at least once over the Christmas period. Talk about a let down....At one time it would have been taken for granted that almost all parents of children in a Catholic school would have taken their children to Mass every Sunday, not just (maybe) at Christmas, plus the occasional hatch, match and dispatch. Now we had an excellent head teacher proclaiming publicly to the little children that the vast majority of parents were non-practising.

Other factors obviously weigh heavily. A Vatican document noted one subversive difficulty some years ago when discussing the selection, formation and education of the new generation of young priests. How wholeheartedly will any eager young priest catechise his flock on true Catholic morality when his parents were divorced, or his younger sister is cohabiting with her boyfriend, or his older brother is shacked up with his boyfriend? This obvious inhibition similarly afflicts Catholic secular teachers of religious instruction. Even if the teacher is personally comfortable with Catholic teaching, how can he/she extoll the sanctity of life-long marriage when up to a third of the pupils have divorced or separated parents, with one or both parents further involved in second families?

British Catholic parents face a lose-lose-lose situation, whereas most British parents face only a lose situation. You pay part of the cost of state funded Catholic schools (through a levy on parish funds to which you pay from already taxed income) as well as paying for lousy secular State schools. AND your kids will probably lapse anyway.

Even making the huge financial sacrifice to send your daughter to the most traditional "Catholic" private school in town, St Joseph's Convent School, might not be all you perceive. According to some reports the intake at St Jo's is nearly 50% Muslim. The local immigrant population understandably gag at the prospect of their daughters going to some of the appalling State schools with their thuggish male students, who fully follow the advice of one exceptionally vile British Government minister of the 1960s: "The permissive society is the civilized society". St Jo's is very conveniently only a short walk from the heavily Muslim area of East Reading, with its Islamic dress shop, halal food shops and the site for the second new Mosque in town. It is only 300 yards from the existing mosque, in a converted and extended house. And, to judge from its ceaseless advertising, St Jo's is an educational business like any other which needs paying customers to survive. It plainly cannot survive on the patronage of 100% committed Catholic families alone. But how "Catholic" is it going to be eventually? You have a son???? Well, you're totally out of luck as regards Catholic private education in town - see Salesians and Oratory above.....

Britain in recent years has moved much closer to the American legal culture where you can sue anyone for anything. So far I have not heard of anyone suing their Local Education Authority for forcing their child to go to a substandard school. But the day cannot be far off. The law says that you have to provide a suitable education for your child up to age 16. This could be private or home schooling, but for the majority it plainly means going to a school provided by the Local Education Authority. And so many LEA schools are officially recognised as substandard that tens of thousands of children are forced to start at such schools every September. This is such a monstrous outrage that I am surprised it seems to have excited so little public anger, apart from the annual grumblings and protests in the local media from parents whose children lost out on a coveted place.

An obvious way out would be a voucher system, where every parent got a voucher for each child to the value of the state expenditure per pupil, to be spent on the school of their choice. I am reminded of the satirical TV show around 1968, where the jester explained that, in view of the soaring defence bill, the Government was going to give everyone £30 and tell them to defend themselves. Obviously all the current entrenched interests (e.g. teachers' unions) would be totally opposed to such a move, as would much of the British commentariat, many of whom rival the above Government Minister in their moral depravity.

The numerous objections to vouchers deserve serious thought. It might discourage efficiency, as every school would get £x per pupil and would feel entitled to spend up to that limit. It would involve extra expenditure if parents were allowed to offset vouchers against their existing private school fees. It would encroach on the independence of many existing private schools as they became partially dependent on state funding. Given the unsavoury nature of so many of our politicians, I would not trust them to run a burger stall, much less have any influence over the lives of children. Also it might entrench cultural divides as parents sent their children to Muslim/Sikh/Hindu schools on top of the existing Anglican, Catholic and Jewish schools which already receive State funding. In the short term there would likely be extensive disruption as the worst schools closed and new ones sprung up like mushrooms.

But it could be a prodigiously liberating move for most parents and pupils. It would create a much wider educational market. Just about every consumer good we enjoy at present (tea, coffee, cars, TVs) was once a rare luxury available only to a tiny fraction of the population. The TV sets at the start of the BBC TV service in 1936 had seven inch screens and cost £70, i.e. six months pay for a London bus driver - about the same fraction of his pay as private school fees would cost a bus driver today if he wanted to send only one child to a private school. Plainly a similar consumer revolution is long overdue in provision of public goods as has happened for "exotic" foods like tea and coffee. One observer noted that Britain is well provided with BMW/Mercedes class private schools. What we need is far more Toyota/Honda class schools within reach of the hard-working majority. (The car reliability surveys are nearly always topped by two manufacturers and it ain't BMW or Mercedes).

Sweden has made one of the first serious moves in providing education vouchers in the 1990s and, as a result, a whole new market in education provision has exploded in a country which previously had very few private schools. The size of some of these new Swedish private high schools is surprisingly small by British or US standards - around 180 pupils. The furnishings and equipment are Spartan, but you do not need fancy equipment for an effective education - just dedicated teachers, committed parents and hard working students. This system has been so successful so quickly in Sweden that it may become official Conservative Party policy soon. But I would be amazed to see its actual nationwide implementation in less than 10 to 20 years.

The possibilities in a liberated education market could be extraordinary for Catholic parents. It would suddenly be possible to have small, but genuinely Catholic schools with a committed parental backing for committed Catholic teachers. Even if the voucher rules prohibited "top up" fee contributions directly from parents, there would be countless other ways to gain money; business sponsorship, fund raising, National Lottery grants, educational trust grants, parish support and much more. The outstanding Maiden Erlegh school mentioned above invites parents to join in work parties at the school, doing repairs, redecoration and so on. This frees up resources to spend on books, laboratory equipment, etc. In effect they are soliciting fee paying, in kind rather than cash, within a state school; a small Catholic community school would probably do even better. Other local schools at present obviously don't even try the Maiden Erlegh approach - they would probably have a better response if they invited parents to walk on water.