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.
There’s nothing retrograde about an expansion in the number of good schools
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.
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