Communio, Catholic Education and Communities of Hope

The twenty-year anniversary of the Diocesan document Fit for Mission? will be celebrated 2027. This document set out a clear and mission-focussed vision for our schools, outlining how an authentic and unapologetically Catholic education could act as an important witness to an increasingly secularised society. This is an opportune moment for a renewal of this important document, in light of the significant challenges facing our schools and the changed political and demographic contexts in which they operate.

At this conference we wish to open up the conversation regarding the mission of our schools and how we ensure they remain fit for mission in a much-changed world. This includes reflection on the purpose of Catholic schools, their role within the mission of the Church, the changed ways in which they operate, and how they may need to continue to change to meet the new challenges they now face.

The conference will comprise a mixture of keynote speeches and more informal panel discussions. We wish to host a diverse range of voices to help enrichen the discussion. We also warmly invite delegates to stay with us for dinner following the conference - accommodation is available if required.

We would be delighted if you would join us and support us in our discernment, as we reflect upon the mission in education in the Diocese of Lancaster.

Speakers

Current confirmed speakers include (more to follow):

• Professor Stephen Bullivant - Saint Mary's, Twickenham
• Professor Jacob Phillips - Saint Mary's, Twickenham
• Paul Barber - Director of the Catholic Education Service
• Dr Philip Robinson - Chief Inspector, Catholic Schools Inspectorate
• Katherine Bennett - commentator and former teacher

Schedule

Lancaster House Hotel, Lancaster University - 25th September 2025

We welcome delegates to join us for coffee at 09:30 for a 10:00 start, and the conference will finish at 16:00. There will be option to attend Benediction in the Catholic chapel at the University Chaplaincy Centre, a short walk from Lancaster House. For those staying for dinner, we anticipate dinner will be served at approximately 17:.30. A full timetable for the day, including final speaker list and paper titles, will follow in due course.

Dinner and Accommodation

Accommodation is available at Lancaster House and this can be booked via the ticket options below. Delegates may wish to book for the Speakers' Dinner, without accommodation - this option can be selected via the ticketing options below.

Travel

Lancaster House can be found at Lancaster University campus, a short taxi ride from Lancaster railway station, or just off Junction 34 off the M6. Parking is available on site.

__________

Please see below for a fuller outline of the conference aims and objectives.

“For I Know the Plans I have For You”: Communio, Catholic Education and Communities of Hope

We are all familiar with challenges faced by Catholic schools, not only in England and Wales but increasingly across the Western world. From the difficulties of recruitment to shifting cultural trends, from (in)adequate formation to the sometimes uncomfortable demands of legislators, there has long been a sense of foreboding about the growing challenges to the settlement bequeathed us from a time much different to our own. These challenges have inevitably shaped what we are able to provide, and how we are able to provide it. And with it has come an oscillation between sad resignation at the inevitable, and a reactionary dismissal of the good work and potential of our schools.

So we find ourselves in a bind. Heirs to an educational settlement the envy of Catholic communities across the globe, yet restless at the strains and trade-offs this collaboration engenders, many have become increasingly uncertain of whether we ought to accept the compromises necessary to uphold the status-quo. Operating in a world of rapidly changing social mores, the State is seen as anything from an unreliable partner to a hostile force from one perspective, to the only thing keeping our educational offer alive from another.

Which means it might be as prudent to question whether it is us who have become unreliable partners for the State, rather than the other way round. A changing demographic within our churches now wants different things from its Catholic schools; a younger group of Catholics in particular, who have actively chosen the counter-cultural life of faith, want their schools to do the same – and they do not feel the same tribal loyalty to their parish schools that marked out their parents or grandparents before them. It is the irony of our times that the greatest challenge to the current mission in our schools in partnership with the State may come not from hostile external forces, but from faithful, good-hearted Catholics.

As such, we stand caught in the middle, mediating the excesses of both poles of this debate, though with each seeming to offer the same ultimatum: to reconsider our whole endeavour, or to abandon it entirely.

And yet there must be reason for hope. Not a hope founded in finding new ways to accommodate uncomfortable realities, nor a hope that possible future demographic shifts might spring up and keep the project afloat just a few years more, but hope flowing from the abandonment of ourselves to the mercy and wisdom of the God who knows what He wishes for His people.

We seem to have lost a language to articulate this hope, with focus often dominated by the instinct to preserve an historic settlement from a time that is not the one which we currently inhabit. As such, we are still searching for a new way of seeing in this changed world, one to help us approach our challenges anew, giving us a lens with which to understand our trials and to formulate faithful, measured responses in light of them. And sitting behind all this, the tangible sense that now, as much as at any time in recent history, the wider culture is blindly grasping for what only we can provide; the practical realities we face are complex, but now is surely not the time to leave the field.

We wish to explore the concept of communio as a fruitful avenue to engage in this work. Through it, we wish to discern where our understanding of the mission of the Church in education can draw its lines, and how this can better help us approach the challenges we face, a language to steer the middle course between despair and reaction. Pope Benedict XVI once described a Church that ‘arises and exists through the Lord communicating himself to people, entering into communion with them, and so bringing them to communion with one another.’ This conference aims to explore how the principles of communio can shape our understanding of the mission at school, parish, diocesan and national level, and provide us with a way of seeing that helps us as we enter, with hope, into the challenges that it is the grace of our generation to endure.