Catholic schools are better, and that’s the blunt truth

You'll understand why, then, for a long time I've been convinced that the debate in Scotland about sectarianism and faith schools has been over-simplistic and ill-thought- through. Setting aside Northern Ireland, it is difficult for me to imagine such a discussion, in its current form, being taken seriously in any of the other European countries of my experience - and that would be most of them.

The dividing lines in working- class Scottish society in the west of Scotland of my youth actually ran along social and economic lines. Religion was a handy distinguishing label, not the root cause. And you don't tackle a problem of this seriousness - and so-called sectarianism is a serious problem in parts of our country - by tinkering with labels: you need to understand and address the root causes.

In our wee village we also knew, of course, that our Catholic pals went to a different school from us. They got on the bus in the morning and went to St Jo's in Kilmarnock; we set off for Cumnock Academy. And, to tell the truth, we always felt that wee bit sorry for them. For the stories they told - entirely apart from the ogre-figures of the priests contained in them - were of teachers and circumstances which always seemed second-class compared to our own. It only confirmed in our minds what we already knew, of course; that what we had - father's job, housing, clothes, schooling - was somehow or other better than theirs. I'd love to say it pricked our consciences, but it takes more than that to get through to an adolescent boy. No, we just knew that that was the way it was.

Can you image my consternation then, some 15 years after leaving school, when - by that time as rector of the Gordon Schools in Aberdeenshire - I ran across the work of Andrew McPherson of Edinburgh University?

But maybe I need to explain a little. It's hard to imagine now, but there was quite a dominant school of educational thought in the sixties and seventies which asserted that schools hardly made any difference to pupil attainment; everything depended upon family background and the home. Andrew thought he would check this through, and he and his colleagues developed a research technique - sort of a pre-cursor to today's "value-added" approach - which would let them compare schools and their respective attainments. And the results were stunningly unexpected.

It turned out there were two kinds of schools which were doing much better than average. Moreover, the first of these, Catholic schools, were doing so entirely contrary to expectations. The "common-sense" approach predicted that Catholic schools would have much poorer results in the study. We thought we knew why, too. Catholic schools drew on children from historically poorer than average socio-economic groups, whose parents had often had a significantly more limited experience of education. Both these factors were known to be strong indicators for underperformance - and Catholic schools' known staffing difficulties should only have made matters worse. But these schools were actually out-performing the so-called non-denominational schools. What on earth was happening? Maybe it was all a matter of prayer - and Catholic prayer at that? Scotland's educational establishment drew in their collective breath.

Well, the clue lay in the other group of schools which performed above expectations - the old "burgh" schools of the Scottish towns; schools such as Greenock Academy, Perth Academy, Kilmarnock Academy or Aberdeen Grammar School. Now, bear in mind that, by this time, all state schools in Scotland were comprehensive - so it wasn't a matter of selection or anything like that. But while they may all have been comprehensive, these old burgh schools still retained many of the characteristics which had made them successful in their time. They tended to have high expectations of their teachers and their students; they had a strong value base, often made explicit in their patterns of organisational behaviour and their traditions - their institutional memory, if you like. They had, in the jargon, a strong, supportive and positive school ethos - and this appeared to work.

Nor was it hard to transpose this understanding into the Catholic ethos that Catholic heads, teachers and clergy worked so hard to create in their own schools. And their Christian faith was the perfect context in which to do this - just as it had been in the robustly Kirk- centered burgh schools of the past.

Andrew's work was quickly noticed, of course, and for a while Scotland led the rest of Europe in recognising, and responding to, the importance of values in education. Thus "school ethos" became a focus of attention both in schools, and in school inspection reports - and this attention paid off in terms of offering schools a way to help their pupils to higher patterns of achievement.

It's important to distinguish, of course, between "values education" - courses aimed at developing a moral and ethical sense in pupils, which are largely ineffective, and "values in education" - an approach which is effective, because it recognises that values are generally caught, not taught, and which thus emphasises the importance of the values embedded in the way a school, and its head and teachers actually behave.

And the truth is that Christian schools - and in Scotland, Catholic schools are more or less all we have left of this provision - are a very powerful context in which to put this approach into practice. They have to be monitored, of course, to ensure that education in a Christian context doesn't turn into indoctrination. But then that should be easy, given the commitment to the value, worth and distinctiveness of every child which is embedded in Christianity; and the importance, central to Christian thought, of enabling that child to grow into an adult able to make genuine informed and independent choices about his or her own life.

So good for you, Cardinal O'Brien. You stick up for your Catholic schools. In fact, if it helps, let's say it explicitly and authoritatively - the evidence is that, on average, Catholic schools are better, and that's the blunt truth. And, judging by the queues of non-Catholic middle-class parents enrolling their children at my local Catholic primary, you won't want for support.

So please, if you can, stop our politicians from responding to a half-baked analysis of ill-understood social circumstances with ideologically driven and poorly-thought- through policies which will make things worse, not better. Rather than exacerbating the problem of sectarianism in our society, it seems to me that Christian schools have the potential to be part of the solution. Babies have been thrown out with bathwater in Scottish education before. Now is not the time to repeat our mistakes.

• Cameron Harrison, a former chief executive of the Scottish Consultative Council on the Curriculum, is a consultant and adviser to governments on education policy. He was recently ordained as a minister of the Church of Scotland.