Following the partition of Ireland in 1921 and the establishment of the unionist-dominated government in the new six-county northern jurisdiction, Northern Ireland’s first education minister, Lord Londonderry, rose to his feet in the new Parliament on 14 March 1923 to propose his visionary Education Bill.
This, he believed, would “lay the foundation of a system of education second to none in any portion of the world”. He celebrated the “genius of self-government” in Ulster, which, he claimed, was just as alive there as anywhere else in the “entire universe”.
‘Myriad deficiencies in NI’s education system’
A century later, there is a bitter irony to Lord Londonderry’s naively optimistic words, as it is hard to imagine a more embattled, beleaguered and crisis-ridden education system anywhere. Indeed, a litany of reviews and reports over the past 20 years have highlighted the myriad deficiencies in Northern Ireland’s education system.
These numerous failings include its crumbling special educational needs (SEN) system struggling to meet the surge of statemented children compounded by the lack of available places in the existing 39 special schools.
The Department of Education is currently leading the latest in a series of SEN reviews that stretch back to 2009 and that have created over 200 (largely unactioned) recommendations.
Another longstanding challenge is the long tail of educational underachievement in Northern Ireland where the GCSE attainment gap between children entitled and not entitled to free school meals has remained close to 30 percentage points for the past 20 years, despite hundreds of millions of pounds of government investment and a costed action plan endorsed by all main political parties, which remains largely unfunded.
A further perennial difficulty in Northern Ireland is that its education system is divided in multiple ways: less than 8 per cent of pupils attend formally integrated schools, the rest attending largely single-identity (Catholic or Protestant) schools.
Northern Ireland has also largely retained its method of academic selection, whereby around 16,000 children aged 10-11 sit entrance tests each November to gain entry to state-funded grammar schools, leading to high levels of stress and anxiety for children and parents alike, trapped in a highly inequitable selective system.
Where has it all gone wrong?
Observers might understandably ask, where has it all gone wrong? After all, the numbers in Northern Ireland are relatively small: 356,000 pupils across 1,116 schools (that’s fewer pupils and schools than in Greater Manchester).
However, while some of Northern Ireland’s challenges are common to other parts of the UK, it is clear that the education system there also faces unique systemic challenges.
Progress in addressing its many challenges has undoubtedly been hampered (and at times completely halted) by years of political wrangling and fallout. For instance, there can be no other jurisdiction in the world where there has been no functioning government (and therefore no executive, no education minister and no scrutinising education committee) for five of the past seven years.
However, while this may seem in itself disastrous, regrettably even when there is an executive, the form of government introduced following the Belfast Good Friday Agreement in 1998 (mandatory coalition between up to five often diametrically opposed political parties) means that cross-party agreement on major educational reform has proven to be virtually impossible.
Signs of hope after ‘policy paralysis’
Such political dysfunctionality has led to an executive failure to grapple resolutely with any significant systemic challenges and instead has created a frustrating sense of policy paralysis.
This paralysis has been exacerbated by the enduring impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, years of industrial action by the teaching unions and punitive budget cuts imposed by the secretary of state for Northern Ireland in the absence of devolved ministers, which have had a disproportionally negative impact on those already disadvantaged in society.
All is not lost, however. We do finally now have a restored power-sharing executive, an assembly education committee and an education minister - Paul Givan - all in place since February and, for now at least, working together with an encouraging sense of common purpose.
With an education system on its knees, surely now more than ever before is the time for our political leaders to display some of that “genius of self-government” that Lord Londonderry heralded a century ago.
Professor Noel Purdy is director of research at the Centre for Research in Educational Underachievement, based at Stranmillis University College in Belfast. He is also a governor at a special needs school and editor of the journal Pastoral Care in Education. He tweets @NoelPurdy
