Status Anxiety: A lesson in competition

For critics of state education, locked in combat with the teaching unions, it is easy to overlook the fact that some comprehensives do an outstanding job. One example in my neck of the woods is Cardinal Vaughan, a Roman Catholic boys’ school. Last year, 90 per cent of its pupils got five good GCSEs, making it the best performer in Kensington and Chelsea, and this year 13 of its pupils have been offered places at Oxford and Cambridge. And Vaughan is completely non-selective, beyond the requirement that its pupils have to be Catholics. It has a fair banding policy whereby a quarter of each year group are in the top ability band, half in the middle and a quarter in the bottom.

Of course, like every successful comprehensive, the Vaughan has its critics. Opponents of faith schools claim it only achieves these results because it admits an above-average number of middle-class children. The argument isn’t that Catholics are more likely to be middle class, but that the way in which Catholicity is measured creates an obstacle that well-off parents, whether genuinely religious or not, can more easily overcome.

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What’s unusual about Vaughan is that one of its fiercest opponents is the Roman Catholic Diocese of Westminster, the body that oversees the school. In 2009, following a disagreement with the governing body, the diocese lodged a complaint with the school’s adjudicator, the bureaucrat tasked with enforcing the School Admissions Code. Being an outstanding school, the Vaughan is heavily over-subscribed and, like many faith schools, it ranked its applicants by awarding them points according to the depth of their religious commitment. The diocese objected that this amounted to a form of ‘social selection’ — that it created a bias in favour of middle-class parents — and asserted its right to be the sole arbiter of how Catholicity should be defined.