Despite the centrality of laïcité as a legal principle and a recurrent theme within the contemporary political debate, faith-based education provision has a long-standing tradition in France, where Catholic providers continue to represent the lion’s share of private subsidised education. Indeed, Catholic schools account for over 17% of primary and secondary enrolment, reaching much higher proportions in urban areas (e.g. Paris) or specific regions (e.g. the northwest of France) (Cour des Comptes, 2023; Grisez, 2024). Catholic schools benefit from substantial levels of public funding (averaging 70%) and a moderately restrictive regulatory framework – one that imposes stringent provisions on curricular and employment-related dimensions, while granting schools considerable autonomy in areas such as student admission (Monso, 2015; Pons et al., 2015). Such features cannot be disconnected from one of the most distinctive features of Catholic schooling in France – namely, its dual or hybrid nature. Hence, according to legislation in place, Catholic education is defined as a private service of public interest – with Catholic schools often understood as private operators of a public service (Poucet, 2024).

Contradictions derived from this ambiguous position have been exacerbated over the last decade. On the one hand, Catholic education providers are increasingly subject to expectations to reinforce their public-service dimension and align with system-level goals. Largely as a result of growing awareness of Catholic schools’ critical role in school segregation, the sector has come under the political and media spotlight (Cour des Comptes, 2023; Durand & Salles, 2015), becoming the object of various regulatory attempts (e.g. Protocole d'accord sur la mixité sociale et scolaire à l'école avec l'enseignement catholique [Protocol of agreement on social and academic diversity in schools],2023). On the other hand, certain sectors of the Catholic Church favour a greater centrality and visibility of the Catholic dimension, while the Catholic education sector has undergone a process of internal restructuration, professionalisation and centralisation, institutionalising many facets of the sector’s autonomy vis-à-vis State education (Poucet, 2024). Overall, and as documented for other hybrid organisations cutting across the public and private sphere (Denis et al., 2015; Krøtel and Villadsen, 2015), Catholic providers in France face the challenge of striking a balance between the preservation of a form of privateness and self-governance, and some degree of alignment with the public ethos, values and practices associated with public service.

However, and despite the prominence of Catholic education within the French public debate, there is limited understanding of how such policy mandates and contradictory expectations are being received, interpreted and enacted by Catholic providers. This is all the more problematic considering the internal heterogeneity of the sector, which encompasses schools catering to a variety of social strata and exhibiting considerable differences in their coupling with religious bodies and their pro-social orientation (Da Costa & van Zanten, 2019; Durand & Salles, 2015). Such organisational heterogeneity can be expected to translate into different approaches to the public-service mandate and their alignment with public-sector values, with important impacts on public-service outcomes (Anderson, 2012).

In light of this, the paper examines how Catholic education providers in France interpret their own role as public-service providers and navigate contradictory expectations and mandates concerning such responsibilities. Cross-fertilizing sense-making approaches (Coburn, 2004; Diehl & Golann, 2023) and publicness theories (Anderson, 2012; Bozeman, 2013), our investigation aims to: (a) map different understandings of the public-private dualism across the French Catholic sector, and the underpinning cognitive and normative frames; (b) identify the organizational attributes associated with these different frames (e.g. autonomy vis-à-vis religious bodies, expressive factors relative to mission and charisma of founding communities, etc).

The paper relies on three complementary data sources. Hence, the study draws primarily on a corpus of interviews (n=35) with three main groups: (a) key informants representing the main umbrella organizations and governance structures bringing together multiple Catholic providers; (b) managers and senior officials from a sample of Catholic education providers (i.e. groups of schools under the auspices of a given congregation or diocese), and (c) representatives of the religious communities charged with the oversight (tutelle) of such networks. In the case of groups (b) and (c), interviewees are sampled across three regions (Île-de-France, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur and Bretagne). These offer some degree of institutional, religious and social variation, while allowing us to identify overarching, cross-cutting trends. Care was taken to further capture a diversity of school network characteristics in the sample (e.g. network size, tutelle type, gender of congregation). Overall, this corpus of interviews allows us to gain insight into the causal and principled beliefs, values, social representations and motivations driving and shaping the actions of Catholic providers. Complementarily, the study relies on an analysis of the publicly available websites of an exhaustive sample of Catholic networks operating in the sampled regions (n=48). Such analysis allows us to map the diversity of approaches taken by Catholic providers in the articulation of their religious and educational identity as part of their external communication efforts, as well as capturing different discourses as to their alignment with public-service goals. In this way, such analysis allows us to document various approaches to privateness and publicness coexisting in the sector, while also gaining a more fine-grained understanding of different sources of organisational differentiation (e.g. identity and purpose and the role of religiosity therein; symbolic and functional integration between religious and educational poles; market position; prosocial dispositions, etc) identified as relevant by existing literature. Finally, the research is informed by a review of relevant policy documentation and media pieces concerned with the changing role of, and expectations around, Catholic education in France. This corpus includes official reports, memoranda and prospective studies prepared or commissioned by educational authorities or government agencies; as well as various materials prepared by different umbrella organisations tasked with the governance and coordination of the Catholic education sector. The analysis of such materials allows us to orient research efforts and data-collection instruments, but also to contextualise and decode the insights gained through interviews, allowing us to test and substantiate emerging findings.

Our study identifies two critical sources of variation in the public-service orientation exhibited by Catholic education providers, namely (a) considerations as to the intrinsic desirability of public-service values; and (b) considerations as to the compatibility of such public values with the preservation of a (variously defined) Catholic ethos. These two axes allow us to map a series of positionings reflecting various combinations of desirability and feasibility considerations, associated with different institutional logics, namely: expressive alignment (public service viewed as an expression of the Catholic social confessional doctrine), instrumental alignment (public-service role as a survival strategy), selective alignment (accommodation and resignification of certain values); compartmentalisation (alignment with public sector goals as requiring some degree of internal secularisation); and detachment (public-service expectations as a form of State interference). Understanding how the organisational heterogeneity featured by the Catholic sector maps onto the diversity of interpretations of public-service responsibility, and of the tensions derived from ambiguities around the public/private dualism, represents a critical endeavour not only from an academic perspective but also from a policy-planning one. Indeed, the question of value or ideational congruence has been gaining prominence in the study of private providers of public services. There is growing recognition that the alignment between the values and goals exhibited by private operators and those pursued by the public administrations commissioning their services, is critical to understanding the outcomes of outsourced provision and the achievement of policy goals (Capano & Lepori, 2024; Mettang & Euchner, 2023). Given the critical role played by subsidised private education providers in the European context (including faith-based operators), this case study offers relevant insights of policy and academic interest beyond the immediate French context.

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