When the results of the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls) - an international comparison of pupils’ reading ability - were published in May this year, England’s schools minister, Nick Gibb, was not shy in celebrating the success of his policies. And the message in the national newspapers was that England was one of the leaders of the western world in literacy.

Yet if it wasn’t for the disruption caused by Covid, that position could also have been taken by Northern Ireland. 

Northern Ireland had delayed its testing of pupils as a result of the pandemic, so was excluded from the final Pirls tables, but you can still see its scores: with a population of just 1.8 million, it would have ranked fourth in the world, comfortably above England in terms of its raw score.

So, why isn’t England - and, indeed, everyone else - flocking to Northern Ireland to see what its education system has to offer? If they did, they might not find the clarity of vision and systems they would expect, but rather an education system in flux. 

An independent review of education in Northern Ireland was originally pledged in the New Decade, New Approach agreement between the UK and Irish governments in January 2020. This said that the Northern Irish executive would set up a review aimed at “securing greater efficiency in delivery costs, raising standards, access to the curriculum for all pupils, and the prospects of moving towards a single education system”.

That review was originally scheduled to report this year, but it has been delayed with no specified delivery date. Some suggest it has been held up by the absence of a Northern Irish executive; others that the panel is taking longer than planned because of the enormity of the issues.

A ‘single education system’ in Northern Ireland?

An example of the latter is that there’s a big question as to what that potentially momentous phrase “a single education system” means. 

Should it mean a system no longer divided between Protestant- and Catholic-administered schools? Most Northern Irish schools are under the management of either the Council for Catholic Maintained Schools (the “maintained” sector for short, where the majority of pupils are from a Catholic background) or the Education Authority, a public body (the “controlled” sector for short, where the majority of pupils are from a Protestant background).

Across all levels of education in Northern Ireland in 2022-23, 139,000 pupils were enrolled in controlled schools; 124,000 in maintained; 5,400 in other kinds of maintained schools, mainly schools with Irish language teaching; 51,000 in voluntary grammars with a high level of autonomy; and 15,100 in integrated schools that aim to bridge the community divide.

Or should “a single education system” mean a system no longer divided by academic selection?

In 2022-23, across Northern Irish secondary schools, 88,590 students were enrolled at non-grammar schools, while 65,722 were at grammar schools, the vast majority of which are selective.

Quite how segregated Northern Irish schools still are will come as a shock to some. Joanne Hughes, a professor of education and director of the Centre for Shared Education at Queen’s University Belfast, says: “We have a system of education that’s divided both in terms of ethno-religious lines - 94 per cent of our kids continue to attend separate schools - and then layer into that the problems of selection, which, in a sense, are dividing children on class lines.”

Hughes was co-author, with colleague Rebecca Loader, of a 2022 paper arguing that academic selection reinforced Northern Ireland’s sectarian divide, which attracted vociferous criticism from the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). The pair highlighted existing research on “the association between attendance at non-selective schools and poorer academic outcomes”, and warned that this was leading to a situation whereby “the highest levels of underachievement are concentrated in more marginalised (and by definition, religiously segregated) communities where grammar school attendance is low”.

The paper suggested that “the grammar school system may be inhibiting the impact of initiatives such as shared and integrated education”, but also, by increasing underachievement among poorer communities, could be a factor in sectarian violence, given “the greater likelihood that underachieving, working-class Catholic and Protestant boys will respond to ethno-religious provocation”.

A segregated and selective system is just one of many issues that the review is trying to tackle, though. Core school spending per pupil is lower in Northern Ireland than in England, Scotland and Wales, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has found.

‘The inherent unfairness and unjustness of the system is palpable’

Plus, the continued failure to restore the power-sharing government at Stormont - the DUP is blocking that over its concerns about post-Brexit trading arrangements - leaves Westminster able to order cuts to the Northern Irish education budget. That has brought the recent scrapping of a raft of programmes, including food payments supporting children eligible for free school meals in the holidays and a mental health counselling scheme for primary school pupils.

Despite all these problems, though, international comparisons say that education in Northern Ireland is thriving. And not just the Pirls study mentioned earlier: Northern Ireland’s 2019 Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) scores for 15-year-olds in reading were above average, a result described as “world class” by the National Foundation for Educational Research. In the 2019 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (Timss), only five of the 58 countries taking part outperformed Northern Ireland, leading then education minister Lord Weir, of the DUP, to declare (again) that “we have a truly world-class primary education system”.

But some academics claim that if you dig deeper you can see the reality of the long-term problems of Northern Irish education laid bare.

Researchers at the Centre for Research in Educational Underachievement at Stranmillis University College said in a 2020 report that actually “a significantly higher proportion” of Northern Ireland pupils performed at the “low Timss benchmark” compared with other countries. Meanwhile on Pisa, “variations in the highest and lowest performing groups” in Northern Ireland compared “unfavourably to the international averages”.

And the proportion of young people who leave formal education without qualifications in Northern Ireland remains “relatively high”, the researchers said.

What the high achievement at post-primary level “hides or masks is…the long tail of underachievement; the massive, massive gap between grammar schools, selective schools and non-selective schools”, says Koulla Yiasouma, who was Northern Ireland’s children’s commissioner from 2015 until March this year.

Children with special educational needs (SEN), or from challenging backgrounds and disadvantaged families, are funnelled into non-selective schools, she says. From her experience of talking with young people, the “inherent unfairness and unjustness of that system is palpable - it is felt by the children who go to the schools that are non-selective. Many of them are getting a really good education, but you can see the lack of resources in those schools. You can see how they are struggling”.

Out of all the issues detailed above, it is selection that has most commonly crossed into the political debate. Those in favour of selection accuse opponents of misrepresenting the facts - particularly in terms of religious segregation. 

“This stuff really does irritate me,” sighs Leo O’Reilly, chair of the Governing Bodies’ Association (GBA), representing the 50 “voluntary grammar schools”, which have a high degree of autonomy under their governing bodies.

No grammar school in Northern Ireland “specifies religion as a requirement to get into a school - which is unlike the situation in England”, observes O’Reilly, a former top civil servant in Northern Ireland’s Department for Communities.

O’Reilly is chair of governors at Our Lady and St Patrick’s College in Knock, in the east of Belfast. “The idea that parents here come from some sort of privileged background…I’m afraid the local academics are plugging into inaccurate stereotypes,” he says.

O’Reilly describes the fundamental principle of voluntary grammar schools not as selection (six of them opt not to use selection) but as the “voluntary principle”: they are good schools attracting parents because they are run by governors who reflect their local community’s wishes and are locally accountable.

With Sinn Féin becoming the largest political party in the 2022 Northern Ireland Assembly elections, there is now greater political pressure building against selection, after previous attempts by Westminster governments and Sinn Féin education ministers to weigh against it (including the abolition of government-run selection tests in 2008).

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The party is “totally opposed to it - we believe it should be abolished completely”, says Pat Sheehan, Sinn Féin’s education spokesperson. “I believe in following the evidence: the evidence shows that when you have that concentration of children from disadvantaged backgrounds [in non-selective schools], it reinforces that disadvantage and underachievement. There needs to be greater integration across socioeconomic backgrounds.”

Evolution rather than abolition is the more likely foreseeable future for academic selection, however: a single common post-primary “transfer test” is due to go ahead from November this year, bringing to an end the system of separate tests run by two different bodies.

The main political barrier to any momentum behind abolition of selection is the DUP, and to a lesser extent the Ulster Unionist Party - and here, “parental choice” is a rallying cry.

“If I were a parent living in the South of England, I could send my child to the local comprehensive; to a grammar school, in some cases; to a free school; to an academy; to a faith school; to a private school - if I could afford it,” says Diane Dodds, the DUP’s education spokesperson.

She is adamant that grammar schools provide opportunity for the poorest. The daughter of a father who drove a lorry by day then farmed at night and a mother who pitched in on the farm, she says that going to a grammar school “improved my life chances and…gave me enormous opportunities in life”.

‘If devolution was here in the morning, we would still be stuck with a problem of funding for education’

On segregation, there has been more political movement.

The first integrated school opened in 1981 and there are now 70 of them, enrolling around 8 per cent of all pupils in Northern Ireland.

The Integrated Education Act, passed by the Northern Ireland Assembly in 2022, defines integrated education as the schooling together of “those of different cultures and religious beliefs and of none, including reasonable numbers of both Protestant and Roman Catholic children or young persons”, and of “those who are experiencing socioeconomic deprivation and those who are not”. Integrated education is often dismissed as a middle-class concern but this is rejected as an outdated stereotype by its supporters.

Rowandale Integrated Primary School opened in 2007 in Moira, a village in Belfast’s commuter belt. After opening with just 18 children, Rowandale is now billed as one of the fastest-growing primary schools in Northern Ireland, with around 400 pupils.

The creation of the school “came from parental power because they felt the values of an integrated education reflected very much those of the community”, a community where there has long been “a lot of mixed marriage”, says Frances Hughes, the school’s principal.

Paul Caskey is head of campaign at the Integrated Education Fund (IEF), a charity that provides grants to integrated schools and commissions research on the issue (including a recent study by Ulster University researchers that suggested the division between Protestant- and Catholic-administered schools costs an extra £226 million in duplication of transport and services to schools).

He argues that “the more you can give children the opportunity to learn side by side, explore their differences and what they have in common, and get to know one another in the classroom, that can only be a good thing. That reverberates out into the community through parents”.

The 2022 act means the Department of Education must now produce an integrated education strategy to “encourage, facilitate and support integrated education”. This strategy was supposed to have been published in April.

However, the debate about academic selection will again come to the fore. Figures on the distribution of pupils on free school meals across schools suggest that some middle-class parents opt for integrated education at primary, then grammar schools rather than integrated non-selective schools at post-primary, says Queen’s University’s Joanne Hughes.

She sees a tension here between society’s transition to “commitment to a shared and integrated society” and the selective system - which “seems to be a countervailing force to act against that”.

“As long as we do maintain a selective education system, then the grammar schools will skew things,” says Caskey, describing the IEF as being in support of “all-ability” education.

Meanwhile, there is some concern about the act in grammar schools, too.

Dermot Mullan, a former Our Lady and St Patrick’s College principal, now a GBA executive committee member, says: “I wouldn’t like to think that children in a voluntary grammar school would be funded at a lesser amount than children in an integrated sector [school]. I think that would be inequitable and totally unfair.”

He also says that “integrated housing is as important as healing the rifts and social breakdown in Northern Ireland…But social housing, I don’t hear anybody launching a campaign in the same manner as middle-class integrated schooling”.

A new direction for education?

There is, then, a sense of stalemate across most issues in Northern Irish education and the continued failure to restore devolved government is making everything worse in the education system, according to many.

Graham Gault, director of school leaders’ union NAHT Northern Ireland, says: “We don’t have our own government budget; we don’t have politicians whom we can lobby on behalf of our children; there are restrictions placed on the development of any kind of legislation; and our school leaders and teachers really feel they are crying out into a void on behalf of their children.”

Does the DUP, the block on returning powers to Stormont, agree that having no assembly is harming children’s education?

“I want devolution to return,” says Dodds. But it has to be “stable” and that means “making sure that Northern Ireland has access to and from its largest market [Great Britain],” she adds.

“If you’re asking me what is the single biggest harm to education, it is funding,” continues Dodds. “If devolution was here in the morning, we would still be stuck with a problem of funding for education.”

The budget for education is “missing about £300 million for special educational needs” every year, says Dodds, highlighting that SEN costs coming out of the education budget have risen from £233 million in 2015-16 to an expected £500 million in 2022-23.

What’s at the root of the underfunding of education in Northern Ireland?

“In a nutshell, the problem is that we have less money to spend on public services here than elsewhere in the UK, on a comparable head-for-head basis,” says O’Reilly, who knows the problem well, having run a Northern Ireland government department.

Key factors here are that Northern Ireland has lower rates of property tax than other parts of the UK and, unlike other parts of the UK, does not levy specific water charges. The return of devolution “won’t address that fundamental problem” of underfunding of public services including education, warns O’Reilly.

‘How could the system be excellent, when there’s no money, no decisions, no support for special needs?’

So, will the independent review find solutions to all these challenges? Its interim report, published in October 2022, offered very little indication of its direction, including on the key issue of selection. Some think the panel is ready to issue its final report in the summer, others that the report is being kicked into next year. 

What are the chances of academic selection ultimately being abolished in Northern Ireland?

Sheehan thinks this “will eventually be achieved”. “I’m not so sure it will happen in the short term. The grammar sector has quite enormous influence, particularly over the unionist parties,” he says.

It should be noted, however, that, as is so often the case in Northern Ireland, things are not as clear-cut as they may seem: while most entries to grammar schools come from the controlled sector, almost the same proportion of entries is drawn from maintained schools.

Joanne Hughes calls for an “evidence-based” debate: “The DUP continues to make these arguments that the system gives the most disadvantaged an opportunity to get the best education. Well, actually, it doesn’t, if you look at the evidence. People are seduced by that argument.”

Similarly, Yiasouma says: “What we need to do - which is where I have hopes for the review - is make sure we give parents and schools themselves the evidence, and the confidence that the alternative [to selection] will be the best for their children, will meet every child’s needs.”

With Conservatives in England talking more loudly about their backing for grammar schools, “this debate has resonance more widely than Northern Ireland”, Hughes points out.

And in Northern Ireland, there’s a feeling of resentment among some that the UK government helped to initiate a review aimed at creating a “single education” system when England retains grammar schools in some areas and religion is used in admissions at some schools, and when Westminster has no intention of acting on those issues in its own backyard.

Dodds says: “I’m not hung up on selective education. What I am absolutely firm on is that we deserve the same choices as everywhere else [that has a wide range of choices] in the United Kingdom.”

More broadly, in terms of the review, there’s a widespread feeling that Northern Ireland’s education system is crying out for fresh direction.

“I do hope it’s meaningful and I do hope it brings new ways of supporting education,” says Rowandale’s Frances Hughes. But of the review’s goal to promote an excellent education system, she says “there’s nothing excellent about it” at present. “How could it be excellent, when there’s no money, no decisions, no support for special needs, no investment in new schools?” she asks.

The review’s findings will need to be implemented by Northern Ireland’s politicians - whenever they return to Stormont.

Yiasouma says her “lack of confidence, regardless of what the review says” is based on “its implementation; is that we don’t have the political will or political appetite or political bravery to get that job done”. 

The review - led by Keir Bloomer, a veteran of Scottish educational reform - was originally scheduled to report this year. If its team can navigate their way through huge complexities and conflicts around issues of selection, integrated education and funding and then come up with plans that gain enough support across Northern Ireland’s rancorous political divide to be implemented, that really will be world class.

The political dramas around Brexit in recent years should have reminded everyone of what has long been true: what happens in Northern Ireland matters not just for its people but for the whole of the UK.