A blessing and a curse? The legacy of the Catholic public school in England

Serenhedd James • October 22, 2024

Educating in Faith: A History of the English Catholic Public School

Mark Cleary, Sacristy Press, 256 pages, £19.99

The cover of Mark Cleary’s Educating in Faith is something of a parable: “a projected but unrealised plan” for Downside Abbey, near Bath, with monastery and school either side of a fine church – two lungs, if you like, of the same monastic body.

A differently splendid version of Downside was built, but that did not meet expectations either. The same could be said of Ampleforth and Ealing, to name a couple of other Catholic public schools which later became tarnished by the appalling abuse of children.

These are different days, as last month’s Catholic Herald education supplement demonstrated. Independent Catholic schools seem to have a new spring in their step – mainly, it has to be said, almost entirely under lay leadership. However, with Labour now in power and intending to add VAT to school fees, there is considerable disquiet; Kilgraston, Scotland’s last Catholic boarding school, has already gone to the wall. Others may follow.

Professor Cleary’s book charts the relatively short history – only 200 years, give or take, since Emancipation in 1829 – of the Catholic public school. He uses the term with care, should purists think that it should be restricted to the seven establishments named in the 1868 Public Schools Act. He argues that there was a distinctive element to the “Catholic public school”, which endured long after other independent schools had rebranded themselves.

The Catholic public schools had a separate element to offer; they were almost entirely staffed by priests, religious and lay brethren. “Every aspect of a boy’s education,” Cleary notes, “was under the control of and eyeline of the clerical teachers and authorities.” With hindsight it is impossible not to regard this as having been both a blessing and a curse.

Cleary wisely devotes a whole chapter to the darker side of education in the context of clerical power and unquestioning obedience – the book would have been totally undermined had he not done so. It does not make for happy reading: “it became increasingly evident that both Church authorities and religious orders had sought to cover up abuse, to protect some of the abusers, and above all to seek to preserve the reputation of the Church”.

There remains much of which still to repent, but Cleary’s openness in this aspect lends credibility to another theme: that at their best the Catholic public schools turned out well-rounded and theologically literate young men who went on to play their part as leaders of the “Catholic elite”: as statesmen, lawyers, public servants and fathers. The girls’ schools were part of the same project, but run differently and to other ends.

Cleary rigorously traces the beginnings of the Catholic public schools and their growth up to the First World War. The inter-war years brought a new-found confidence, with various establishments competing to be thought of as “the Catholic Eton”. Heroes arose here and there, like Dom Paul Nevill, headmaster of Ampleforth for 30 years from 1924, who implemented, with the full approbation of the abbey chapter, “a single-minded and impressive set of changes in the physical, social and academic capabilities of the school”.

It would not – perhaps could not – last. The 1950s and 1960s were what Cleary calls “The Last Hurrah”, as confidence recovered and grew in the decades after the Second World War. “The period between the end of the war and the first pronouncements of Vatican II,” Cleary thinks, “represented something of a high-water mark”. He cites Eamon Duffy’s view that “anyone raised a Catholic before 1965 was formed in a Church which understood and presented itself as essentially timeless [and] its principal teachings infallible”.

Thereafter, Catholic public schools struggled to steady themselves on shifting sands. Demographic and economic changes did not help, and it was difficult to shore up the distinct religious identity of Catholic institutions while traditional practices that had formed part of the English Church for so long disappeared. A steady decline in vocations to the religious life meant that salaries needed to be found for lay teachers, while revelations of abuse were – rightly – devastating.

The old models will no longer work, so new ones must be found. Cleary concludes that what is needed now is distinctiveness and identity – although he concedes that these were “rather easier to identify in the past”. To that we might also add wisdom and understanding, which Cleary provides in spades: his book is incisive, erudite, meticulously researched and eminently readable. It should be compulsory reading for abbots, headteachers and school governors up and down the land.

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Photo collage: (left) Ampleforth pupils at work in 1952 (Getty) / Benedictine monks in the grounds of Ampleforth Abbey and College (Anna Gowthorpe/PA Wire).

Serenhedd James is interim editor of the Herald, and a former Head of Religious Studies at More House School, London.