I have just had a long and very frightening e-mail from someone in the know at St Bede’s College in Manchester explaining the present atmosphere and Daniel Kearney’s erratic behaviour. It seems that things, instead of improving from the all time low of last year when Kearney’s qualities as head were exposed like nothing else, they are now reaching lower depths. At last the parents are copping themselves on and realising that the school is no longer the Valhalla it has always said it was. Prospective parents are voting with their feet and becoming aware that they might as well let their kids go to the local comprehensive and save 9 or 10,000 GBP a year than send their kids to Bede’s. The results are the same and there are better things to do with their hard earned than give it to the reckless and feckless Daniel Kearney and his erstwhile mate, the florid Quinlan.
It seems the numbers of flustered parents clustering round the first year open day is no more, numbers of prospective candidates for the entrance examination are dropping at an alarming rate and the need for parents seeking a good Catholic education is a thing of the past. Catholicism and all its paraphanalia no longer holds sway with Catholic parents. Is there such a thing as Catholic parents in the 35 to 45 year old professional and earning classes? Has the Church finally finessed its way out of the minds and hearts of supposedly Catholic mothers and fathers? Young parents are now not as heedlessly taken in with the utterings of a religion that has lost its way in this world. There are plenty of decent schools round the periphery of Manchester to send your children to which have no religious identity. So why send your children long distances to a school whose supposed ethos is no longer required. This 35-45 year old bracket of parents who have the money for a private education are generally these days divorced entirely from the Catholic Church and its ridiculous metiers. All they want is a good caring secular education without the hang ups and dirty washing the Catholic Church brings to the table.
I think the Salford Diocese know this and are trying to break it gently to the parents that they have already enticed into their web. That is one of the reasons why Kearney was a deliberate appointment, he was put in place not to succeed. He was put in place in dubious circumstances to ensure that the school fails. The school and its playing fields are a fine piece of real estate virtually in the centre of Manchester and the Diocese would be nuts not to redeem its assets faced with the problems coming down the tracks at it Some of you might shirk from this point of view but we will see, a couple of years down the road, if in fact Kearney lasts that long.
At a recent staff meeting last week Mr Kearney lost the plot altogether, his neuroses came to the fore and he blamed the assembled staff for the catastrophic fall in applicant numbers and their machiavellian plotting and briefing of others. A sure sign that another home leave of undetermined length beckons.
One of the other sure signs that things are not going right at the school are the numbers of staff sending their children elsewhere for an education. They are nearest the action, they can see the quality of what is on offer and they are the ones with a choice. A growing number are taking this away option and it is a real pity, some of the older staff who have put in years of good work must be in despair at the sudden downturn. A career of caring hard work smothered by a failed Church and a failing, never fit for purpose headmaster and badgered into performing Kearney’s way by a phalanx of thugs employed by the head to manage the school.
Not only is the intake down 50% in numbers, I understand about 40 were garnered on the first cull, Kearney has been refusing places to some children that he suspects of taking other private school entrance examinations. This was brought to light when a friend of one of the governors had a child who was refused a place even though the entrance exam had been passed. Surely not the act of a rational thinker faced with the problems he had. The governor complained and Kearney was told to reverse this and other decisions brought about by his many neuroses and which has made him very unpopular with the Quinlan mob but it has been a victory for the Hale Barns/Bowden set, which Bede’s unfortunately have tended to lean on these last few years with their scant regard for humanity.
This obvious policy of the Diocese, to send the school down as quietly as possible, has brought about the affect of pushing a wagon to the top of a hill and hoping Kearney, the appointed man, has brought the braking system with him. He hasn’t, he left it at home on his last leave of absence and the wagon is now careering down hill with no control at all.
Kearney’s answer backed up by the governors is to increase the number of idiots from Manchester City Football Club. These boys, although helping the school to recruit an intake of around the seventy pupils it needs for viability, far from help the school to survive. In fact they are hastening its demise. They are not subject to the same discipline and do not have the same academic ability as the rest of the pupils. They have become an elite and are despised by the majority of the kids. The City boys behaviour and general unwillingness to work puts more burden on the thoroughly disgruntled staff and so the cycle worsens.
This conundrum has made the staff morale become virtually non-existant, they now go to work to bring home their pay, looking desperately for other jobs away from their manic headmaster and a failing establishment. There is a distinct stand-off between the ordinary staff and the SS style thugs that Kearney brought in to manage his new style of education, which came to a head at the end of Christmas term, when the staff or those daft enough to go, had their Christmas party. One of these thugs, an antipodean, who brought his ancestors free and easy ways over with him, became plastered with a surfeit of booze they never knew how to handle and he started mouthing off to all and sundry. A young female teacher told him to shut up and she got a lashing of his tongue. An elderly teacher with some years at the school came to the lady’s aid but was grabbed round the collar by Down Under and given a throttling. The row was hot and heavy and the talk of Didsbury for weeks and it was well known it was between the staff of St Bede’s. No action was taken, Kearney bottled it and Pike poured it down the sink. Poor old Spike Martin only lives round the corner from this venue, he would have dropped with a heart attack at the news of the school descending to such lows.
On good authority I have it that the feeling in the school is abysmal, the righteous staff are on their knees, the kids are not reaching their potential. The Salford Diocese is fiddling whilst Bede’s burns and the parents are still forking out money for a dying cause.