There can be little doubt that British education is in a state of crisis, and that Kenneth Baker’s so-called education reforms have simply compounded that crisis. We are likely to witness in Britain in the next decade perhaps more than at any other time since the passing of the Shaftsbury Act over a hundred years ago, the fiercest ideological battles around issues to do with the purpose and function of education and schooling in a liberal democratic society, the rights of the child and of the student, and the relationship between education and the national economy. In such battles the Church will be heavily involved—Catholic schools will see to that. Government legislation may hit Catholics hard in other areas and receive scant criticism, but schools are where the hierarchy believes the Catholic community finds and passes on its own identity. Perhaps bishops also think that Catholic schools are among the last places where the hierarchy has real power. Thus in recent months we have seen the dispute between Cardinal Hume and parents over whether one school should or should not ‘opt out’ of the State system. The danger, exemplified by the case of the Poll Tax in England and Wales, is that the Church will fight what it sees as its own corner, but will then keep silent in the wider battle. Its intervention may be dangerously misplaced.

This article seeks to set out what has happened to British education and the vision which a prophetic Church should champion.

Our sense of history should tell us that we have a responsibility to safeguard and to extend the hard-won rights that generations before us have secured through their struggles and their blood, even to the point of sacrificing their very lives.