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Bishop Hopes calls on government to keep schools faith cap removal pledge

  • Keith Morris

Students at Notre Dame High School, Norwich

Students at Notre Dame High School, Norwich

Following the Queen’s Speech, the Bishop of East Anglia has written to MPs across the diocese urging them to support the pledge to remove the 50% cap on faith admissions to new Free Schools. Bishop Alan Hopes is also asking anyone who supports the idea of new Catholic schools across East Anglia to write to their own MP.

Bishop Alan urged MPs to write to the Secretary of State for Education, Justine Greening, on behalf of Catholic communities to offer support for this manifesto pledge and ask her to stand by this commitment to faith schools.

He wrote: “The removal of the cap was specifically designed to allow the opening of new Catholic schools, thus answering the demand from tens of thousands of parents across the country.

“The cap was a Liberal Democrat policy brought in as part of the coalition agreement with the aim of creating religious diversity in faith schools, something it has failed to do. All the cap achieved was to bar the Catholic Church from opening new schools. This is because it would result in Catholic schools turning away Catholic pupils on the grounds of their Catholicism, a feature which is prohibited by Canon Law.

“Moreover, both the Government and the Casey Review into community integration recognised that the cap had not created religiously diverse faith Free Schools. This is in stark contrast to existing Catholic schools which are the most ethnically diverse in the country, with a third of their pupil population being non-Catholic. In fact, the most recent Catholic schools census showed that more than 26,000 Muslims currently attend a Catholic school,” he said.

“Since September, the Diocese of East Anglia has invested a significant amount of its own financial and staff resources into developing bids for eight new Catholic schools in Norfolk, Cambs and Peterborough. These bids are now complete and we believe they are very strong. We are now simply awaiting the opportunity to submit these bids, and the removal of the cap is the final piece of the jigsaw to enable this to happen and for new Catholic schools to become a reality,” said Bishop Alan.

Unlike the grammar schools policy, removing the cap does not need any primary legislation, only the political will of the Secretary of State.

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