Why Gillian Keegan is right to scrap the free school cap

The other day a nice Albanian builder came round. He was in an upbeat mood because his son had been admitted to Cardinal Vaughan, a London school for which the optimum Ofsted rating of ‘outstanding’ probably doesn’t suffice.

The school has got one of the best heads in England in Paul Stubbings, a choir, the Schola, which is- as excellent as any in the country and a reputation for tough discipline and good pastoral care which draws parents like bees to a jam pot. The upshot is, as the nice builder observed, there were 1,000 applicants for that year’s places. Now, he wasn’t religious himself, from a Muslim family in Kosovo, but his wife was Polish and Catholic. Their son had been to a good neighbourhood Catholic primary school and had now hit the educational jackpot – admission is, except for music, by ballot.

Now the Vaughan would still be pulling in all these applicants regardless of whether there’s a change in the rules governing free schools in the near future. Gillian Keegan, the Education Secretary, herself the product of a Catholic school, plans to allow schools of a religious character to admit all their pupils from that religion in future, rather just half. That was the restriction that the Lib Dems insisted on during the Coalition government when there was a push to expand the number of free schools. But the Catholic Church wasn’t going to accept a system which could mean turning away up to half the Catholic applicants to the schools it runs, so it declined to take part. A win for the Lib Dems then.

Today’s announcement by the Department of Education reverses that and is unlikely to be opposed by Labour; Bridget Philipson is also a product of a Catholic school. It is, however, opposed by the teaching unions: Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union, said they were worried that removing the cap is ‘an unnecessary and potentially retrograde step’.

Well, there’s nothing retrograde about an expansion in the number of good schools. Catholic schools are, by and large, pretty good, and some are very good. They account for just under 10 per cent of the school population in England and Wales. Figures from the Catholic education service showed that just under a fifth of their pupils are from deprived background, significantly more than the 12.8 per cent national average. Ethnic minorities make up some 45 per cent of the intake, way more than the national average of 37.4 per cent – and this is even more true in Wales. So if parents are looking for a Catholic school it’s not to get away from immigrants or to mix with the prosperous. As the Albanian builder and his Polish wife might point out, the children of non-English parents make up an awful lot of the cohort.

But having a school that’s mostly Catholic does make a difference to the ethos and atmosphere. You can hold a Nativity play at primary level or a Passion play at Easter without having to fend off secularist parents complaining that it’s not inclusive, or school heads anticipating their objections. You can have a statue of Our Lady in the grounds and a procession today to put flowers before it (May is, for Catholics, the month of Mary) without the non-Catholics sniggering. You can have prayers at the start of the school day without shouty female columnists sounding off about it (how bad is it to say the Lord’s Prayer?). You can celebrate saints’ days and feast days like the Assumption or Pentecost (Whitsun).

Actually, once, in normal schools you could do many of these things without raising objections because so many people were default Anglicans, but you can’t any more. So if Catholic schools give preference to Catholic applicants, that’s reasonable, even if it means that London churches are bolstered by opportunists sucking up to their parish priests in order to get a letter for the school documenting their mass-going.

Some of the objection, I think, arises from the weaselly designation of the schools as ‘faith-based’. God, how I hate the ‘faith’ designation as a catchall for anything religious. If the BBC and news outlets could be persuaded to describe these schools as ‘church and other faith-based schools’ then we might be reminded that they’re Christian too.

Gillian Keegan is doing the education sector a service in allowing Catholic schools to expand by lifting this cap. It’s just a pity it took until five minutes before the next election to do it.