The above quotation is taken from Mt 16:4 and was used by Pope John Paul ll when he convoked the Second Vatican Council on 21st December 1965. It is a reminder for the Church in particular to be vigilant and to keep a sense of responsibility for the world around it. The full text can be found in the Apostolic Constitution Humanae Salus (Of Human Salvation), 1962.
The phrase is considered apt for the concluding chapter of this empirical study, underpinned by its theoretical concepts, because the area of the current Tower Hamlets has been greatly at the forefront of diocesan education policy since the early days of the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in 1850. Conscious of the great need to educate the mostly poor and often starving Irish Catholics in the faith and to enable them to better themselves economically and socially, the Missionary Rector of the area invited the Sisters of Mercy to come from Ireland and they arrived in 1859 to set up Catholic schools and to generally minister to the whole population (Maynard 2009, p199, quoted in chapter 1). They are still ministering in the borough.
For the purposes of this study, by the 1990s economic and social conditions in Tower Hamlets had deteriorated from the relative stable prosperity of the 1950s. Gardiner (1995) reported on the local, racially motivated, problems surrounding the Poplar-based Catholic boys’ school as immigrant communities fought each other in the streets. Ofsted reported in 1998 on the borough’s woeful education service and the fact that strategic planning across the borough had largely ceased because of political and administrative experimentation. GCSE results were poor and there was a surplus of places in the borough’s schools, presumably because parents sought education for their children outside the borough. The Catholic boys’ secondary school in Poplar was not immune from the borough’s problems and was deemed a failure and designated for closure in 2000. Responding to the failure of the school the Bishop, as recorded, invited the representative governors of the Catholic girls’ school to provide for the Catholic boys. The invitation, or challenge, was
193 accepted, but on terms that necessary negotiations with the borough’s Chief Education Officer were to be conducted by the girls’ school representative governors for a federated school that would educate boys and girls separately. A federated school, with a new boys’ school using the girls’ school staff and managed by its governors was deemed necessary because of the urgency of providing for the boys with of the impeding parental decisions of Catholic parents to select secondary (Catholic) schooling for their primary-school children. That, seemingly, answers part of the subsidiary question as to why the girls’ school governors decided upon the original concept of the federated school, but a new school building seemed impossible to acquire, furnish and staff in the time available, and the use of the Poplar building and staff with the history of failure was not desired by the representative governors of the girls’ school. The greatest problem, however, was that there was no of legal authority for a federated school within the maintained sector of education.
How the governors of the girls’ school developed the federated school concept was initially through good offices of the borough’s Director of Education (CEO) and the DfE. The Director contacted the DfE and the officials found a compromise by which the desired ‘federated’ situation could be operated in advance of legislative authority. Recognising ‘the signs of the times’ in which the social and political strength of the local Muslim community had negotiated the use of the Shadwell Centre, the only possible building locally suitable for the boys’ school, the CEO and Head Teacher of the girls’ school persuaded the Elders of the Muslim community to relinquish part of the Centre for the use of the boys. The promise was that this was a temporary arrangement. The promise was fulfilled on the transfer of the boys to the site leased from the local authority and the school developed on this site. The promise was later to benefit the school by the intervention of the Imams whose good offices apparently led to peaceful co-existence with the local Muslim youths.
With the project grant of £30 million, new thinking was possible by actively recognising ‘the signs of the times.’ It has been shown that Tower Hamlets was a divided society with racial strife (Gardiner 1995), severe poverty, poor housing and health, exacerbated by high levels of immigration (Child Poverty
194 Action Group 2008,2012, 2014 and Mathew, Harper Associates, 2010). It was a borough in transition with a burgeoning hyper-diversity of communities at the margins (ibid). The signs of the time required action and this was provided by developing the excellent facilities of the now formally federated school for use by the wider community. As has been shown this was through the further original concepts of the Urban Learning Village and the Local Area Partnerships with the local authority. A more insightful aspect of why and how the federated school developed as it did may be gleaned from Bishop Stack’s evidence to the High Court in 2006 and the Holy See’s publication in 2013. Both saw multi-culturalism as the big challenge to education, with inter-cultural dialogue as a means of promoting peaceful human progress and living in harmony. The school, in advance of these statements, planned for and instituted this dialogue to the benefit of the many socially and economically deprived inhabitants of Tower Hamlets. The needs of the time were thereby recognised and met to the best of the school’s ability.
The main research question relates to the tensions that arose between the decisions of inclusiveness and distinctiveness in the development of the Catholic school federation in Tower Hamlets and their resolution. The really surprising tensions were with the small group of Catholic local parishioners who apparently saw the outward looking policies of the federated school governors as a threat to the distinctive nature of their conception of a Catholic school. There appeared to be undertones of insecurity when they perceived the growth of the local and mainly Muslim community and were overly defensive of their traditional form of inward –looking Catholicism. As described, they instituted High Court proceedings against the diocese and the school governors. They lost their case with costs and damages awarded against them. The Court therefore legally resolved the differences, but not the emotional ones. These were seemingly resolved when the diocese waived its rights to the considerable sums awarded against the parishioner group, held a reconciliatory Mass in the parish church and awarded diocesan medals to long-serving parishioners, amongst whom were those who had taken the diocese and the school governors to the High Court. On the retirement of the Parish Priest on the grounds of ill-health (he was an opponent of the school’s
195 policies) the Archbishop appointed a succession of Priest Administrators to the parish who were great conciliators. It appeared that all these measures successfully resolved the former tensions.