Q
Quatsch
Guest
I was appalled as I read this article. This school needs our prayers!
Keeping the faith at a Catholic state school
Keeping the faith at a Catholic state school
You know you are not inside a bog standard comprehensive when you walk into a Latin lesson at Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School and all the pupils spring respectfully to their feet.
Then there is the strong sense of Catholic devotion. The rosary and Angelus are recited every day. At mass, the boys and girls — who are admitted into the sixth form — kneel on the bare floor. They are encouraged, though not compelled, to attend confession. Discipline is strict, though the school is certainly not solemn.
The teachers josh around with the boys and girls in the corridors between lessons but there is no doubt who is in charge. Bad behaviour and slacking at homework are not tolerated. The teachers use unfashionable words such as “punishment”.
Overwhelmed by applications for its prized places, the Vaughan decided to demand proof of levels of Catholic adherence beyond the diocese’s standard requirement that children be baptised Catholics whose parents regularly attend mass.
Many parents believe the diocese has deliberately paralysed the governing body so that it can impose a liberal outsider on the school as the next headmaster and begin to purge the Vaughan of its conservative Catholicism and unpick its unapologetic academic elitism.
“The diocese clearly wants to change the school,” says Sir Adrian Fitzgerald, an outspoken sixth baronet who divides his time between west London and his ancestral home in Ireland. “Why are they picking on this school when they should be worrying about failing schools in London?” He believes that the officials in WDES are “wagging the dog” and persuading the bishops to impose conventional Left-wing ideology on the schools.