Recent evidence from Diocesan and Office for Standards in Education inspections under the Education Act 1992 seems to suggest that while pupils in Catholic schools in England and Wales obtain high levels of academic success at Key Stage Two and Key Stage Four compared with those attending other schools in the maintained sector, their achievements in Advanced level examinations are lower than one would expect. The article points to evidence of a similar long‐standing pattern of performance of pupils in Catholic (...) schools and speculates on some possible causes of the phenomenon. (shrink)