The Catholic Education Service of England and Wales wishes to emphasise that all Catholic maintained schools are subject to Ofsted inspections under section 5 of the Education Act (2005), and that the Service welcomes this arrangement. There is no wish at all on the part of the sector for a different system of inspection. The inspection system (under section 48 of the Act) already allows for the separate inspection of religious education by inspectors nominated by the diocesan authorities. When possible, those authorities prefer to timetable their inspections at the same time as Ofsted inspections.

Catholic independent schools are subject to the same inspection arrangements as other independent schools and here too there is no wish for any changes to create a special ‘faith schools inspectorate’ as reported in a Daily Express article of 11 September 2006. The CES expects that inspection teams will be sensitive to the special character of Catholic schools and finds this to be the case in the overwhelming majority of inspections, of both maintained and independent schools. A separate system would run totally counter to the wish of the sector to play a full part in the educational life of the country: to succeed by the same criteria applied to all schools, while making a distinctive additional contribution to the personal spiritual growth of pupils in a Catholic environment.