Over a hundred delegates attended the first meeting in Parliament to celebrate the results achieved by Catholic education in recent days. The participants included headmasters, teachers and representatives of the Catholic Association of Teachers, representatives of the Department for Education and Training of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, and Kerry Pollard, MP and member of the select Committee for Education. “It is wholly consistent with the Catholic faith to encourage and strengthen in the young the idealism and consciousness of being able to contribute to a better world”, said Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Birmingham and chairman of the Catholic Education Service (CES), in his opening address, emphasizing the contribution that Catholic schools make to civil society. “The majority of our schools, including those that prepare children for university, have now reached a high qualitative level and enjoy considerable prestige. Nonetheless he continued I am conscious that there are still gaps that need to be filled and I wish to assure our cooperation with the measures being taken by the government to achieve ever higher levels in the educational field”. 2,500 schools to which should be added 16 “form colleges” to prepare older children for university and a total of some 840,000 pupils: these are the current data for Catholic education in England announced by Oona Stannard, CES executive director, who described some projects, in particular that of research in collaboration with Heythrop College of the University of London aimed at examining the cultural context of religious education and catechesis in our time. “In the weeks ahead she also announced we’ll begin work on the ‘White Paper’, a document dedicated to teenagers aged from 14 to 19 with the objective of better addressing their needs. It should be ready by January 2005”. But the CES, she concluded, is also active “on the front of policy and legislation on schooling and the underage”.
