FROM THE ARCHBISHOP: Catholic Education – a service to Tasmania

There is much to be proud of in Catholic education in Tasmania.

Our schools educate thousands of young Tasmanians each day. They achieve excellent academic results. The 2025 NAPLAN results showed students in Catholic Education Tasmania performing above the Tasmanian average across every domain and at every year level assessed. Fewer students in our schools were identified as needing additional support.

But academic results, important though they are, do not tell the whole story.

Parents choose Catholic schools because they want something more. They want excellent education within a community shaped by faith and Christian values. They desire that their children be known, respected and cherished. They want schools in which the dignity of every human person is not simply written into a policy document but lived each day.

Sometimes, listening to parts of our public debate, one could imagine that Catholic values are somehow an obstacle to creating schools where young people are welcomed and safe. The evidence tells a very different story.

Recently, I received some remarkable information from Marist Regional College in Burnie. Students were asked what they valued about their school. One Year 10 student spoke about teachers wanting the best for students and appreciated that the College “upholds standards and has structure.” Another praised the support offered by staff and counsellors. Another simply said: “The values align with my personal values.”

Even more striking is that, in interviews for the 2027 Student Representative Council, more than half of the students interviewed spoke of having a strong Christian faith and wanting faith practices to be further developed and made more visible within the College and beyond.

The young are worth hearing!

Young people are sometimes spoken about as though adults already know what they need and what they believe. Yet here are young people themselves asking for more visible Christian faith in their Catholic school.

The wellbeing evidence is equally encouraging. In Marist Regional College’s 2026 Resilience Project Survey, the proportion of students reporting that they always felt safe at school was significantly above the reported national average in every year level.

This matters because there are voices in the public square seeking to minimise the place of Catholic values in Catholic schools, whilst seeking to shoehorn other values and ideologies in their place.

We should listen respectfully to public debate. We should always examine our own practices. Where we can do better, we should do better.

But we should not be embarrassed about being Catholic.

Our Catholic identity is not opposed to inclusion. It is the reason we insist upon the infinite dignity of every person. It calls us to welcome the child who walks through our gates, to care for them, and to help them discover the person God is calling them to become.

Catholic education in Tasmania is something precious. We should cherish it, strengthen it and never be afraid to let it be Catholic.