Crisis of trust – 4 PETER STANFORD


Parent power T


he meeting was billed as a chance for dialogue and a clearing of the air. On Monday evening, around 400 parents of boys and girls at the


Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School in west London gathered to share their concerns for the future of this high-achieving comprehen- sive with the chairman and diocesan- appointed members of the governing body. It had been hoped that Archbishop Vincent Nichols would send a representative to this “turn-down-the-temperature” session, prompted by a long-running dispute over admissions, the process for appointing a new head, and the composition of the governing body, which has ended up in the Supreme


The row between families of pupils at a high-achieving Catholic comprehensive and the Archdiocese of Westminster has developed into a deep rift. According to one parent at the Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School, the biggest casualty is the collapse of trust in the diocese


Court and on the front pages of newspapers under distressing headlines about “Catholic parents fighting their bishop”. But, citing legal advice, the diocese didn’t turn up. My son is at the Vaughan and each and


every day I say a prayer of thanks. It is a model Catholic community, expertly led, bringing out the best in every child from its compre- hensive intake academically, spiritually and emotionally. So far I have tried to steer clear of this very public scrap – “the shenanigans” as one well-placed insider calls it – because it seemed to me that both sides, the diocese and the Parents’ Action Group, were taking such antagonistic positions that they were simply postponing the day when this emi- nently resolvable dispute could be sorted out. However, sitting on Monday evening in the school hall for two-plus hours of heated debate, I was saddened to witness only the breakdown of trust between parents and the diocese. Time after time, the embattled chair- man of governors, John O’Donnell, clearly a decent, well-meaning man, told questioners that he could not comment on diocesan policy towards the school because he didn’t work for the diocese, nor could he convey their con- cerns to Archbishop Nichols because, as a foundation governor, he did not represent the parents, but was a diocesan appointee. Putting to one side the inherent contradic- tion in what he said, his stance begged a fundamental question. Who is the diocese? Who is the Church? Is it just Archbishop Nichols, his auxiliaries, his priests and the officials they employ to advise them on schools’ policy? That makes it sound like a business. Or is it, in that wonderfully resonant phrase of Vatican II, “the people of God”, in this case Catholics in Westminster? Surely, we are all the diocese? It includes all of us, sees us all serving each other, spends the money we give it and – according to its own description – works to make the Catholic education of children a three-way partnership of trust between parents, parish and school. Recent events surrounding the Vaughan


have seriously depleted that residue of trust and made talk of partnership sound hollow. What happened in that school hall on Monday night was akin to a mini Arab Spring. Here was a group of intelligent, articulate adults, denied a voice by the powers that be, standing up and demanding one. Their principal con- cern was not, as has sometimes been alleged,


10 | THE TABLET | 16 July 2011


The Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School in Kensington, west London


simply for the fate of their own darlings cur- rently at the school but, as one after another stressed, about preserving both the Catholic ethos of the Vaughan, and the life chance it has given countless generations of young men and women in Westminster. These parents wanted the school to continue that work for generations to come. The clash over a particular set of circum- stances at the school seemed to have brought to the surface a deeper concern among this cross-section of the Catholic laity. They felt the ecclesiastical hierarchy was treating them as disobedient children, with their concerns (well-founded or not) simply swept aside. It all came down, speaker after speaker made plain, to trust. In a narrow sense, the parents don’t have trust in the governing body, reconstituted recently by the diocese to contain a majority of appointees with no children at the Vaughan. And, more widely, and more worryingly, these loyal, Massgoing Catholics, who for years have dutifully chipped in to every second collection for the Catholic Education Service, no longer trust the diocese to know better and make decisions on their behalf regarding schools. There are many reasons, way beyond the


actual dispute, why that trust has been lost. Some are to do with history and the social context in which our national Church operates.


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