THE 12 J u l y 1975

The international Catholic weekly 25p

P sychiatric prisons in the USSR: Janis Sapiets The ordination o f women: a report on the Anglican Synod by P e ter H ebblethw a ite Vatican docum ent on ecum enical collaboration G ilbert’s Churchill review ed by Andrew

The hierarchy and our schools

A crisis is blowing up in the educational field and it particularly affects the Catholic community, some sections of which are indignant with the hierarchy for falling in with government policy. There is a failure here to take into account the very real economic considerations. In his April Budget the Chancellor reduced educational spending by £76 million. Cuts in building were announced affecting primary, secondary and tertiary education. Many colleges of education were asked to close, to prepare to close, or drastically to change their courses. Drops in local authority capitation allowances next year were threatened. Teacher redundancy and unemployment for college and university leavers—hitherto the vaguest of possibilities— became probabilities. Even the cuts in money for education were not so savage as those made elsewhere in public spending. The prospective decline in the school population next year, the need to save public money, an unexpected extra £1,000 million award for teachers’ pay, the increased cost of things educational—all these accounted for the harsh measures. Gone were all the brave hopes of the 1960s: of improvements in pupil-teacher ratios, in the equipment and appearance and design of schools, which the population decline was supposed to allow.

Now educational spending is to be cut even more ruthlessly. The Department of Education and Science contingency plans for the next few years and promised crisisinduced cuts for 1976-77 call for a nil growth rate until at least 1980. About £520 million will come off the education budget. In all this there has been the usual appalling lack of consultation of local authorities, teachers’ and students’ organisations, and other bodies: an insouciance characteristic of the des (one of the most self-sufficient of government departments) under Labour and Conservative administrations alike. Cuts have to be made; schools and colleges have to close: there is little argument about that. But there is a question of priorities: of which sectors to hurt first and most.

The effective future of the non-fee-paying schools in which the great majority of citizens, and of course Catholics, will be educated is immensely important. As far as the Catholic system is concerned, the hierarchy and the Catholic Education Council have opted for the national pattern. That is no trahison des évêques: they had to do it for two main reasons: they hadn’t the money or the prospect of the money to do anything else. They were anxious not to perpetuate anything which sorely and unnecessarily divided the Catholic from the general community. Less than onethird of the direct grant schools (all of which are to be abolished as such) are Catholic. The bishops cannot be expected to demand for their Church the maintenance of a type of school disappearing from national life, and to demand (for that is what it would mean) general lay contributions to support 54 schools which are very unevenly distributed. If there is a readiness privately to endow and fund those that choose independence, that is a different matter. In the present educational austerity and confusion, some parents, teachers and religious orders are able and prepared to make sacrifices to support independent schools serving a variety of ends including, one hopes, educational experimentation. Long may they continue in this line.

What we must ask is: Does the abolition of the direct grant schools mean any reduction of the inalienable rights of the individual, the family and the Church? In view of the persistence of independent schools (as the nation appears to wish), the answer seems to be No.

But the lack of government consultation of the governing bodies and staffs of direct grant schools and even— astonishingly—the local authorities with whom they are