Councillor Eileen M. Keegan has drawn assumptions from my article which the article itself did not in any way justify. It was an attempt to outline the difficulties which changing L.E.As' plans can impose upon the organisation of Catholic education developed within plans drawn up only a relatively short time ago by those same Authorities.
A structure may have only just been completed or may not have even been fully completed when it is pushed out of line by funda mental alterations. .
Further complications occur when our provision of secondary education uses Direct Grant Schools and involves children from a number of Authorities each with a differing concept of secondary education. The position of our administrators is not helped when L.E.As. may not bring all interested bodies fully into their confidence at the very beginning and at all stages of their replanning.
Councillor Keegan assumes a lack of consultation and even of awareness by Bradford Catholic Managers and Governors.
Nothing in my article suggested this and had she read the follow-up report she would have learnt that intense efforts were being made by the Catholic school authorities to effect equality of treatment for Catholic children. The fullest possible consultation has taken place within the time available. By the vela nature of things such reorganisation as Catholic schools could effect could not be fully planned for until the principles upon which the L.E.A. based its own proposals were made known to all concerned.
Some changes which are now being introduced in Bradford and elsewhere are as far reaching as those of the 1944 Education Act and have not had to be met by Catholics before.
Councillor Keegan's fourth paragraph seems to infer that the retention of a selective system for Catholic children only in Bradford would be. if finally arranged, at the wish of the Bradford Catholic authorities. If she does infer that, she has no right to do so from my article. ryty l remind her that it is by aai no means certain that the measures now p abeeei sn gt inretnr Fiedduycewdh ai nt saomn uemcobneri conskier to be defects in secondary education and in selection for it, will achieve the desired end.
Apart from our own problem in Catholic secondary education, nationally the State would be wise not to destroy a system painfully built up in the face of many difficulties ion the post-war years, until
lied experimentation had proved that the replacing systems did not create more evils than they sought to remove.
B. A. Harrington.