While the issue of faith schools continues to bubble in the public consciousness (see Chris Wright’s Opinion, Another Voice, in this week’s main paper), debate cries out for solid and informed research. Gerald Grace, professorial research fellow at London’s Institute of Education, has written a timely book on Catholic schools. At its heart, he reports on 60 interviews with Catholic secondary heads in London, Liverpool and Birmingham. The headteachers provide a perspective and a voice that tell us what Catholic schools are like from the inside. And, by analogy, we might begin to work out how other kinds of faith schools could function.

Many of the Roman Catholic schools are in inner-city areas, one of them carrying 76 per cent of pupils requiring free meals. When grouped according to academic success, however, nine of the schools are highly successful in terms of GCSE results, and a further 24 enjoy above average results. Yet all the schools are comprehensive and avoid academic selection. How is it, then, that Catholic schools manage to do better than comparable non-religious schools? The answer has puzzled researchers since the Seventies, indeed since Vatican 2 opened Catholic schools up to a new theological impetus and encouraged more permeability to local cultures.

In the Nineties, the work of Professor Anthony Bryk in the United States indicated that typical Catholic behaviour encouraged academic success. Pupils’ attendance at church and after-school clubs and societies gave them a chance to flourish, as well as low staff turnover and good links between home and school. In the UK, a significant proportion of Catholic heads saw their mission to the poor as an expression of Christian values. Some of the heads interviewed by Grace have been lifted out of poverty and powerlessness by their Catholic schooling. Others, female heads notably, want schools to impart confidence to girls disadvantaged by working-class and patriarchal environments.

Unfortunately, the educational mission to the poor clashed with the market forces unleashed at the start of the Nineties. When schools were offered tempting new resources if they obtained grant-maintained status, the Catholic bishops resisted this golden option - they knew that better resources for some meant worse resources for others. The large-scale transfer of Catholic schools out of LEA control would damage the common good. Middle-class Catholic parents disagreed. Grace shows how these tensions appeared as the old hierarchies struggled to retain control.

Within schools the style of leadership was also being renegotiated. Grace found that the old, authoritarian-style head is being replaced by a more collegial and facilitating role. Some of the clergy dislike this and others consider collegiality a weakness. Others, again particularly female, see collegiality as strength.

Leadership takes several directions. Some headteachers are pragmatists but almost all want to root their mission in social justice and the transmission of Catholic culture. What they find is that the secularism of modern Britain and the reduction of parish effectiveness throws the main weight of spiritual and moral formation on to the schools. In one sense the schools become the pupils’ parishes and headteachers, praised by Ofsted for their faith policies, begin to see chaplaincy, times for reflection and prayer, as a means of preserving spirituality in a way that is also multiculturally sensitive.

Divergent views about the Catholicity of church schools have been aired . One view argues that schools are losing their distinctiveness. Others argue that a more pluralist but equally committed Catholicism is needed. Grace sees a need to revivify Catholicism to meet the needs of adolescents and to strengthen values championing the common good against market competitiveness.

Anyone wanting to contribute sensibly to the faith education debate ought to read this excellent book. It shows how rhetoric on both sides - for expansion or for abolition - often misses the mark. The many quotes from heads who work every school day with young people articulate the importance of a genuine care for pupils. When educational rhetoric becomes an exercise in scoring points and when schooling sinks out of sight in a sea of cynicism, we should listen to the professionals who give their lives in the service of the young.

William Kay

William Kay is a senior lecturer in theology and religious education at King’s College, London, and the University of Wales, Bangor