According to the CES 2018 Census, there are currently 2,122 Catholic schools in England. Just over a quarter – 26% - are academies. We don’t have any figures on the numbers of Catholic academies which are in multi academy trusts, but the assumption is that any new academies or schools compelled to become an academy by an Academy Order if it is judged to be in special measures will join a MAT, since the DFE/RSC’s policy is no longer to allow any single academy converters. To become an academy, you need to find a MAT to join.

The Catholic figure is well below the national figure of 47% of schools which are academies. This is due largely to the different academy strategy pursued by the Catholic dioceses, with some still resisting and some embracing the programme.  Depending on where you sit in the debate, this is either a disadvantage, preventing any national planning and support, or a welcome drag on the wholesale rush into a programme which is a threat to the very notion of Catholic education.

I’d like to divide my comments into three sections

1.     A personal perspective on my involvement in a Catholic MAT

2.     An attempt to define the hallmarks of Catholic education, or more specifically, the Catholic school. If as the title of this conference suggests MATs are a threat to Catholic education then what is this “Catholic education” that is being threatened? If there is a risk, then what is it that is “at risk”? To what extent can we talk about Catholic education as a recognisably coherent project in this country given that individual bishops have so much say over policy and practice in their diocese and the national presence is largely focused on legal and political interface with the government of the day

3.      A version of a SWOT analysis in which I’ll comment on the strengths of a Catholic MAT when it works, the weaknesses in Catholic education which effective MATs might address, the opportunities for us if we pursue the setting up of MATs and finally the threats to mission integrity posed by the MAT model.

For thirty years I have worked in state-funded Catholic education as a teacher, senior leader, headteacher and executive headteacher. From 2016-2018 I served as the general secretary of the Catholic Independence Schools Conference and, since July 2018 I have served as the Chief Executive Officer of Plymouth CAST, a MAT of 33 primary schools, 2 secondaries and one nursery. All the Catholic schools in Plymouth diocese are in the MAT, apart from the two joint RC/CofE secondary schools. In the academic year 2016/17 Ofsted carried out batch inspections across the Trust and placed 5 schools in special measures with 11 requiring improvement. In September 2017, the Trust’s own evaluation found that a further 11 schools were ‘not good’ including schools previously judged as outstanding under older frameworks, so at that point 27 of the Trust’s 36 schools were not good.

In addition, the Trust self-referred to the Education and Skills Funding Agency due to its financial position and was served with a Financial Notice to Improve, which imposed a range of restrictions and monitoring on the Trust. Staff morale was low, pupil numbers were declining, results were not improving. What was at stake was not just the education of children in Plymouth Diocese – which was and remains the absolute priority – but the reputation of the Catholic Church in England to be able to manage this new type of educational provision.

It’s worth just adding at this point that in normal circumstances a MAT with this level of dysfunction would have been broken up by the Regional Schools Commissioner and the schools re-brokered into other Trusts. The reason that didn’t happen was the Memorandum of Understanding drawn up in April 2016 between the Catholic Education Service and the DFE with regards to academisation. The Church was adamant that whatever happened to its schools, their governance would always be in the control of the Catholic Church. The DFE agreed to this, presumably considering this a price worth paying to get Catholic schools into the academy system. It meant however that in the case of failure at scale, which was perhaps not envisaged in April 2016, the only option to improve a Trust was new leadership.

So what possessed me to walk into this challenge? Firstly, that braver people than me had gone in first. There were, by the summer of 2017 some key people in place who were beginning to halt the decline and begin the repair. The key roles in the Trust in this phase were Director of Education and Standards; and Chief Finance Officer. An interim CEO was in place from another diocese. I applied to the third advert for the post of CEO – a reserved post – not because I was evangelical about academies or MATs. My 14 years in Catholic headships were all in voluntary-aided schools, so I had no experience of an academy or a MAT. In 2010, we pursued an interest in becoming an academy purely for financial gain, but a land issue meant we could not proceed. My motivation in applying to Plymouth CAST was to help a member of the family who was in trouble.

Two years on, we are seeing the recovery gain traction. As I write, only one of our schools is in special measures, not 5, and we judge 12 of our schools to be not good, not 27. A key reason for this improvement was that we were able to establish a school improvement team with leadership and management authority. Not a School Improvement Partner model when someone appeared in the school from time to time and left you with some helpful suggestions, but an improvement strategy supported by line management authority and bespoke professional development.

The final part of the repair strategy was the recovery of the link between mission and standards. In the Catholic tradition and in canon law, schools are expected and encouraged to be as “academically distinguished” as the other schools in the area (Canon 806.2). This is not a crude competitive play for market share but arises from a deep insight in the Catholic tradition that excellence in education is humanising and an essential dimension of the church’s intention to contribute to the common good by providing capable, but not uncritical citizens, who have a heart for the poor, an eye for the obstacles to social justice and a commitment to human flourishing. At Plymouth CAST we took our time to re-animate our vision and values and we now have a compelling vision and set of shared Gospel values which have been welcomed by our schools and above all by our children and young people.

Which leads me in to the second part, an attempt to understand more fully and deeply what we mean when we say Catholic education. I’d like to start at a point where we don’t often start but should do more often. Rather than beginning with the distinctive nature of the Catholic school, which could leave us open to compromises with our cultural context or colonization by the dominant contemporary discourse of psychology which is at odds with the tradition of the Church – with its emphasis on self-realisation and the autonomous self -  I’d like to start with the mission of the Church, since as it states in the 1977 document from the Congregation for Catholic Education, The Catholic School, in para 9, “The Catholic school forms part of the saving mission of the Church.” And if we start with the mission of the Church we have no option but to consider the mission of Christ.

For a definition of that I turn to the Second Vatican Council and the Decree on the Church’s Missionary Activity, Ad Gentes. There it states in para 5 that the mission of the Church “in the course of history unfolds the mission of Christ Himself, who was sent to preach the Gospel to the poor.” And so “the Church, prompted by the Holy Spirit, must walk in the same path on which Christ walked: a path of poverty and obedience, of service and self - sacrifice to the death, from which death He came forth a victor by His resurrection.” Here we have some of the keynotes of our mission: good news to the poor and service, not material gain or worldly success “over against” our rivals or the less advantaged.

The Catholic School document takes up this keynote when it states in no uncertain terms that, “first and foremost the Church offers its educational service to ‘the poor or those who are deprived of family help and affection or those who are far from the faith.” (58) What is good news to a portion of the human race which has grown exponentially since the time of the new testament? And what do we have to say to the poor today which they would consider to be worth hearing? Taking our cue from the words and deeds of Jesus in the gospels, we could say: you are human too, you are beloved, your state of diminishment and exclusion from community is not part of God’s plan. Jesus blessed, loved, forgave, healed and restored the poor to community and commissioned his followers to build a kingdom in which power, prestige and possessions were not a normative pursuit, but where reconciliation, compassion and justice held sway.

The Congregation for Catholic Education has provided many rich and insightful documents since 1977 which have adumbrated the principles of Catholic education, inspired by the gospel and the mission of Christ to humanity. However, there is no one side of A4 to tell us what Catholic education looks like, no tablet of stone with a magisterial definition which is binding in every jurisdiction. What we have in the documents are themes, leitmotifs if you like, which emerge consistently throughout. Catholic education in that sense is an interpretative project, dependent on the discernment of its practitioners. What I would like to offer now, to conclude this second part, is my attempt to capture the hallmarks of Catholic education, my interpretation of the documents based on my reading of them and my application of what I believe to be their principles in various leadership roles. I offer 7 hallmarks of Catholic education, or more specifically the Catholic school:

1.     We do God

It is the first declaration of the creed: “I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth.” In an age of receding transcendence, we affirm our faith in a loving transcendent being, who made heaven and earth and made men and women and declared them to be good. We mediate to our children the sense of the nature of the sacred, we invite them to turn to the ‘burning bush’ of God’s presence. This provides the anthropology and dignity which is foundational to our schools and its worship and should underpin every policy and practice in the school. It is also our driver for committing ourselves to the care of our common home and inviting our children to do likewise, although in this respect they are already ahead of us.

2.     Christ at the centre

Christ is the foundation of the whole educational enterprise in a Catholic school (TCS, 34). The Good News of God made flesh should be at the heart of our discourse. Our pupils, whether Catholic or not, are invited into a Christian world view and more than that, invited into an encounter with Christ in the 4 ways identified by the Catechism (ccc 1378) – in scripture, liturgy, prayer and the poor. The skill of leadership is to discern the extent and form of that encounter given the nature of the pupil cohort.

3.     A Community of the Catholic Church

The Catholic school is a community of the Catholic Church and as such should be linked in to local, national and international Catholic networks. It is a part of what used to be known in the Patristic age as the Great Church, the great main stream. It should be characterised by a spirituality of communion, animated by the same Holy Spirit which hovered over the deep at creation and over the disciples at Pentecost. The community is the place which ‘holds’ and cherishes values, the Gospel values which describe a way of being and belonging which God would recognise. In a loving community, the poor and neglected should receive special attention. As one headteacher put it to me, “those who are loved at home, come to school to learn. Those who are not, come to school to be loved.” And they do not always ask for love in the most loving way.

4.     The Formation of the human person

The Catholic school is committed to the formation of the whole person, a rounded education, never just the narrow pursuit of academic outcomes. It is a house of formation, of character development, where pupils are introduced to the lead virtue of prudence, they learn to see and judge/interpret the signs of the times in the light of the gospel and then to act with courage, temperance and justice. They are encouraged to discover their gift, their element, their contribution to the world, or as Pope Benedict XVI said in Twickenham, to discover the type of person God wants them to be.

5.     A curriculum in the light of the Gospel

The curriculum in a Catholic school should involve the critical transmission of a cultural legacy and knowledge – always accompanied by the ‘big questions’ the gospel schools us in – where is the power here? Is it just that this should happen? Whose dignity is ignored here? Whose story is unheard? Who is being hurried to death? The Catholic Church, without ever providing a concrete programme, encourages “the art of teaching in accordance with the principles of the Gospel.” What might this look like? Consider one example. A maths lesson on percentages, which you would cover at different ages at different levels of complexity. So this was a Year 9 lesson on APRs, the annual percentage rate. The teacher needs an example from real life. Consider the difference between using mortgage payments and using pay day loans. Each present a different world, a different ‘normal’. In the lesson I observed a few years ago the teacher used pay day loans to illustrate her point and was very soon teaching percentages through a lens of social justice, initiating a conversation about a single parent on a zero hours contract whose work ended on a Wednesday and who had no money to feed his or her family an so borrowed money online or from the back street and a month later owed ten times what she borrowed. For this and other examples I would refer you to the work of Professor Trevor Cooling at Canterbury which can be found in his 2010 publication, Doing God in Education. In this way the curriculum can be ‘marinated’ in the Gospel. This does not require Catholic staff, but staff who support the values of the school, which should be everybody who works there.

6.     The transformation of society

Our schools have a tradition of commitment to the common good. The main tradition of the Great Church has always seen its place as being in the world to make it better – to tend its fields and gardens, to care for its sick, to educate its poor. We are open to life and to the world, part of a project to build a different kind of kingdom, one constructed and sustained by ironic imagination, where the last are first, the greatest least, the rich poor. It offers Good Friday, not Black Friday; resurrection, not despair. What our pupils do when they leave us is beyond our control, but we can at least inspire and encourage them to use their excellence, their education, to care for the world and its most vulnerable and precarious inhabitants.  What we don’t know – and there is an urgent need for the research community to develop longitudinal studies to find out – is just how formative a Catholic education is in the life choices of adults, years after they have left us.

7.     Virtuous leadership

Finally, our schools need the kind of leaders to make this kind of school a reality. Our leaders should be virtuous, in the sense of infused with the theological virtues of faith, hope and love. They should be encouraged to develop a prophetic imagination, which sees an alternative to the dominant consciousness of buying and selling. They should possess what professor Gerald Grace has called mission integrity, defined by him as “fidelity in practice and not just in public rhetoric to the distinctive and authentic principles of Roman Catholic education.” Or in the formulation of Professor John Sullivan, they should not only know the Gospel and proclaim the Gospel but embody the Gospel. And this deep living of the Gospel should permeate all aspects of professional practice, from financial decisions which consider the impact on the most vulnerable, to accountability with a human face and a compassionate disposition, which never losing sight of what is just.

So if that is anywhere close to defining the concept of Catholic education which we believe may be under threat by the advancing programme of academisation and MATs then let us turn now to that programme in the Catholic sector to try and determine the level of threat and also to consider any benefits.

An academy, introduced into the English education system by the Labour government in 2000 and turbo-charged by the Conservative government’s Academies Act in 2010, is a state funded school independent of local authority control, accountable directly to the Secretary of State, with certain freedoms over curriculum and pay and conditions but still subject to inspection by Ofsted and regulation on admissions, exclusions and SEND pupils.

A Multi academy trust is a single legal entity, one not for profit trust under company and charity law. And this is very important – a MAT is one organisation, one educational provision on multiple sites, although currently schools are still inspected as individual entities but their leadership and management increasingly is being seen in the context of the Trust.

In a MAT, the Members are like the ‘owners’ of the company (although they don’t receive dividends), they can amend the foundation articles and critically they can appoint the directors. The Board of Directors is the statutory body, the employer, not the local governing body. The Board draws up a Scheme of Delegation which defines the limits of the powers of local governors. The CEO, who is also accountable to the Board, is responsible for implementing the Board’s strategic vision for education and financial sustainability. Heads are accountable to the CEO for their performance. In larger MATs, like CAST, there is a tier of school improvement managers. The heads are line managed and appraised by this tier of management. This is a significant shift in mindset for local governors and headteachers and some struggle to make the transition and for that I have much sympathy.

When I was a headteacher I was accountable to my governing body but did not feel line managed by anybody. For new heads coming into the Trust, it’s not an issue, they come in wearing the T-shirt and are signed up to being in a Trust. For more experienced heads, it can be an awkward transition, not least when they are held to account for years of unchallenged mediocrity. What needs to change is the culture of ‘my school’. A MAT is one organisation with its own vision and ethos and its own set of policies and practices. There are decisions to be made along the spectrum from autonomy at one end to complete alignment at the other, but in my view and in my experience of the system the dial has to be closer to alignment than autonomy.

STRENGTHS (when a MAT works well)

Formal collaboration of Catholic education under one leadership and management: shared values and mission, common strategy, common purpose

Strategic co-ordination of sharing/developing of good practice in local clusters, especially in mission critical activity: chaplaincy, SEND, disadvantaged

Community/family feeling at scale – joint INSET events, pupil gatherings

School to school support, extend role and reach of effective leaders and governors – deployment

Recruitment and retention – MAT career pathways, bespoke CPD

Economies of scale, procurement – value for money for public resource

Monitoring of standards - rapid intervention, effective challenge and support

WEAKNESSES - in some aspects of Catholic education which effective MATs could address

Dualism between curriculum and ethos – subjects in secular silos

Narrative that standards agenda is incompatible with mission agenda – Ofsted some kind of distraction from core purpose

Lack of compelling counter-cultural vision for education, reliance on statistics “over against” other schools

Culture of “our school” – even in Catholic community – not serving common good – especially in urban areas where schools are ‘in competition’

OPPORTUNITIES

Catholic structure of school governance at scale – “Catholic local authority”

Catholic MAT to MAT networking nationally – signs of network developing e.g. Birmingham conference in March 2020

S48 inspections of multi academy trusts

Development of MAT curriculum “marinated” in Gospel values

GAG-pooling: funding centrally directed to support weaker schools, restore equality of provision

Networking with other MATs – much to learn about systems and processes, fruitful partnerships

THREATS to mission integrity posed by MAT model

Role of headteacher diminished - head of school

Extreme alignment – diminishment of charism, school’s tradition

Role of local governors re-defined – no longer statutory body, community support falls away

No clear evidence that academisation leads to better outcomes for children

Failure is scaled up – then what?

Dominance of corporate business model – driven by efficiency = mission drift. Back to importance of Directors (Trustees)

Impact on most vulnerable of efficiency savings/closures = TA support, resources

Corporate accountability model = lack of dignity

Success reduced to academic outcomes alone – Church has longer view

I’d like to finish with a quotation from Dr Sean Ruth, an organizational psychologist who specializes in leadership development. In this comment I am very much reminded of Pope Francis when he spoke to the curia in December 2014 and told them exactly what he thought was wrong with them. Ruth states:

“It has been said that an important role of any leader is to name or define reality and part of what gives people hope is the leader’s ability to accurately describe what is currently taking place. Effective leaders also have a long-term perspective and are able to point a direction that it makes sense to move towards. They do not simply fire-fight or react to events as they occur but operate with a vision of where they want to get to.”

Naming the reality of MATs in Catholic education is not straightforward, nor is understanding the nature of the threat. In conclusion, I would say that the scales between thriving and threat are in the balance. If the Catholic community continues to commit to programmes of formation for leaders and system leaders then the scales may tip in favour of thriving. If not and we continue to struggle to attract leaders who have mission integrity, then we will tip towards threat.

So let us develop a long-term perspective and a direction it makes sense to move towards, a vision of where we might get to.