WHILE many students attended colleges of education as a "stop-gap" or because they wanted a job to fall back on when their families were grown up, Catholic teaching was a particular vocation, said Fr. Cedric Frank in an address to the Teesside Catholic Teachers' Association.
Catholic colleges o f education existed to fill the needs of Catholic schools, although non-Catholic students must not be excluded from them, said Fr. Frank, who is president of the Catholic Teachers' Federation.
A problem was whether to concentrate on preparing students for the integrated day, or for one of the other modern or traditional methods of teaching.
Schemes were being proposed which would limit even further the number of acceptable candidates for training colleges and this at a time when there were only just enough students to fill the existing places.