Sustaining mission integrity in a Catholic primary school in which Catholic teaching staff are in a minority: a case study

Catholic schools in this country have long-maintained high standards of academic excellence. They perform strongly in national examinations (at the age of 11, pupils in Catholic schools outperform national average English and maths SATs scores by 6 per cent) and receive overwhelmingly positive ratings from Ofsted (74.7 per cent of Catholic primary schools have Ofsted grades of good or outstanding, compared with 64 per cent nationally). Whilst this may be viewed as ‘success’ in secular terms, it is often achieved whilst schools attempt to fulfil their individual Catholic missions, and that of the Catholic Church itself, namely the Common Good. Alongside this, there should also be a strong commitment to the world’s poor, a theme that has been significantly reinforced by the recent words of Pope Francis who declares that the Roman Catholic Church must ‘strip itself of all vanity, arrogance and pride and humbly serve the poorest in society.’ However, secular excellence and Catholic integrity can often be at odds with one another. The pressure, and indeed the challenge, for today’s Catholic school leaders, is to remain truthful to the mission of the Church whilst yielding to the demands of local and national government. At the heart of any Catholic school, and central to its wider mission, is an understanding that every child is a child of God. On his visit to these shores in 2010, Pope Benedict XVI spoke of the good Catholic school providing a ‘rounded education for the whole person so that all students can become saints.’ This dissertation will explore whether this particular notion can be successfully achieved in one primary school, where the number of Catholic teaching staff are fewer in number than those of other faiths and none; and will attempt to answer one specific question in particular: Can a Catholic primary school sustain its broader mission with a minority of committed Catholic teaching staff?