Woman to head London schools set-up

A WOMAN has been appointed director of the new Westminster Diocesan Education Services, one of the top posts in the diocese.
Mrs Kathleen O'Gorman, 45, a mother of four, will be the first woman to hold a post of such seniority in any diocese in England and Wales. She will take over in May from Mgr Ralph Brown, a Vicar General, who has been acting as caretaker during the first stages of a fundamental reorganisation of the diocese's educational structures following the controversial Grubb Institute report last year.
Mrs O'Gorman will eventually head a team of specialists In religious education, and formation In schools, in parishes and in continuing education. There are more than 200 parishes in the diocese serving about half a million Catholics, and 252 Catholic schools, with some 80,000 pupils.
Meanwhile, a working party set up by the diocese to examine the feasibility of the Westminster bishops' proposals for the reorganisation of secondary schools hi north west London has recommended the establishment of a new Catholic secondary school has Chelsea.
The new school would be the result of the amalgamation of two existing schools, St Thomas More and St Edmund's. The working group, which drew its members from governors, staff and representatives of the Inner London Education Authority, also concluded that enough pupils would be applying to Catholic schools in 1986 to make the bishops' proposals of 21 forms of entry in ILEA Division One a feasible proposition.
Although there was disagreement between members of the 18-member working group over the best form of amalgamation of the two schools, the majority decided that setting up a new school was preferable to closing one school and expanding the other. They recommended that the new school be based on two sites, at the St Thomas More site and at the former Chelsea school site.