New move

for more school grants
By B. A. Harrington
AWARNING that the whole question of State financing for Catholic educa tion will have to come before Parliament was given by Bishop Dwyer of Leeds last Saturday.
Speaking at the official opening of the new Sacred Heart school at Sowerby Bridge, near Halifax. Bishop Dwyer declared:
"The increasing cost of building schools for an ever-increasing Catholic population is a matter so serious that it will certainly have to be taken up again with the next Parliament."
He added that State grants were bound to drop because so many new schools required for increasing Catholic population did not qualify. Grants are available only for schools which replace older buildings or provide secondary schools for children in existing primary schools.
EXAMPLES
From his own diocese Bishop Dwyer quoted Halifax where between £250.000 and £300,000 is needed for one, possibly two, big new secondary schools. "That would be an impossible amount to raise without a grant", he emphasised.
As long ago as 1959, the Bishop added, the Government was asked for a 75 per cent. grant but "all kinds of pulls and pressures brought on the Government from elsewhere prevented them agreeing". Meanwhile a new regulation announced this week by the Minister of Education will help voluntary teacher training colleges. including Catholic Colleges. Because the distinction between "expansion" of colleges for which grants have stood at 75 per cent., and "improvement" of colleges which carried grants of 50 per cent.. has become so blurred. it has been decided that both types of work will get 75 per cent, This regulation will stand until 1967. Seventy-five per cent. is now the universal rate of grant for voluntary schools or colleges, wherever grant is paid at all. The difficulty in the case of schools is that grant is not available in every instance (as cited by Bishop Dwyer); some schools receive no grant, whilst others rank for grant only in part.