Is the writing on the wall for religious education?

Published on Wednesday 3 May 2006 00:53

IN 1918, the Scottish Roman Catholic hierarchy either made a pact with the Devil or planted one of the longest-fused timebombs in history. I'll leave it to readers to choose which. In that year, the largely impoverished sector of 226 voluntary Roman Catholic schools was transferred to the control of local authorities, then bodies much more influenced by the Presbyterian Church of Scotland than now.

There have always been rumours about the politics of the transfer. Some say that Scottish Catholics opposed it but were nudged towards it by Rome, which could see no other way of obtaining adequate public funding for the schools. It is not clear why a voluntary-aided arrangement, on English lines, was set aside in favour of the solution chosen - unique in Europe - of almost total integration with the mainstream system.

Of course, the Catholics negotiated safeguards: the hierarchy was to have the right to approve all teachers in Catholic schools "as to religious belief and character"; there was to be Catholic control of religious education in Catholic schools; the Church was to be represented on education committees in all areas where Catholic schools were transferred.

These safeguards were never going to be sufficient to face challenges presented by a public sector education system becoming increasingly secularised. Indeed, the only surprise, in retrospect, is that the timebomb took 88 years to explode and that the instrument of the explosion should not be the Scottish Parliament or any politician, but an employment tribunal. In the case of McNab v Glasgow City Council, the tribunal decided David McNab, a teacher of maths at St Paul's RC High, had been discriminated against in not being considered for the post of Principal Teacher (Pastoral Care) because he was an atheist. The city council relied on an agreement between the old Strathclyde Region and Catholic Church that certain promoted posts in "sensitive subjects" in the secondary sector should be reserved for Catholics. The tribunal decided this had no legal standing.

Historically, the Catholic sector always had difficulty staffing its secondary schools with Catholic teachers. In the years after 1918, the problem was most acute in the east of Scotland, where the limited Catholic population simply did not produce enough teachers to staff the schools. However, since the Second World War, the recruitment difficulty has spread to the west of Scotland heartlands. Since the hierarchy could not live with Catholic schools being less well staffed than other schools, and since such a position was unacceptable to local authorities, a policy of "default approval" was operated by local authority staffing departments. Unless the Catholic representative on the education committee actively objected to an appointment, the appointment was made and the appointee deemed approved. Non-Catholics appointed in this way were entitled to assume they were eligible for promotion within the school.

It turned out that the detail of the law about approval was unhelpful to the hierarchy, despite a change in wording in the 1970s in the wake of a controversial case in Dundee. The vetting process, if it takes place, applies only once to any teacher in any one school. After that, a teacher's belief or lifestyle may change and there is no effective action the hierarchy can take.

The Catholic Church, which sold most of its rights over its schools in 1918, must have had some inkling of how things were likely to go and cannot now complain when the chickens come home to roost. In response to the McNab decision, Michael McGrath, the director of the Scottish Catholic Education Service, tried to move the battle to the primary sector. He argues that, as each primary teacher covers the whole curriculum including religious education, all teachers in Catholic primary schools should be practising Catholics. Sorry, Michael, but the 1918 safeguards, with all their weaknesses and loopholes, apply to primary schools as much as to secondary.

Indeed, the great majority of schools transferred in 1918 were primaries. Furthermore, a leading employment lawyer has said discrimination on the grounds of religious belief is only possible where such belief is "a genuine and determining occupational requirement" (GOR), and this couldn't be sustained in the case of a primary teacher who spends the greater part of teaching time on mainstream subjects.

The Catholic Church endorsed all parts of the 5-14 curriculum except religious and moral education, where it substituted its own guidelines. There is no Catholic curriculum for maths, language, environmental studies or expressive arts. Arguments about a different overall ethos in Catholic schools are weakened by the enrolment - not resisted and often encouraged by the Church - of non-Catholic pupils. We are quite close, in some parts of Western Scotland, to a Church of England school scenario where non-Catholic parents enrol children in Catholic schools for social reasons or even on grounds of geographical convenience. Many would welcome this as evidence of crumbling sectarian boundaries, but the real winner is secularism and the presence of a non-Catholic pupil body is not conducive to upholding the identity of Catholic education.

I am sometimes asked why, as an advocate of choice and specialisation in education, I cannot regard Catholic education as a legitimate choice by parents. The problem is that placing a child in a Catholic school is not an educational choice, at least not in Scotland. The differences between the educational programmes of Catholic and non-Catholic schools are marginal. They both offer the 5-14 curriculum and national testing, prepare pupils for the same external exams, all send their most ambitious children to secular colleges and universities.

The religious faith of parents, which may or may not survive in the children, is not a specialism like music, drama, sport, science or modern languages. There is no vocational element in Catholicism, except for a tiny minority who might wish to become priests. The society in which pupils will live and work is more and more secular, one in which religious faith is essentially a private matter with no bearing on a person's status as a citizen.

In such circumstances, to put forward faith-based education as a free market choice is to run in the face of all the facts. Those who argue for this are harking back to a divisive tribal tradition that has no place in a modern western society. The state has no obligation to provide a separate system of publicly-funded schools to cater for a diminishing demand that has no educational rationale. In many parts of the country, joint campuses are a not-so-subtle indication of where the politicians think we are going on this issue. Let's go the whole hog and remove religious affiliation from the system, while providing for an increasing level of genuine educational choice and specialism.