The Innes Review

Introduction: the contexts of Catholic schooling

As post-devolution Scotland passes the milestone of a third Scottish parliamentary election, the question of state-supported Catholic education, and the peculiar nature of the 1918 UK legislation that underpins it, is once again the subject of intense scrutiny. Emboldened by devolution and fuelled by a wave of progressive UK and European law concerned with issues of equality and diversity, opponents of separate Catholic schools have renewed their demands for the provisions of the 1918 Act to be reviewed or, indeed, abolished. With the ninetieth anniversary of the passage of the Act approaching, influential commentators from across the political spectrum have argued that its principal terms reflect the social and religious controversies of a distant era, increasingly incongruent with the inclusive culture of a multiethnic and mostly secular twenty-first century Scotland.¹ The character and scale of the objections currently levelled at the continued existence of Catholic schools in Scotland suggests that reconsideration of the transactions between Church and State that led to the signing of the 1918 Act is perhaps overdue – especially as a realignment of the relationship between the two forces seems currently to be well advanced.

This article examines a particular phase in the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Scottish state authorities with reference to the development and reform of the Catholic schools system leading up to the watershed settlement of the 1918 Education Act. It analyses the collaboration of Church and State in the context of wider developments in the culture of Scottish education in the period 1872–1918, focusing particularly on the experience of Glasgow and the emergence there of a fully state-supported network of Catholic schools. It brings to bear on the material from this period an interpretation that places greater emphasis than previous studies on wider state attitudes to institutional religion and changing perceptions of the role of Churches in the provision of mass education in a modern society. The concordat struck between the Scottish authorities and the Catholic Church in Scotland regarding the governance of schools in the early part of the twentieth [End Page 72] century has long been recognised as exceptional and, indeed, continues to be a source of controversy.² This article underlines the exceptionalism and tries to explicate the rapprochement realised in 1918 from the perspectives of both Church and State. It concludes by suggesting that the arrangements arising out of 1918 do not fit easily with standard 'social control' models of Church-State cooperation in education, but require to be explained giving closer attention to local factors and the specific religious and political influences at work in the Scotland of the time.

Researching the decades from the second half of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, historians of Scottish Catholic education have provided us with accounts of the period that rightly highlight the importance of the work of the teaching religious orders in Glasgow. In what is a still relatively under-researched field, the painstaking analyses of primary sources and archive materials carried out by pioneer scholars of earlier generations such as J. E. Handley and, more recently, Sister M. Skinnider, B. Aspinwall, J. Treble, T. A. FitzPatrick and F. O'Hagan have focused sharply upon the contribution of the religious orders who came between 1847 and 1894 to the survival and independence of Catholic education in Glasgow: the Franciscan Sisters, the Sisters of Mercy, the Marists, the Jesuits and the Sisters of Notre Dame.³ The general trend of this scholarship has been to emphasise the achievements of the various orders in their schools, seeing this as typical of the activism of the Catholic community and its leadership in the skilful promotion of their interests to a political establishment anxious to maintain consensus in a period of far-reaching educational reform. Much documentary work has been concerned with examining the connections, the personalities and the diplomacy involved in securing the religious orders their important [End Page 73] role in the creation and preservation of schools and the local social and confessional networks of support behind these efforts.

Without rejecting or underestimating the importance of existing approaches, it is nevertheless illuminating to relate developments in the dealings between the Catholic Church and the Scottish state authorities to wider cultural attitudes to the involvement of institutional Churches in the management of schools emerging among the Scottish elites in the last third of the nineteenth century. The specifically religious theme in this set of attitudes has until recently been markedly downplayed, but it may be of greater significance than has previously been recognised in understanding the general disposition of the state authorities towards the involvement of any and all Churches in the running of schools. This, in turn, underlines the unusual character of the State's dealings with the Catholic Church in Scotland in the same period – a series of transactions largely at variance with prevailing and long-term developments in Church-State relations in the British Isles.⁴

The peculiar and sometimes chaotic mix of parochial, burgh and private schools in nineteenth-century Scotland undoubtedly fell well short of the aspirations (regardless of how these might be viewed) of the radical reformers upon whose vision and efforts the traditions of early modern Scottish education had been raised.⁵ Nevertheless – and despite the misgivings of a younger generation of scholars towards the claims for pre-1872 Scottish literacy levels⁶ – evidence exists to suggest that educational provision in nineteenth-century Scotland in the absence of central state planning was varied and vibrant. We know this from the remarkable series of government surveys carried out in the early to mid-nineteenth century, most notably in the general survey of 1834, which revealed basic literacy competence and school enrolments of around twenty percent, well above the European average of around six percent.⁷ As the work of the sociologist Andrew McPherson has shown, 1834 was a turning point in the relationship between religion, State and education in Scotland.⁸ The tensions between Moderates and Evangelicals within the Church of Scotland, destined to climax in the Disruption of 1843, found in the 1830s a focal point of conflict in the contest for control of parochial schools. Established Church [End Page 74] Evangelicals, who saw the longstanding dispute about patronage as inextricably linked to the supervision of schools, levelled searing criticism at what they saw as the paucity of moral and religious instruction in the parochial system and, infamously, denounced Scotland as 'a half-educated nation'⁹ – thus supplying the advocates of increased state intervention with the much-cited pretext for a far-reaching reconfiguration of the relationship between Church and State in the management of education. Post-1843, the intensified efforts of the Free Church Evangelicals to prize governance of parochial schools from the grip of the established Church reinforced the perception of an internecine conflict likely to cause lasting damage to the educational fabric of the country and lent further justification to the centralising and increasingly anticlerical tendencies of the bureaucracy. The post-1847 Privy Council grants-in-aid scheme significantly increased government expenditure on schools and with increased supply from the secular authorities there came inevitably more exacting State oversight of the detailed operation and management of schools, much of it at best indifferent to the interests of the national Church.

It is, of course, quite possible to see in these developments, whatever their precise local causes, the broad outworking of the process of secularisation in education, paralleled in other European countries of the time. Despite the incremental advance of a centralising imperial state on the irregular and pluralistic Scottish schools system – highlighted in the steady imposition of the culture of 'standardisation' classically associated with the rise of industrial economies – between 1860 and 1872 the Edinburgh bureaucracy continued to criticise the inadequacy and confusion of the existing educational infrastructure, and particularly the allegedly retrogressive and disorganised role of the established Church in the provision of schooling. Donald Withrington's work has been vital here in demonstrating that constant government condemnations of the suggested failings of the Church as a provider of education were repeatedly contradicted by the government's own remarkably sophisticated instruments of demographic survey and review, the findings of which revealed far more effectiveness in the quality of education than successive governments were prepared openly to acknowledge.¹⁰ Even the exhaustive Argyll Commission of Enquiry of 1864, which paved the way for the revolutionary school-board system of the 1872 Act, produced statistical evidence from across Scotland of enrolments, attendance, teacher-pupil ratios and [End Page 75] attainments in literacy and numeracy, which belied its own alarmist conclusions. It therefore seems clear that behind the drive for centralised resourcing and regulation of the nation's schools lay a deeper estrangement of Church and State, with its roots in a complex Enlightenment legacy of ambivalence and scepticism on the part of professional elites towards the influence of Church and religion in the education and instruction of the Scottish people.¹¹

Against this seemingly inhospitable historical backdrop, the achievements of the Scottish Catholic Church between 1872 and 1918 in arriving at a rapprochement with the secular powers of late nineteenth-century Scotland for the protection and maintenance of a separate and distinctive educational system – within the financial and technocratic jurisdiction of a powerful and still essentially Protestant polity – seems all the more remarkable. In important respects no more than the priest caste of an ethnically alien and educationally backward immigrant population washed up on the shores of the world's first industrial society, the Catholic Church succeeded in assuaging centuries of sectarian enmity and incomprehension, conducting a skilful fifty-year dialogue with the ruling professional elites of Scottish education, the growing consensus culture of which sat in almost inverse relation to the declining influence and power of the national Presbyterian Church. Moreover, far from charting in this relationship of Church and State the supposedly inexorable modern pattern of secularisation, the period from 1872 to 1918 witnessed an enhancement of the stature of the Catholic Church and its agencies as providers of education. The culmination of this process came with the articles of the 1918 Education Act, a settlement swiftly regarded by the Catholic hierarchy worldwide as one of the few acceptable educational concordats between the Catholic Church and a modern democracy and viewed confidently by the state authorities as the basis of a lasting partnership.¹² Understanding both why and how this happened involves engagement with an experience of genuine Scottish exceptionalism that has not been fully examined by historians and educationalists. One of the implicit questions arising out of this appraisal is – how did a country regarded as pioneer of Reformation, Enlightenment and industrialisation find itself joint custodian of a Catholic educational system commonly seen as at variance with the defining principles of each? [End Page 76]

Backdrop to 1872: origins of Catholic school provision in Scotland

In the second half of the nineteenth century an identifiable group of Catholic teachers began to emerge in the centres of the immigrant Catholic population, especially after 1847 when Government grants became available to inspected parochial schools in Scotland, as elsewhere in the United Kingdom, in response to the lobbying of the Catholic Poor School Committee.¹³ Government grants were necessary for the continuing wellbeing of Catholic schools and as such were welcomed by the Catholic hierarchy and the Catholic community in general. What was not welcomed by the Catholic Church and the wider Catholic community, however, was any accompanying hint of Government control of, or interference in, the provision of Catholic education. In 1850, in Birmingham, Archbishop Ullathorne published his influential Remarks on the Proposed Education Bill, an attempt to anticipate the imminent debate about the position of religion in the schools in England by upholding parental rights to denominational instruction for children.¹⁴ Ullathorne's document criticised the idea of the secularisation of primary education. He followed this in 1857 with a still more important intervention, Notes on the Education Question. This was a detailed and balanced account of Government policy, ultimately critical of the terms upon which Catholic schools in England had accepted maintenance grants from the Government. Ullathorne was concerned about Government interference rather than financial maintenance:

After ages of exclusions, as Catholics, from the funds at the command of the state, we are beginning to receive its aid towards educating the poor of our Church .... And in return for that aid, as a matter of course, we are giving up something of that absolute freedom and independence of action, which, whatever else we have suffered, has been our greatest earthly blessing.¹⁵

Ullathorne admitted that Government inspection had 'stimulated and braced up the tone of our schools', but he warned of 'those hidden springs within the machinery over which the Government holds the direct, the exclusive, and perpetual control.'¹⁶ His point of view, which he stated clearly, was that 'Government inspection is one thing but [End Page 77] Government control would be another; and that we can never accept.'¹⁷ In 1870 Ullathorne made his position still more clear in a pastoral letter strongly urging Catholics to keep Catholic schools out of the new dual system:

Understand it plainly, my brethren, that it now depends on our own exertions, whether our Catholic children shall be taught by Catholic teachers, or can be put under a system of education which will not only deprive them of Catholic influence, but will be directly injurious to their Catholic sense and faith.¹⁸

For better or worse, Ullathorne's warning was not heeded and large numbers of Catholic primary schools in England continued to receive both grants and inspection under the terms of the new legislation. The situation in England was a foretaste of what was to happen in Scotland two years later in 1872. However, as we shall see, the terms in which the debate was conducted assumed a significantly different tone in the Scottish context, one which implied a subtly different style of encounter between Church and State.

The 1872 Education (Scotland) Act did not happen suddenly. Throughout the 1850s and the 1860s Scottish opinion seems to have favoured a new national system of education. The outstanding and revolutionary feature of the 1872 Act was the substitution of state control for that of the Presbyterian Church, which for centuries in Scotland had been the dominating force in education. Undoubtedly, as Ullathorne's anxieties had illustrated in an English setting, there was a definite tension between the aims of the Catholic Church as a minority provider of education to its faithful and the aims of the increasingly powerful and resourceful State embarked upon an assertive renegotiation of its relationship with a national, Protestant Church. On the one hand, the Catholic Church saw education as a means of proselytising and – in the case of at least some of the religious orders beginning to re-enter Scotland – as a means of constructing an educated caucus of Catholics who would then become influential in society.¹⁹ On the other hand, the state authorities saw the 1872 Education (Scotland) Act as a means of regularising the chaotic situation with regard to schools, or as a means of raising standards, or as an overt instrument of governmental control and accountability – or, perhaps, as all of these things. Alongside the essentially evangelical motivation of the Catholic hierarchy in the promotion of its schools, there also existed in the [End Page 78] Catholic population at large the continuing fear of sectarian and ethnic prejudice, the awareness of cultural separateness and suspicion of the enduring Protestant ascendancy of a nation still proudly and publicly associated with Reformation and antipopery.²⁰ The Catholic leadership judged, therefore, that a state system of education, in which Catholic parents had no assurance of the religious belief and Christian practice of teachers, or of the religious education to be provided in the daily life of the school, was not one that could satisfy the claims of the Catholic conscience.²¹ The introduction of compulsory education in 1872 exacerbated the problem for the Catholic population in a city like Glasgow, where large concentrations of poor, illiterate, immigrant Catholics had haphazardly congregated, desperately in need of pastoral and educational care.²² The Church's bold response to this volatile situation was to place a heavy reliance on members of a range of male and female religious orders from outside Scotland to strengthen the supply of teachers in Catholic schools. By 1872, four of the five teaching religious orders had arrived and were working in Glasgow – and not only in schools.²³

From 1872 to 1918, as educational requirements became more expensive to satisfy, the financial burden on Catholics, paying for their own schools and at the same time contributing to general taxation for the provision of non-denominational schools, became increasingly heavy. As each decade after 1872 witnessed a spiralling in costs destined ultimately to crush the older, voluntary schools out of competition with the Board schools set up by the Education Act, the contribution of the religious orders to secondary as well as primary education in Glasgow was essential for the continuation of a Catholic system deprived of a major increase in Government aid for which existing legislation made no obvious provision. Scotland was unique in this respect during the nineteenth century, since in many other countries in Europe at the time – for example France, Germany and Italy – there was a much more overt ideological shift from Church to State as a direct consequence of the twin processes of industrialisation and anticlericalism.²⁴ Remarkably, in Scotland, in precisely the same [End Page 79] period, and as exemplified by events in Glasgow, there was a curious converse of this process. Specifically, and, of course, ironically, in relation to a Catholic Church that the Scottish nation had for centuries viewed as its sworn enemy, the State not only allowed, but actively encouraged, the Catholic leadership to bring the religious orders to Scotland in general, and Glasgow in particular, with the express intention of pursuing their mission to educate and build up a Catholic community with a distinctive identity within the city. The pattern of these developments demonstrates clearly that the State recognised that, with their unique sense of community and common interests, the Catholic population of a major conurbation such as Glasgow possessed a corporate identity that might legitimately – and safely – be moulded and shaped by the religious orders in their key roles as educators of a confessional minority. The religious orders were therefore able to participate in the process of state standardisation envisaged by the 1872 Act and yet retain their position as religious missionaries. This amounted to a unique accommodation between Church and State unprecedented in Scotland since the early Reformation parliaments.

One appealing explanation of this outcome is the Weberian one that the State was doing nothing less, or more, than reaching out to what it perceived as an ethnically distinct and potentially alien and even subversive community, using the Church as an intermediary in the delicate process of disciplinary control.²⁵ However, the nature of the partnership established between the Scottish educational authorities and the Catholic Church suggests that a more nuanced and complex reading of the evidence is required. Standard accounts of Church-State interactions in the period in question customarily point to either the steady eclipse of ecclesiastically controlled schooling by the advance of secular provision, or to the instrumental use of intermediary Church agencies by state authorities anxious to control potentially disruptive minorities through Church proxies. From the perspective of religious organisations themselves, the standard account emphasises a siege mentality, with religious schools being used by increasingly beleaguered faith communities to withstand the encroachments of secular society and its anticlerical ideas.²⁶ The situation in Scotland between 1847 and 1918, and the eventual rapprochement reached between Roman Catholics and the secular powers, exhausts both of these explanatory models. Examination of the collaboration between key individuals in Church and State, and the pattern of provision on [End Page 80] which they finally settled, reveals a more complex interaction at work, rooted in the clarification of common interests and in the formulation of an educational agreement that offered each party much more than their minimum expectations. Focusing briefly on the parts played by important personalities in these developments implies no eschewal of explanations rooted in the analysis of social change, but it does seek to anchor that analysis in the motivations and aspirations of representative figures who were themselves vital agents of that change.

Catholic schools and social control: Craik and the case of Catholic teacher training

For a large part of the period covered by this article, immigrant Catholics were perceived by many influential interests as an obstacle to progress in Scotland. In the view of certain sectors of conservative opinion, they were involved in strike-breaking and they were poorly educated.²⁷ In the view of liberals and social reformers, they were seen to be part of a Church that was regarded as essentially illiberal and anti-progressive and which obstructed the progress of democratic reform. As Hickman argues, although they were formally citizens of the State, Irish Catholics, especially, were not generally perceived as part of the British nation in the middle of the nineteenth century. Anti-Catholicism was ingrained amongst all social groupings in Britain and was significantly intertwined with anti-Irish hostility and the growing fear of Irish nationalism.²⁸

Faced with the problem of how best to remake a British society fragmented by class and religious antagonisms into a nation-state, liberal opinion settled on the view that the stabilisation and reproduction of appropriate social relations required the medium of the State as a 'moralising' or educating agency, no longer reliant simply on the routine repressive or exclusionary measures of earlier regimes.²⁹ There was also widespread consensus, dating back to the Enlightenment, about the comparative efficacy of education as an institutional force for the control of the volatile working classes in general.³⁰ Mass education, as many historians and sociologists have recognised, is one of the key instruments of the modernisation process, insofar as it supports the creation of new, post-religious forms of loyalty and identity and facilitates capitalist economic progress. [End Page 81] Numerous cultural commentators, influenced by the work of Michel Foucault, have pointed out that within the secularising State the model of religious authority, with its traditional emphasis on surveillance and regulation, confirms religion as a classic and enduring vehicle for the realisation of social control. Religion, in this analysis, performs for a modernising society a transitional function while the institutions of the secular nation state mature and expand – eventually, of course, to leave religion behind.³¹

From a sociological perspective, building on a classical, Durkheimian theory of social control that links easily to historic Christian and Pauline principles of obedience, submission, loyalty to state authorities and the preservation of social stability, Steve Bruce has highlighted the part that religion can play, not only in regulating a majority population but in helping an immigrant group to come to terms with major cultural transition. Bruce suggests that 'cultural transition' and 'cultural defence' are evident in the case of the Catholic Church in Scotland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.³² It can indeed be argued that, despite their doctrinal and organisational differences, the Catholic Church and the Church of Scotland both performed a social control function in relation to the communities over which they presided in the early industrial period. Even if the social control model does not provide a satisfactory, all-embracing explanation for, particularly, the subsequent role of the religious orders in the promotion of denominational education, its insights need to be taken into account given the larger social and ecclesiastical context of industrial Scotland. For a nation taking the first tentative steps towards post-confessionalism in some of its key institutions, such as education, the potential intermediary role of the Catholic Church – and, more especially, its highly trained and focused religious orders – held forth the promise of social stability in the strongest sense of that term: stability secured from within rather than imposed from without. While this may well have been one of the key elements of State policy towards the Catholic Church, it seems absolutely clear that a 'social control' explanation does not capture the complexity and diversity of the activities of the Church in a variegated community such as metropolitan Glasgow. In the pursuit of their educational goals, the maintenance of stability may well have appealed to the leadership of the apostolic and missionary orders as much as to their State partners, but the key objective of transforming the fortunes of the marginal Catholic population remained central and could not be limited or [End Page 82] contained by any social control task discharged on behalf of the Scottish State.

Perhaps unexpectedly, one of the sites where there is early evidence of the developing relationship between the Catholic Church and the Scottish State authorities post 1872 is not the issue of the schooling of children itself, but the wider question of the training of teachers. As FitzPatrick has shown,³³ the arrival of the Sisters of Notre Dame in Glasgow in 1894 represented a key moment in both the provision of Catholic education within the city and in that other dimension of the education question with which the Scottish authorities had been preoccupied in their growing desire for centralisation – the training of qualified teaching staff for schools. Archbishop Charles Eyre, the first archbishop in the restored see of Glasgow, became aware of the work of the Sisters of Notre Dame in Liverpool, specifically in the area of teacher training. His invitation to the Sisters to set up a training college for Catholic women teachers was issued in 1893 and Notre Dame College was established in the Dowanhill area of Glasgow's West End in 1894. Introducing teacher education into the mix of Church-State partnerships brought another complicating theme to the work of Catholic education in Scotland, acting as a perhaps unexpected catalyst in deepening mutual understanding and collaboration between Church and State. For some considerable time, it had been recognised across the developing educational leadership in Scotland that too much reliance had been placed on the use of largely untrained pupil-teachers in Catholic schools, even as non-denominational schools were beginning to professionalise their personnel. A Scotch Education Department (SED) (renamed Scottish in 1904) report of 1891, produced under the auspices of Henry Craik, emphasised this anxiety:

There is a point beyond which the work, especially in the senior classes, will not rise, a point considerably lower than that attained in board schools. This holds true after making allowances for the poorer class of children common in Roman Catholic schools.³⁴

When the Congregation of the Sisters of Notre Dame opened their Training College in Glasgow in 1894 and, subsequently, an adjoining school, it was working under the watchful eye of the SED, though not, at first, with direct accountability to the department. Indeed, the [End Page 83] emergence of the arrangements for Catholic teacher training epitomises the evolving rapprochement between the Catholic Church and the Scottish State in the pre-1918 period. The convergence of interests also resonates with deeper social, economic and cultural forces at work in the Scotland of the time. It seems clear, for example, that the Sisters favoured the residential district of Dowanhill precisely because of its proximity to Glasgow University, a major European seat of higher learning, which for centuries had been powerfully associated with Scottish Protestant intellectual and clerical life and with which the Sisters were determined to associate their new college. This goal is indicative of the stated and perceived mission of the Sisters of Notre Dame throughout the period: engagement with, rather than withdrawal from, modern secular society.³⁵ The substantial fabric and appearance of the Dowanhill building, as well as its location, imply a serious sense of purpose, an optimistic, even ambitious attitude on the part of the Sisters towards their work in Glasgow. The actions of the Order reveal a congregation determined to be at the heart of secular society, unafraid of hostile influences, outward-facing and modern in approach.

Sister Mary of St Philip sent off the news of the letter of approval for the foundation of the new college of Notre Dame to Sister Marie des Sts Anges, the Superior of the Order, in Namur. Sister Mary's letter provides remarkable insights into the thinking of the lead protagonists in the Church-State encounter on this particular issue, as well as on the intensive negotiations that had allowed each party to realise their respective goals:

I opened it with fear and trembling, dreading that there might be conditions which you would not like, but it really seems miraculous, it is so perfectly fair and straight forward. Notice that it puts Glasgow on precisely the same footing as all the denominational colleges …

The proviso points to a desire to connect the Colleges more closely to the Universities, but they may not have in their power to do so for many a day. I am really astonished at the present Government acting towards us with so much fairness. We could scarcely have expected it but it must be owing to prayer, and we have much to be thankful for.³⁶ [End Page 84]

The outcome acclaimed by Sister Mary of St Philip was perhaps owed not only to the power of prayer but also to a dawning realisation on the part of the SED that there was urgency about the matter coupled with a convenient, ready-made vehicle for the training of Catholic teachers for Catholic schools in the form of the Notre Dame order. The initiative, indeed, was clearly part of a wider strategy on the part of the SED from which both sides would stand to benefit. The desire on the part of the Sisters to locate their college within the milieu of a university reflected their belief in a vision of learning in which the barriers between sacred and secular might be overcome and where the emerging educational leadership of the Order would interact with modern ideas and contemporary approaches to knowledge and learning associated with the environment of the university.³⁷ From the perspective of orthodox accounts of Church-State relations in the industrial period, the choices and actions of the Sisters depart from stereotypical portraits of the Church isolating its flock from the perils of worldly knowledge and aspiration. Everywhere can be seen a longing on the part of this important religious community, invited to play a pivotal role in Scottish Catholic education, to take their beliefs to the intellectual heart of the society in which they would serve.

The role played by Sir Henry Craik in the establishment and development of the Catholic Teacher Training initiative in Scotland was crucial, given the power of the SED at that time. Very revealingly, there was an early and enduring opposition on the part of Craik and the SED to direct university involvement in teacher training – for reasons unrelated to the Catholic question. This hostility came from fundamentally educational and not religious reservations. Craik's doubts were manifold: his lack of faith in the universities' familiarity with the classroom situation, his fear of the possibility of a training system falling between the two stools of liberalism and professionalism and – probably his deepest misgiving – the possibility of control of teacher education passing from the hands of the SED itself:

It would be very difficult for us to exercise the same control in the university, or even any committee appointed by the university, which we exercise over the training colleges. They are constantly visited by our inspectors. They are under our supervision as regards their curriculum in every way.³⁸

Craik expressed a preference for the separation of the university course from teacher training by the establishment of the 'university [End Page 85] graduation plus one college year' pattern. When weighing the claims of the Catholic Church to high quality professional teacher training, it is evident that Craik was in favour of leaving the management of new Catholic training institutions to the denominations because this served to strengthen his position in relation to the universities and their possible encroachment on the preparation of teachers. Empowering the colleges, even to the extent of reinforcing the hold of the Church over its own institution, assisted the SED in building a teacher education structure quite independent of the university influence, which Craik feared infinitely more than he feared the Catholic Church. This explains the positive language of his letter in 1893 formally sanctioning the establishment of Notre Dame College:

I am to state that the proposal for the establishment of a Roman Catholic Training College for mistresses in Glasgow … has been under consideration.

My Lords find that the facts of the case entitle the proposed College to recognition on the usual conditions and have accordingly decided, on the fulfilment of the necessary preliminaries, to place it on the list of those conditionally credited with grants under Articles 86-90 of the Scotch Code. It would be well that a correspondent should be named, who is to act on behalf of the College, in Glasgow, with whom the Department may hereafter communicate. My Lords wish it to be distinctly understood that the present decision does not in any way commit them to the permanent recognition of Training Colleges on their present footing, and that while extending to this undertaking the advantages enjoyed by Colleges connected with other denominations under the present system, they reserve to themselves the right hereafter of reviewing the relations generally of the Training Colleges to the Department.³⁹

Craik's dialogue with the Sisters of Notre Dame crystallizes several of the issues surrounding Church-State relations in the period of rapid expansion of Catholic education throughout Glasgow and the West of Scotland. Upholding the rights of the Church to the maintenance of its own college suited the wider ambition of the SED to increase centralised control of education. At the same time, the opportunistic response to these manoeuvres on the part of the Sisters of Notre Dame typified the ability of the Catholic Church in Scotland to collaborate skilfully with the state authorities to their mutual advantage. [End Page 86]

Struthers and the search for consensus

In the period from 1885 until 1904 the SED became an undoubtedly powerful and creative force for innovation in Scottish education. Much of its influence was attributable to Henry Craik, its energetic permanent secretary throughout that period. He was, in particular, largely responsible for giving the SED a central role, only dimly anticipated by the 1872 Act, in the development of secondary education in Scotland, assuming over a period of some twenty years a profile, and an autonomy, higher than most civil servants of the era.⁴⁰ Craik's successor, Sir John Struthers, also held the position of Permanent Secretary of the SED for almost two decades. Craik occupied the office from 1885 until 1904 and Struthers from 1904 until 1921. Each of these men faced the task of dealing with the Catholic Church and negotiating a place for the Church in the planning and overhaul of Scottish education that would adhere to the ambitious, centralising goals of the Department whilst avoiding any alienation of the Catholic minority and its vociferous leadership. Shifting attention to the lived experience of schooling, there are several significant episodes in the unfolding history of Catholic educational provision in the crucible of late nineteenth-century Glasgow that serve as illustrations of the evolving relationship of Catholic Church and Scottish State in the years leading up to the First World War.

In 1894 the Convent School at Charlotte Street, run by the Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, and subsequently named Our Lady and St Francis, came under government inspection and, on the basis of this, more advanced work was undertaken by pupils and teachers. In 1899 the school was recognised as a Higher Grade School and a Pupil Teacher Centre was instituted. In 1894, to satisfy the growing demands for more advanced secondary education in the centre of the city, another teaching order, the Sisters of Mercy, purchased the building formerly known as Buccleuch House and renamed it Garnethill Convent School. The 1890s scheme of Higher Studies undertaken in schools such as these was based precisely upon the requirements of the examination system initiated in 1888 by Craik. Pupils were presented for the Leaving Certificate Examination and University Preliminary. Craik's creation of the Leaving Certificate involved a complete reorganisation of the studies of the Advanced Schools of Scotland, formally known as Higher Grade Schools. Garnethill Convent School was recognised as a Higher Grade establishment in 1904. In only ten years, therefore, the two religious orders had taken remarkable strides in the education of girls in the city of Glasgow, all of which were implemented in a fashion consistent with [End Page 87] the goals of an SED only too eager to see the new schools further the objective of integrated national provision. In the East End of the city, the Marist Brothers performed a similar task for boys in the founding and recognition by the state authorities of St Mungo's Academy. Although for the most part a poor, underprivileged section of the community, Catholics built, equipped and maintained these and other schools and paid their teachers. Writing in 1918, John Struthers had observed of the situation immediately after 1872 that Catholics were obliged to pay rates 'for the support of schools which from motives of conscience they could not make use of.'⁴¹ Looking back from the vantage point of 1918, Struthers' comment conveys something of the spirit of sympathetic engagement that the initially tentative process of collaboration had begun incrementally to foster between the Catholic Church and the state authorities in the decades after 1872. It reveals a convergence in the objectives of both parties on which a new kind of Church-State operational cooperation could at least theoretically be built, reinforcing the strategic collaboration established under Craik for the training of teachers. Owing to the inconsistency of the record, it is not possible to establish conclusively the full extent of Struthers' role 'behind the scenes' in the crucial 1898–1904 period. Nevertheless, the archive does reveal key transitions in the thinking of Struthers – consistent with the overall evolving policy of the government authorities towards the Church as both a provider of education and a potential partner in the expanding State enterprise.

Between 1898 and 1904 the framework of Scottish education was reshaped in every particular by means of a series of departmental minutes and circulars of monumental import for the system as a whole. The rationalisation of the grant system was completed; post-primary education was reclassified and developed in new directions by the institution of Higher Grade Schools and Supplementary Courses; continuation classes were regulated in a single system and grouped around central institutions; the training of teachers was reorganised. It is not too much to say that these initiatives represented an outworking of the educational vision of Struthers and their consolidation was the most characteristic part of what he accomplished as Secretary. To some extent they hinged upon the Scottish Education Act of 1901, overseen by Craik, which raised the school leaving age to fourteen. In 1907, having contrasted unfavourably the Episcopal Schools (few and decreasing, finding it difficult to compete with state schools, disappointing those who wished to 'proselytise' and, in Struthers' view, very probably about to undergo imminent national takeover) with their [End Page 88] state counterparts, Struthers saw a very different situation in what he termed 'RC' circles:

… making all allowance … I think it indubitable that the great majority of the existing RC schools would continue to be maintained and attended even if they did not receive a single penny of aid either from State grants or from local rates. There is a genuine question of principle behind these schools for which their supporters are willing to pay and to pay heavily. Whether they do in fact pay enough is another question. Personally, I think not … What is the result of the working of this system in Scotland? There is one enormous advantage which is the direct outcome of it viz that there is no such thing as a 'religious question' in Scotland. Nowhere does one hear a word of complaint on the subject. This is no doubt largely explained by the comparative homogeneity of religious belief in Scotland. But that is not the whole explanation. One is apt to forget that about ⅓ of the school population of Glasgow is to be found in RC schools and that throughout the mining and manufacturing districts the proportion of RCs is high. It is quite certain that if any attempt were made to subject the RC schools in any way to the control of the local authority there would be the strongest resistance on the part of the Catholics … Scotland would be aflame from end to end and we should have a religious question with a vengeance. My conclusion is that the present is the only safe settlement in Scotland …⁴²

Struthers went on to stress that, even if local authority takeover ensured greater efficiency, the resultant religious strife would be costly. This was uncharacteristically colourful language for the normally restrained Struthers and signals an important underlying element of his analysis of the social context in which Catholic schools operated in Scotland. Nevertheless, the broad SED objective of a much more centralised and coherent educational system across the country – given initial expression by Craik – remained a priority to be reconciled with these other perceptions and anxieties. Struthers' strategy now emphasised realisation of the objective through the more subtle means of steadily extending the enforcement of national standards on staff, equipment, plant etc., in a manner guaranteed to incentivise ever-closer partnership between Church and State. The 1907 Memo is an extremely informative primary source, for these comments were made, after all, by the same man who gradually worked from 1911 to 1918 for a settlement with the Church that in 1907 he himself had thought impossible. The crucial turning-point was, of course, the 1908 [End Page 89] Education Act and the transformation it effected in the duties placed upon any and all providers of education. Reality for the Catholic schools was changed in the period after 1908, which brought – in addition to expensive building of plant – added burdens of physical and social welfare, developed teacher training and a series of innovations and regulations which the Church could not meet from its own resources. Instrumental in the production of the 1908 legislation, Struthers himself played a crucial role in creating a new situation in which he would 'begin to suggest' a series of arrangements with the Church that had previously seemed to him insupportable both in terms of confessional favouritism and the larger determination to retain fundamentally secular centralised control of the rapidly modernising national school system.

Of the many practical challenges facing the Church in its desire to preserve an autonomous network of Catholic schools, the trigger for renewed dialogue with Struthers over the question of Church-State cooperation was undoubtedly the issue of the Draft Teachers' Superannuation Scheme of 1910. A direct consequence of the Liberal Government's radical pension reforms of the previous Parliament, the intended Scheme confronted the Church with a seemingly insurmountable financial challenge. Perhaps buoyed by the commanding role of the new Irish members in the reformed Parliament, overtures were made to Struthers by Catholic MPs and the Catholic Education Committee of Scotland (CECS) for face-to-face meetings that would address the range of worsening financial problems with which the Catholic schools system was burdened. In a memorandum preparatory to the first of these meetings, Struthers conceded revealingly to his staff that '... when all is said and done the fact remains that about 1/9 of the school population of Scotland is for the most part receiving an inferior education because of the existence of these Voluntary schools ....' He went on:

I firmly believe that the present large grant to Voluntary schools is productive of comparatively little to the State and that to secure a really beneficial result the expenditure in one way or another must be largely increased.⁴³

It seems clear that Struthers concurred with the Catholic delegation with which he finally met in April 1911 that the financial difficulties threatened a crisis in both the continuing viability of the Catholic schools and in Church-State relations. Minutes of the meeting record a robust encounter in which Canon Mackintosh, on behalf of the CECS [End Page 90] and the bishops, challenged Struthers to support the schools in satisfying new legislative requirements for teacher superannuation and smaller class sizes but warned him of the Church's unwillingness to see Catholic schools assimilated into a national system. In a sequence of formal and informal meetings subsequent to the April 1911 encounter, Struthers dangled before the Catholic representatives a series of options in which various permutations of Church and Local Authority finance and governance arrangements were modelled. The most far-reaching of these was Struthers' proposal of 30 May for a Bill incorporating Catholic schools into the national system in return for large-scale investment. Struthers' Memorandum to the Secretary of Education reveals the ultimate ambition of this move:

In my view, the essential alteration in the conditions of transference ... which is required in Scotland would be to give the Local Authority more complete control of the transferred schools and greater powers of assimilating them to their other schools as regards the efficiency of the secular instruction by giving them a majority on the Committees of management ... This would ... satisfy the reasonable demand that schools sustained by public monies be under public management.⁴⁴

At one point in his dealings with Struthers, Mackintosh sombrely concluded that the goal of centralised secular control being pursued by the Secretary was likely to make agreement impossible. Struthers' own motives at this stage seem perfectly consistent with the overall direction of SED thought since the early days of Craik, with its object of steady and subtle displacement of the Churches from the management and oversight of schools. As Br Kenneth noted forty years ago in 1968,⁴⁵ Struthers' policy formulations of 1911 were crucial in the realisation of the settlement with the Catholic authorities eventually achieved in 1918. The basic building blocks of an agreement emerged in the negotiation of the two principal and controversial areas of financial governance and the appointment of staff – negotiations unexpectedly protracted by the political upheavals occasioned by the Great War and the fall of the Asquith administration in 1915.⁴⁶ The turning-point appears to have occurred at the juncture where the two key questions of finance and staffing, originally seen as mechanisms for (in Struthers' phrase) 'assimilating' Catholic schools, were suddenly reconceptualised as devices for securing their lasting autonomy within an essentially state-controlled system. At the point where partnership between Church [End Page 91] and State seemed on the verge of collapse, Struthers made a series of vital concessions that transformed the prospects for collaboration. The most important of these was the clever and typically 'Struthers' formula for ensuring that teaching staff in Catholic schools were at one and the same time full employees of the Local Education Authority whilst also requiring them to be fully 'approved' for employment by the Church, 'as regards their religious belief and character.'⁴⁷

In an important sense, the mechanism of 'approval' – which has remained fully and controversially in place in Scottish education for almost a century – epitomises the paradoxical nature of the Church State partnership with which this article has been concerned. In key respects an anomalous arrangement for an educational system that purported to be secular and free of Church control, approval defined the point at which the interests of Church and State both collided and converged. By proposing approval, Struthers was able to remove a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to the realisation of Craik's original dream of an integrated state-sponsored system of schooling in Scotland – one that, to this day, retains one of the highest levels of popular participation in the world, dwarfing independent or fee-paying provision. Approval lay at the heart of the 'transfer with safeguards' principle that the Catholic Church in Scotland consistently believed would guarantee – correctly, as it has transpired – the continuing vitality and distinctiveness of its schools within a modern state system operating in accordance with a fundamentally secular construction of educational purpose. The achievement of Church and State in each affirming the claims of the other on precisely those issues where, in almost every other polity, the relationship unravelled to the lasting detriment of religious schooling, marks the encounter in the lead-up to the 1918 Education Act as genuine experience of Scottish exceptionalism.

Postlude: the 1918 Act

Historians traditionally see the 1918 Education (Scotland) Act as a watershed in a number of spheres. It marks the entry of Catholic religious schooling into the educational culture of the twentieth century, signalling the admission of the Catholic community into mainstream Scottish education. At the same time, it can be seen as highlighting the end of an older apostolic philosophy of education, vigorously independent of state jurisdiction. It is worth reflecting on what might have happened if the 1918 Act had failed and all of the schools managed by, for example, the religious orders had remained outside state control. The Act, although subsequently regarded by many as [End Page 92] hallowed and with terms that can never be surrendered, at the time of its passage into law aroused deep fears within several sectors of the Catholic community. In retrospect, not all those fears were groundless. Echoing the debates of 1911, Gourlay observes that opponents at the time pointed out how the Church's only way of safeguarding the Catholic nature of its schools now lay in the right to approve teachers who would henceforward owe their appointments and their salaries to education authorities, and not to the Church. With an ironic echo of the words of Struthers himself, Gourlay adds:

They feared that the schools, once part of the state system, would have a strong tendency to be assimilated into it and to seek to obscure rather than cling to the distinguishing features of confessional establishments.⁴⁸

A preliminary judgement might be that, as with so many of these seemingly momentous turning points, the consequences were mixed. Consistent with broader themes of this article, the 1918 Act allowed Catholic education to become a mainstream element within the Scottish educational experience. It also gave the Catholic community access to unprecedented levels of resources. On the other hand, it is also possible to see the 1918 Act as the moment at which the Catholic Church acknowledged that it was no longer capable, within its own resources, of providing a sustainable education to its children. It therefore inadvertently contributed to the process of secularisation by enmeshing the Church in the State's apparatus, compromising its independence and arguably circumscribing important elements of its distinctiveness.

Pessimistic accounts of the 1918 Settlement have to contend with the fact that a flourishing separate Catholic school system continues to exist in Scotland today. The Catholic community has demonstrated that, although there are certain principles that must be protected – the most obvious being the right to a confessional religious education administered by Catholic teachers – this need not entail the community seceding from Scottish society. This 'diversity within unity' was ensured when in 1918 the Catholic community agreed to accept the national system of education and embrace the Scottish curriculum. Rather than withdrawing, the Catholic community proclaimed its identity as active and involved, not simply submitting to the forces of social control, but reclaiming agency and recognition in the midst of a dynamic, if sometimes hostile, secular society. In this analysis, older champions of Catholic education, such as the religious orders, provided a model of Catholic education the ultimate virtue of which lay not in [End Page 93] any pastoral or educational retrenchment of the kind predicted by the ideologues of secularisation, but in its embrace of change, its flexibility and its openness to innovation. The further demonstration of this in recent times, as the religious orders have themselves been replaced in schools by an active Catholic laity educated almost entirely within the terms of the 1918 partnership, strongly urges an optimistic assessment of the achievements of Scottish Catholic teachers and leaders in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Scotland in forging – against formidable odds – an enduring and successful educational pact with the State. [End Page 94]