Schools survey
- Thread starter JoeRoberts
- Start date
I'm wary of any survey and conducting one I reckon you get what you pay for. Earlier on this thread someone said that why wasn't such-and-such a question asked. I think we need to be very careful here and not accept something that will not help our education system or our students under any guise. All of my friends living in the UK (none of them is Roman Catholic) want their children and grandchildren to attend Roman Catholic schools. There is a message in there somewhere which I think we shouldn't ignore.
I live in the UK. I know many non-Catholic families who send their kids to Catholic schools, although this is becoming less common as more schools are giving preference to Catholic children, so the number of non-Catholic spots are reducing.
The reasons I have heard from non-Catholics are the exact same as the Catholic parents - Catholic schools here have strong reputations for good academic results. I think this is largely fair but not always the case.
Interestingly most of the non-Catholics that I know sending kids to Catholic schools are Muslims who like them because they feel they are stricter and closer to Muslim values, particularly around gender roles and sexuality. One of my Muslim colleagues told me he found their Irish Catholic headtacher very understanding about their Hajj plans, which he felt would have been made a big deal of in a state school. I told him the headteacher could probably see some similarities with people going to Lough Derg, Lourdes, etc.
I don't think any of the Catholic parents I know here have any interest in the actual religious teaching of their schools. It's branding really.
Yea, far fewer black, immigrants and poor kids in the RC Schools. That's the reason.
Fair point and sure of course the headteacher would; it's the same product with different branding.
In my experience they wore black and were called "Brother".
The UK has a different system. But I think that"s down to many of the catholic schools being the equivalent of private schools here. You could equally say that Irish catholics are clamouring to get their kids into protestant schools because many of the best private schools in Ireland, wiith very high demand, are protestant ethos.
Same issue arises in the US - catholic schools tend to be better, but thats because they are normally fee paying.
Id prefer us to stick with moving towards secular schools where everyone gets the same access to education.
Same issue arises in the US - catholic schools tend to be better, but thats because they are normally fee paying.
Id prefer us to stick with moving towards secular schools where everyone gets the same access to education.
I'd also like to get away from the ridiculous notion that children who go to private schools are beneficiaries of educational privilege and those who don't are not. The reality is that house price in the schools catchment area is a far better indication of educational privilege than an annual fee.
That is the divide in this country, not religious ethos or whether school is fee paying or not.
To conflate religious ethos with educational outcomes is illogical and unreasonable (done in the absence of reason).
That has always been the case. We have snobbery and inverted snobbery but we are not nearly as bad as our nearest neighbour.