Fitting Faces

One of the aims I have in this blog is, occasionally, to shine light on some of the more arcane processes of the Church of England, and the business of how clergy arrive in their positions is one of the more unnecessarily reticent of them (let's not say secretive). When an ordinand is in training, it's normally assumed that the diocese which sponsored their training will find a place for them to 'serve their title' as a curate, which in Guildford diocese should take no fewer than three years and no more than four. Dioceses have some constraints acting on how many ordinands they can support and place, which are a mixture of the financial and of trying to preserve a balance of ecclesiastical flavour across the area; ordinands deemed surplus to requirements are 'released' to look for work elsewhere. This commonly happens in dioceses such as Oxford or London which historically have produced more ordinands than they can place once their training is over. Occasionally somebody is 'released' because they are actually completely unsuitable for anything and their sponsoring diocese doesn't want them around, although the training process has been tightened up in recent years to avoid duds getting that far. I have heard this phenomenon charmingly referred to as 'throwing dead cats over the wall'.

Our ordinand-in-training, Debbie, has been 'released'. She only learned this after trying for three weeks to get some kind of information from the training department as to what should be happening to her, suddenly aware that some of her colleagues had training parishes already sorted out. She had a brief, uninformative email from the diocese saying they had 'no place' for her, without any hint of help finding a position somewhere else, or an explanation why. Her training institution, Sarum College, is up in arms about this as it's not the first of their graduates this has happened to. Our curate, Marion, recalled exactly the same fate befalling one of her echelon; meanwhile, as she and other curates have noted, the diocese seems perfectly happy to import ordinands from evangelical colleges such as Wycliffe or Trinity Bristol at the same time as telling non-evangelical ordinands that they aren't required. The training department hasn't seen fit to inform me, as Debbie's training incumbent, about this decision at all. 

Is Debbie perceived as a 'dead cat' to be thrown over the wall, or does she simply not fit the bill the diocese, or a certain bit of it, thinks it wants? I and I daresay Sarum College as well will be trying at least to get some answers.