For critics of state education, locked in combat with the teaching unions, it is easy to overlook the fact that some comprehensives do an outstanding job. One example in my neck of the woods is Cardinal Vaughan, a Roman Catholic boys’ school. Last year, 90 per cent of its pupils got five good GCSEs, making it the best performer in Kensington and Chelsea, and this year 13 of its pupils have been offered places at Oxford and Cambridge. And Vaughan is completely non-selective, beyond the requirement that its pupils have to be Catholics. It has a fair banding policy whereby a quarter of each year group are in the top ability band, half in the middle and a quarter in the bottom.
Of course, like every successful comprehensive, the Vaughan has its critics. Opponents of faith schools claim it only achieves these results because it admits an above-average number of middle-class children. The argument isn’t that Catholics are more likely to be middle class, but that the way in which Catholicity is measured creates an obstacle that well-off parents, whether genuinely religious or not, can more easily overcome.
What’s unusual about Vaughan is that one of its fiercest opponents is the Roman Catholic Diocese of Westminster, the body that oversees the school. In 2009, following a disagreement with the governing body, the diocese lodged a complaint with the school’s adjudicator, the bureaucrat tasked with enforcing the School Admissions Code. Being an outstanding school, the Vaughan is heavily over-subscribed and, like many faith schools, it ranked its applicants by awarding them points according to the depth of their religious commitment. The diocese objected that this amounted to a form of ‘social selection’ — that it created a bias in favour of middle-class parents — and asserted its right to be the sole arbiter of how Catholicity should be defined.
The diocese also complained that the school set aside 10 per cent of its places each year for those applicants who exhibited a particular aptitude for music. This is actually permitted by the code, but the diocese objected to it on principle, arguing that it had an adverse affect on neighbouring schools. To prove that Vaughan was in breach of the code on this point as well, the diocese claimed that the test it used to determine an applicant’s musical aptitude — getting him or her to play an instrument — was yet another form of ‘social selection’.
The adjudicator partially upheld the complaint and, as a result, the Vaughan adopted a broader definition of Catholicity. Instead of religious points, applicants are now ranked according to how close they live to the school. The governors denied that the school was disproportionately middle-class to begin with and pointed out that this was an odd remedy for a maladie imaginaire, since the school is located in Holland Park.
An uneasy truce was declared, but the conflict flared up again last year when the Vaughan’s headmaster took early retirement on the grounds of ill health. Possibly because they were terrified that the governors would choose an independent-minded head who didn’t much care whether Vaughan’s success would have an adverse effect on other schools, the diocese managed to stuff the governing body with their preferred candidates, an act that was promptly challenged by the school’s five parent governors in the High Court. The court ruled in the diocese’s favour, but the parents appealed and they’re awaiting the verdict.
On the face of it, this seems like a straightforward case of tall-poppy syndrome, but it’s more complicated than that. The problem with placing a number of schools under the control of a single entity, whether a diocese or an LEA, is that the body in question will generally penalise its highest-achieving schools on the grounds that their success will handicap the others, particularly if they’re clustered together in a small area. Critics of state education imagine that schools like the Vaughan are punished for ideological reasons, when it’s actually just an inevitable consequence of the way the system is designed. The most reliable way to drive up standards is to allow for open competition. It’s why capitalist societies are so much more successful than socialist ones.
If the parent governors of the Vaughan win their case on appeal, they should immediately apply for academy status and, in that way, guarantee their future independence. The battle for control of Cardinal Vaughan is a perfect illustration of why the coalition’s education reforms are so urgently needed.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator
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