Speaking on 22nd September 2005, Mr. Phillips made a keynote speech entitled After 7/7; Sleep Walking to Segregation, to the Manchester Council for Community Relations. In this speech he said:

“Data from OFSTED shows that when we look at the ethnic mix of schools, Catholic schools tend to be far more mixed than local authority schools. A healthy mix might be a school with a proportion of ethnic minority pupils somewhere between 5% and 40% - where these children neither predominate, nor are they isolated.

Among state schools, about a quarter (25.6%) fall into this group. But amongst Catholic schools, a third (32.5%) would fit this description. So the passion being spent on arguments about whether we need more or fewer faith schools is, in my view, misspent. We really need to worry about whether we are heading for USA-style semi-voluntary segregation in the mainstream system. That would be a grim prospect."

The CES is delighted that Mr. Phillips has acknowledged the ethnic diversity in Catholic schools. Too often people forget that religion, culture and race are not the same things. The Catholic Church is truly Catholic in its universality and this is well demonstrated in the racial diversity of our communities and subsequently in our schools.