Quo Vadimus?

Fifty years ago this month, in September 1972, the first national conference on the organisation and administration of Catholic Education in Australia was held at the University of New England in Armadale, NSW.

This was a seminal moment in the history and growth of Catholic education in Australia. Federal government funds had already begun flowing to parochial schools in Australia over previous years and in December of that same year, the Whitlam Government was elected with a platform of increasing both recurrent and capital grants to the Catholic sector.

Leaders in Catholic education from around the Commonwealth gathered to discuss the pressing issues for our Church and its educational apostolate. Their presentations were gathered together in book a few years later by a young Professor of Education at the University of Western Australia – PD Tannock (no relation).

Dad’s concluding chapter was entitled Quo Vadimus - “Where are we going?”. As a Catholic school student of the 1980s, Latin was no longer offered and so I had to call him to confirm the translation.

50 years later, it is worth articulating that the Armidale Conference reached agreement on the following points:

1.?????Catholic education at primary, secondary and tertiary levels is an essential activity of the Church. Formal schooling is in the vanguard of the Church’s educational effort and apostolate; there is no adequate alternative. There can be no question of abandoning education at any level; indeed renewed efforts to provide such education are essential, and this is especially true for Catholic students enrolled in government schools and tertiary institutions.?Nevertheless, it is a reasonable aim that all children in Australia who seek a Catholic education should be able to do so.

2.?????The best form of governance for Catholic education as suggested in the documents of the Second Vatican Council, is based on maximum participation by clergy, teachers and laymen (sic).

3.?????Catholic education in Australia relies insufficiently upon the expertise and goodwill of all who wish to be involved in governance.

4.?????Catholic education in Australia lacks adequate leadership, coordination, research data, and development activities.

5.?????The time is overdue for a ‘thoroughgoing’ investigation of the administration and organisation of Catholic education and for the delimitation of more efficient and more effective patterns of governance.

(Tannock (Ed) The Organisation and Administration of Catholic Education in Australia, 1975)

And so, from Armidale, began a fifty-year odyssey of mission and growth for Catholic schools and Catholic education more broadly in Australia. We have recently celebrated 200 years of Catholic schooling in Australia and so we should, but it is worth noting the major milestones since 1972:

• The attainment of what they then called ‘state aid’ – large scale public funding from Federal and State governments for Catholic schools. Eventually this policy was supported by all the major political parties in Australia – and the High Court in the Defence of Government Schools (DOGS) case in 1981.
• The almost complete replacement of Religious Order staff with fully salaried lay teachers in Catholic schools, thereby changing and greatly expanding the Catholic education workforce. This saved most of Australia’s Catholic schools from extinction and gave them a new lease of life. Some of you may know that I was appointed the first lay principal of St Aloysius’ College in 2014. This was traumatic for the community, but I was at pains to explain that we were one of the last schools in Australia to go through this transition!
• The expansion of the Catholic school system to match the dramatic growth in the post-War Australian population. This meant new, publicly funded, high quality Catholic primary and secondary schools in virtually every new suburb and town across the nation.
• Catholic Education Offices, and their overseeing Commissions, were established in each Australian State and Territory. These largely (although not completely) replaced the traditional parish/school/Religious Order model. These predominantly lay-led agencies became the coordinating, managing and developmental ‘engines’ for the Catholic education system which emerged.
• The establishment of two successful Catholic universities: Notre Dame Australia in 1989 and the Australian Catholic University in 1991. Both universities have grown rapidly since their foundation, with tens of thousands of students currently enrolled across the continent.

These have been amazing achievements and we should be proud, but our back-patting should also be tempered.

What I propose is that Catholic schooling in Australia has lost that edge that made this growth possible. Catholics in this country moved predominately from the working class into the wealthier classes and the total percentage of Australian children being educated in Catholic schools reached a peak over a generation ago. Whilst we have maintained the 20% - we have stayed there. We have plateaued.

The iconic leader of Catholic schools in Australia’s only global city, Br Kelvin Canavan FMS, was very conscious of the danger of becoming satisfied and comfortable as a sector. On the publications that came from the Catholic Education Office there was always a sticker with a warning “Government funding of Catholic schools should never be taken for granted.” Unfortunately, we did not heed his prescience.

Now, in 2022, fifty years after Armidale, we might ask ourselves that same question - Quo Vadimus? Where are we going?

We are all aware of the latest census data and what it tells us about religious adherence in Australia. All of us involved in Catholic schools see this in our daily mission as educators.

St Aloysius’ College has a total Catholic enrolment of 96% - making us one of the most notionally Catholic schools in the nation. Like every school we rely on the parish priest’s reference, we interview every family and ask them about their faith and, even with those high numbers, most of our students are increasingly unchurched. They rarely attend their local parish and instead, their only real opportunity to participate in the sacraments is at the College. Blessedly, we have two Jesuit priests on staff and so masses and liturgies are a common experience for our community.

I won’t pretend to assume we are a typical Catholic school. Most of our families are well-off and can afford the substantial fees that the school charges. But I want you to know that they choose St Aloysius’ because of its Catholic identity and Jesuit tradition. This is important to them because the beliefs and values of the school align with that of their family.

How long can we keep relying on this as the tribalism of our Church declines? How long can we rely upon Catholic families that use to gravitate without question to their local Catholic school? How compelling is the case we offer as a school beyond its Catholic identity?

Beyond this, there are sections of our community who are increasingly hostile to the work of Catholic schools and especially to the public funds that support these works. Because we are a well-resourced school on the northern lip of Sydney Harbour, St Aloysius’ is a current target in the Sydney media. My concern is that antagonism won’t stop with us, but will extend to any faith-based school. We must reinterrogate the case for Catholic schools.

After DOGS we thought that the Catholic settlement had been achieved. My concern is that the settlement is weakening as faith and culture move further apart in our society.

I note with interest the current NCEC priorities of the National Catholic Education Commission. These have been the focus of the Commission from 2021 until next year. They are:

• PRIORITY 1 - Enliven faith formation and religious education
• PRIORITY 2 - Support the continual improvement of educational outcomes for all students
• PRIORITY 3 - Respond to the needs of families through strong advocacy for recurrent and capital funding, legislation and policy

These are sound priorities, but only one deals with the preconditions for the educational mission of the Church in Australia.

We need to ask ourselves what are the more fundamental reforms that are necessary to assure the future of Catholic education in Australia.

I offer three priorities:

1.?????School Leadership

The future Catholic school principal is the most important priority for the educational apostolate. We must identify, recruit and promote the next generation of local school leaders. There are outstanding Catholic schools in Australia right now who cannot find exceptional leaders willing to take on the responsibility of leading a faith community. This should worry us all.

We need future Catholic school principals who possess:

• A faith in Jesus.
• Belief in and loyalty to Church and a desire to see our Church reform itself through a thorough knowledge and understanding of its history.
• Belief in Catholic schools: their role, their worth, their traditions.
• Professional expertise and demonstrated excellence when it comes to academic outcomes for all students and a commitment to continual renewal of the school. (the plenary session today on lifting outcomes must come from school and leader and their teachers!)
• Intellectual strength, and appropriate high-level training.
• Personal qualities of courage, strength, humility, optimism, creativity, drive and energy, risk taking and persistence. And a sense of humour – preferably about themselves!

I know this sounds like Jesus on a good day, but these leaders are already in our midst. Where will we find such leaders?

Firstly, within Catholic Education and the Church. To a large extent we have to identify and ‘grow our own’. However we need to be creative and generate a ‘corps’ of potential leaders. They should be found in a wide diversity of different pathways, not just those who have traversed through the Catholic system that has grown and grown over the last 50 years. Our schools are graduating excellent young women and men – how can we get them to consider not just a vocation of teaching, but a vocation of school leadership? They will need to have a commitment to excellence in our new future here in Australia.

2.?????Governance

We need a review of the structure and the size of Church bureaucracies that have grown exponentially since 1972. This should begin a ‘way of proceeding’ that see us periodically review the structure, size and cost bases of State and diocesan bureaucracies. Our aim should be to achieve cost savings and efficiencies, and the productive reallocation of ‘freed up’ resources back to the schools. If we are to retain the systems that have supported a shared approach to mission, then we should aim for simple, frugal Offices, with an emphasis on core priorities, minimum bureaucracy and a continued battle against red-tape and unccessary 'compliance'.

These reforms should occur alongside much greater lay participation in Diocesan Leadership. This has been discussed ad nauseam in the Light of the Southern Cross Report and at our recent Plenary Council proceedings. But they are being discussed because they are so self-evidently necessary, important and potentially impactful.

Our future should enable lay participation with Bishops and senior clergy in the major councils and decision-making bodies of every Diocese, including those currently restricted to Bishops and Clergy. These reforms are most important when it comes to the women of our Church. In my experience, it is the women who are leading us and it is the women who are the solutions to the many of the problems we currently face as a Church.

The future of Catholic school governance should be at the local level. For many of our diocesan school principals, their capacity to genuinely lead their community is substantially curtailed by a central machine that has (as previously described) grown over 50 years as all bureaucracies inevitably do. Now is the time to release the power and the authority and to practice genuine subsidiarity when it comes to Catholic schools in Australia.

Obviously, this needs to be tempered by the increasingly high levels of accountability that our governments are demanding of us and the resources that need to be shared within our systems. Diocesan school systems should pursue a reform agenda of establishing more empowered local school councils that can hold principals accountable and that tap into the enormous expertise and goodwill that local Catholic school communities possess. The future of Catholic school governance is local.

3.?????Funding

This final priority (which aligns with that of the NCEC) is the most important as I fear that rising secularism is clearly coupled with escalating antagonism to our works. Our works rely on public money. Without it we are lost.

It is worth noting our history here:

• Following a series of legislative developments in the latter half of the 19th Century, successive colonial governments removed public funding from religious schools. For most of the 20th century, non-government schools were ineligible to receive funding from government. This began to change after WWII.
• In 1964 the Menzies Government introduced capital funding of Science Laboratories for all non-government schools throughout Australia
• In 1970 the McMahon Government introduced recurrent commonwealth funding for all non-government schools. This was a per capita arrangement that went to every student in every school regardless of that school’s resource base and regardless of the student’s demographic profile.
• In 1972 the Whitlam Government was elected on a platform of ‘needs-based’ funding for students in all schools from the Commonwealth. ‘Needs-based’ funding was based upon a ‘standard’ of recurrent funding of non-government schools. Standards became the policy mechanism used in determining funding from this point and Catholic schools were the great beneficiaries of this new arrangement because of the substantial gap they faced in their resource base compared to any other school or school sector. The flow of government funds into the Catholic sector allowed for the development of diocesan systems of education and for the replacements of very cheap religious staff with competitively salaried lay staff.
• In the late 1990’s, the SES System was introduced by the Howard government. This was a significant change in arrangements as it calculated funding on the basis of parental capacity to pay rather than school resource standard. This SES scale was then linked to government school expenditure as a percentage. Catholic schools originally opposed this formula because it had the capacity to stimulate the differentiation of school fees within a Catholic school system and because the Catholic sector wanted to ensure that it retained the capacity to operate a system parallel to the government school sector – open to an entire community.
• However, in 2004, Catholic schools came into the SES system as a result of the ‘funding maintained’ mechanism that ensured Catholic schools that might lose funding as a result of the change would be funding maintained. This ensured that for the life of this funding model there was going to be Catholic school being funded at a higher rate than they were eligible to be. This included St Aloysius’ College. This system of funding lasted until 2013. ‘Funding maintained’ was a poison pill and every time my school is mentioned in the media it is called ‘overfunded’ even though those funding entitlements were enshrined in legislation.
• In 2008 the Gonski Review recommended a funding model that was sector blind, needs-based, per capita based and a new standard to be used – school resources standard. Funding maintained remained a political problem and the solution was to increase funding to a level for all schools to ensure that funding-maintained schools were not worse off. Over time, they would be funded at an appropriate level, but would not lose funding as a result of the new system.
• Then came 2017, and the calamitous decisions by the Turnbull Government and Minister Birmingham to pursue a heavily compromised set of Gonski reforms. Kelvin Canavan’s warning had not been heeded and we had become too complacent. A new generation of political leaders and senior bureaucrats in Canberra did not understand the Catholic philosophy or they were just not supportive of it.

?The initial set of reforms were potentially catastrophic, before the intervention of leaders like Steve Elder resulted in a much better financial outcome for the Catholic sector.

For the first time since the colonial period, schools began to lose funding – my own included. I am not crying poor here. I am crying rich.

?What have we lost?

?We lost the argument that (when it comes to funding) Catholic schools should be compared with government schools regardless of their location, because this allows for them to be open to all.

?Catholic schools in poorer communities receive more funding – as they should. Low fees for families who have the greatest claims on our wealth as a nation. But wealthier Catholic schools in more affluent locations of our nation will become increasingly inaccessible to middle class families. For the middle class, their Catholic schools must provide the compelling case for enrolment or post-tribal Catholic families will go down the road to the good standard public school that costs them almost nothing.

If you want to see what this looks like you just need to go to the United States. ?

This is our great challenge. Catholic middle class Australia may be lost to us unless we reposition out resourcing and our commitment to an excellence of education.

We must reframe our philosophical base and then make it manifest in a new funding model for the future. We should look to other nations like ours around the world (including NZ and the UK) to see what might be possible.

We need to reclaim our ability to offer an accessible, excellent Catholic education universally throughout Australia regardless of a child's geographic location, and regardless of their parent's financial status. The citizen's entitlement to choose an education for their child based on their own preference must be reclaimed.

Fifty years after Armidale, what are the agreements coming from this conference?

Fifty years after Armidale, we might ask ourselves again, “Where are we going?”

MN Tannock ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? 5 September, 2022