Some people would sell their granny’s kidneys to get their children into the right school. This issue is a hardy perennial. I wrote about it in
The Times six years ago after hearing about parents renting temporary flats in desirable catchment areas, pressurising friends into providing accommodation addresses and even feigning broken marriages so that fathers could claim that they lived near a target school.
There were tales of spurious arguments accepted by appeals panels. One woman claimed that it was the dying wish of her daughter’s cancer-stricken grandmother that the girl should attend a particular school. Another argued, successfully, that in Caribbean families, cousins are effectively brothers and sisters, so her child should get into a cousin’s desirable school under the sibling rule. An US Episcopalian mother miraculously rediscovered her nominal religion to get her child into a local Anglican school. As Labour politicians from Tony Blair to Diane Abbott have discovered, the twin drives of aspiration and desperation can make hypocrites of us all — and sometimes liars.
Even so, the writer-director Joe Ahearne thought that he was taking matters to a logical extreme when he created an atheist couple who pretend to be Roman Catholics to get their daughter into a good Catholic secondary school. This is the premise of Perfect Parents, to be shown on ITV1 tomorrow. Needless to say, the trick proves fiendishly difficult to pull off, and the plot spirals into sinister territory. Ahearne says that he has never come across anyone who has tried to do this, but how plausible is his scenario? “The impetus came from my producer, Nicole Cauverien,” says Ahearne (a lapsed Catholic with no children). “I had no idea that there was so much pressure to get your kid into school today. There’s a taboo about this because parents can be in competition with each other. You’re not telling everyone over the dinner table what you’re doing to get your kid into school.” Cauverien, who lives in Camberwell, South London, had noticed that the pressure was becoming obsessive, even among primary school children.
The fake Catholic couple, Stuart and Alison, are played by Christopher Eccleston and Susannah Harker (memorable in Andrew Davies’s version of Pride and Prejudice and in House of Cards). “I’ve never done anything for which I’ve received such a response as this,” she says. “I have come across many examples of the extremes to which people will go to put one’s child through this system.”
Religion and the supernatural lurk in Harker’s ancestry. Her great, great, great grandfather, Jonathan Harker, was a friend of Bram Stoker who named the vampire-hunter in Dracula after him. Another ancestor was Bishop Ridley, the Protestant martyr burned at the stake in 1555. Susannah was brought up Catholic and educated in a “strict” boarding school run by nuns. Her son attends a private South London secondary school. Ahearne might have had to invent his atheists who feign religious belief, but Harker has actor friends who have really done it. “This was for a Cof E school,” she says. “They were genuine atheists and had to start going to church. In the end they were chased up by the vicar to be in the Easter play and decided that was where they had to draw the line and take their kids out.” They ended up going private. But Harker say that she knows “several” actors who have pulled the same stunt.
Yet faking Anglicanism may be a stroll in the park compared with faking Catholicism. In Perfect Parents, once Alison and Stuart have rejected for their daughter Lucy (Maddy Garrood) their local comps, they quickly realise what a gargantuan task they have taken on. The challenge for Ahearne was to make it appear possible. Although most Catholic schools — including the London Oratory, attended by Tony Blair’s children — refused to talk to the team, two schools helped Ahearne and Cauverien with the research. I ran Ahearne’s plot past a real Catholic head teacher: Ursula Morrissey, of St Michael’s, a Catholic girls’ grammar in North London.
The first problem in the plot is the paperwork. The family needs certificates of baptism and first communion. Ahearne has Stuart working in a garage and in touch with purveyors of dodgy documents. “It’s convenient that Stuart has access to someone who can forge documents,” he says. But forging church documents wouldn’t be that easy, Morrissey says. “Every church has its own stamp, like a seal. If there isn’t a stamp on a document you would question that, in case they had forged the priest’s signature.
“We occasionally get application forms from people who are not Catholic,” she says. ‘But if I don’t know the church and minister they’ve put down, I always check in the Catholic Directory. If the priest isn’t in the Westminster Yearbook, I would contact him and ask ‘who are you?’ Often they turn out to be Anglicans. Some Cof E churches have Catholic-sounding names. But you’d be talking less than five out of hundreds of applications a year.”
The primary test for admission to most RC schools is “Catholicity”. “Most Catholic secondary heads used to interview prospective pupils and their parents to test the Catholicity of the children and their parents,” says Morrissey. “But the English bishops agreed with the Government that there could be a perceived unfairness in the interviews, and they were abolished two or three years ago. Now we rely solely on a reference from their parish priest.”
The London Oratory was taken to court for continuing to interview last year, but won the case on the grounds that the interviews, while against the Government’s code of practice, were not illegal. Its website carries a breakdown of degrees of Catholicity, from regular attendance at mass to involvement in parish activities. For other schools, though, the only evidence is the priest’s reference, stating how regularly the parent(s) and child attend mass. In one scene, Stuart and Alison are called to the school by the head (Leslie Manville) to be told that there are irregularities in the paperwork. In practice, says Morrissey, this would not be settled by interview.
Stuart and Angela are put in touch with a priest (David Warner) who will complete the reference for a fee. He also provides a crash course in the catechism and how to take Communion. Morrissey thinks that such a child would quickly be spotted. “You’d see that they didn’t know how to make the sign of the Cross, for instance.”
Yet the idea of finding compliant priests is not outrageous, especially helping the lapsed. “Some would see it as a great opportunity to get people back into the church,” says Ahearne. Others could want to subvert the admissions policy, be financially corrupt or open to another form of improper pressure.
“You’d be a fool to say it couldn’t happen,” says Morrissey, “but if it’s happened to me I’m not aware of it. And I’d like it to stay that way really,” she laughs. The difficulty of this scam seems to make it improbable. Then I mention the story to my 22-year-old son. He met a girl on work experience last summer, he says, who told him she went right through secondary school pretending to be Catholic.
Perfect Parents, 9pm, ITV1 tomorrow
