You Can Ignore the Archbishop

At least 21 Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of Birmingham are on record as ignoring the archbishop.

That takes some doing.

In June 2021, the archbishop requested “every Catholic Voluntary Aided school in the Archdiocese of Birmingham to join a multi academy company of Catholic schools by September 2022, or to be in the process of doing so by this time”.

Objective: 234 schools to be part of 15 Multi Academy Families of Schools.

However, those 15 families of MACs may now be/are being/are planned to be reduced in number, possibly to thirteen. Information is hard to come by from official sources.

Result: 145 schools have heeded the archbishop’s request.

These numbers may not be correct. Many of the official documents giving figures are not dated.

Requests to the Diocesan Education Service (DES) for accuracy or for information on progress against the objective are generally met with suspicion or silence.

Synodality a la Pope Francis does not sit easily in the corridors of the DES.

We know that 21 of the 68 schools inspected under the new Catholic Schools Inspection system between October 2022 and December 2023 are recorded as not belonging to any MAC.

That fact is on record.

This act of defiance/disobedience/lethargy/no rush to sign up/”it was only a request”, is recorded on Catholic Schools Inspection reports in the section “Information about the school”. When asked to name the “Multi-academy trust or company (if applicable)” the school has joined, 21 reports recorded “N/A”. Surely this should read "No", or "Ignored the instruction".

30% said "no".

That takes some doing.

There is no mention in the body of these reports that the school is ignoring the archbishop’s request.

There were no obvious consequences to their refusal to join up.

The grades awarded for the Catholic Life and Mission of the school are not affected in any way by the refusenik status of the schools. In fact, 3 schools were awarded a grade 1 for Overall effectiveness and 12 were given a grade 1 for Catholic Life and Mission.

Those grade 1's are like saying a cruise liner has been cleared as sea worthy even though its communication systems linking it with shore have been ripped out.

Threats of being stripped of the name Catholic, or being smote with great smites of biblical proportions are not invoked.

Not even a polite and convoluted recommendation along the lines of, ‘should look again at the possibility of re-walking the path to reconsidering the possibility of maybe revisiting, reviewing and re-examining the request of someone or other who may have been keen on the idea in favour of joining a MAC’ is allowed to besmirch the judgement that the school is a mighty example of a truly Catholic school – other than when ignoring the archbishop’s request.

Maybe the archbishop should have been advised to turn his ‘request’ into a ‘directive with consequences'.

The diocese of Lancaster could give practical guidance on that approach.

There appears to have been a problem with some schools not wanting to be academized.

To academise or not to academise. That was the question.

Actually, no, it wasn’t the question.

Why would you not make all your schools academies? The government website spells out (to them) the amazing benefits of the move. “Academies have much greater freedom in terms of curriculum, school times, term dates and most importantly can decide how to allocate funds”.

The "greater freedom" on times is of little use as a bribe.

Having your own curriculum is useful as long as you aren’t inspected against other criteria. Westminster diocese was more open, in a 'private letter', telling schols that being part of an academy stopped the LA from closing them in the event of falling rolls.

Did they actually write that?

That leaves the cash incentive.

In financial terms alone, academisation is worth it.

Who wouldn’t go for it?

The next question is the key one.

Why place all your academies into families of schools?

In bureaucratic and control terms, it makes sense, until you ask what is the basis on which the schools could be grouped in a family.

The rationale in Birmingham’s case seems to have been a geographical one. The key document here is the AA Route Planner.

Sounds like a plan. That is before you engage your brain and discard it as a half-baked plan. Has nothing been learned from what schools have been through in the past five years?

Catholic schools don't deserve such lazy thinking and lack of imagination.

That AA Route Planner model easily shifts across to a purely bureaucratic one when someone decides it would be easier to communicate, dominate and control thirteen instead of fifteen families.

Why stop at thirteen?

Why not go for twelve or seven, well recognised biblical numbers? 

But now you have to face the tough question of who the academisation movement was supposed to benefit.

Efficient bureaucracy does not figure much in the gospels. If anything, it is derided and dismissed.

Not a place Catholic schools would want to be.

You could leave each of your schools as a stand-alone academy. There are many of those around the country thriving, succeeding, enriching the lives of students and staff and making real contributions to the communities they serve.

Stand-alone is a non-starter in Catholic schools, predicated as they are on being part of the diocesan gospel mission to preach the gospel.

Some Trusts go for the grouping of multiple single semi-autonomous schools, ignoring the geographical, bureaucratic and stand-alone family models. They form associations where membership is dependent on an invitation to join. The member ship requirement is that each school shares and demonstrates their pursuit of the values of the whole group.

This model of group membership has been well and truly tested in the independent school sector over many years.

How about creating families on the basis of say,

1. their teaching or subject specialism

2. they are learning research schools

3. they train teachers

4. they serve a particular type of community

5. their unique contribution to serving the gospel mission of the Church in the archdiocesan plan.

How about families of schools 

i       that are ecumenical

ii      that work with PNEWs – Pupils Nobody Else Wants

iii     or are thoroughly hybrid school, responding to pupils and students who cannot attend school or have mental problems while being there. Such schools are already proposed in other parts of the country. We worked out three such schools would be enough to form a family across the archdiocese and serve young people – free of charge. 

In each of these families, geography and distance would not be issues but only factors to be addressed.

Even lazy thinkers could cope if given the steer by the DES.

Setting up families of schools across the stretch of the Birmingham archdiocese where each member school choses the family that most reflects who they are is not difficult.

The blueprints are already there.

Stop ignoring the archbishop. Make his idea worthy of the creativity of his teachers.

(c) Ted Dunphy

5.01.2024