The Catholic Education Service (CES) has reported that their 2022 annual census of Catholic schools has shown that learners in Catholic schools in Wales are ‘much more diverse than the national average.’ Catholic schools comprise 6% of the national total of maintained schools in Wales.
The main headlines derived from these data have been published on the CES website (23 January 2023), and include:
- More than 30% of pupils in Wales’s 82 Catholic state-funded primaries and secondaries are from an ethnic minority background, compared to 12.5% in all other schools.
- Catholic schools in Wales also have more than four times as many black pupils, with 4.5% of the 28,176 pupils being Black or Black British, compared to 1.1% in all Welsh schools.
- There is also more than twice the proportion of pupils from an Asian or Asian British background (6%), compared to 2.6% in other schools.
- Just over half (50.3%) of pupils in the sector are Catholic, as are 43.6% of the 1,644 teachers employed.
- A total of 73.4% of pupils in Welsh Catholic schools are Christians, and 80% are from a faith background. Of the 13,992 non-Catholic pupils, 46% of these are from other Christian denominations, 36.8% have no religion, and 5.7% are Muslims.
To help contextualise these figures, read the full census 2022 report for Wales:
http://catholiceducation.org.uk/images/CensusDigestWales2022EnglishText.pdf