The McAuley Catholic High School is a coeducational Catholic Academy in Doncaster, South Yorkshire, England, and since 2003, a Specialist School for the Performing Arts. In 2014, the school was granted permission by the education authority to acquire Academy status, and thus now holds the status of a Catholic Voluntary Academy. History The Convent Collegiate School can trace back its original foundation to 1887, but the current school was founded in 1981 by the amalgamation of the Catherine McAuley Grammar School and St Peter's High School Cantley. As a school for the children of local Roman Catholics, it was originally a girls private school until the move in the 1970s, when the School became coeducational. The School takes its name from Catherine McAuley, founder of the Sisters of Mercy, the order which ran the School until the late 1980s. Born at a time of anti-Catholic bigotry in Ireland, McAuley was deeply touched by the faith of her father who welcomed the poor of Dublin to his door, cared for them and taught them the Catholic faith. James McAuley died when Catherine was a child, and her mother some years later, yet despite the anti-Catholic feelings of the relatives who took Catherine and her brother and sister into their care, Catherine held on to the faith of her father. At 40 years of age McAuley inherited a fortune from a childless couple she had befriended. With the inheritance she bought a property in an affluent part of Dublin, where she was determined to bring the needs of the poor to the attention of her wealthy neighbours. With like-minded women McAuley engaged in the practical work of housing poor women and children and educating them through academic schooling and training in practical skills. Eventually McAuley and the other women who had joined in her work became a formal religious order taking the name Sisters of Mercy. They were among the first nuns who were founded to work in the community and became nuns following the expansion of Catholic clergy and their role in education and welfare in Ireland after Catholic emancipation. Soon other houses of mercy were founded throughout Ireland, and McAuley then founded the first convents to be built in England since the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. The work of the Sisterhood of Mercy spread throughout the world after McAuley's death, and her passion for education as a means