Freelance Report: Winter 2025
Havering Deanery Catholic Schools Conference
This winter I’ve continued to be able to devote one day a week to freelance work. This has mostly been giving keynote addresses for Catholic schools and multi academy trusts. My freelance work in the last few months has taken me from Newham to Romford, from York to St Alban’s, plus a very enjoyable visit to the annual conference of school leaders of Arundel and Brighton Diocese at East Horsley.
In Romford in February, I spoke to 500 staff from the Catholic schools of Havering Deanery during their INSET day conference. It was a pleasure to hear from Sian Thomas-Cullinan from Caritas Brentwood. I would encourage all Catholic schools to make contact with their local Caritas agency, or local Catholic charities. We are working for the same mission and we have so much to learn from each other.
After my keynote, Sian, used Slido.com to ask the participants what words or phrases had stood out for them? I was delighted when the keywords on the word cloud were Love, Solidarity and Community, as well as God is Love. If that’s what people took away from my talk, then I’m more than happy.
At the beginning of my keynote, I asked the conference - as I often do these days - to discuss what they thought was the distinctive purpose of a Catholic school today. I stress “today” because the Church’s vision for Catholic education has shifted over the years.
From 1850 until the 1960s, you could say that the purpose of a Catholic school was to educate Catholic children, especially poor Catholics from the east end of our towns and cities. The purpose was to give these Catholic children the dignity of an education, so that they would know their faith, go to church and become good citizens.
All of that still holds, but at Vatican II the vision shifted to a broader horizon. It was about educating Catholic children - and other children, who were explicitly welcomed in Catholic schools - but the purpose now was not just to be good citizens, but to be positive agents of change to build a better world. The Catholic school should be characterised by an atmosphere of love, like the family at its best, and in this loving environment young people would flourish and grow in values and skills for the building up of the Kingdom of God.
The most recent document from the Congregation for Catholic Education, The Identity of the Catholic School, makes this connection very clear when it says: “The school must be the first social setting, after the family, in which the individual has a positive experience of social and fraternal relationships as a precondition for becoming a person capable of building a society based on justice and solidarity, which are prerequisites for a peaceful life among individuals and peoples” (19).
If you’d like to make contact to enquire about a booking for me to speak at a conference or an INSET day, please get in touch.