A Northern Ireland schools system in which pupils from different backgrounds were more likely to be educated together would be morally right and also save money at a time of huge budget pressures, conference delegates have been told.
These issues were raised at “Next steps for the education system in NI”, an online conference organised by the Policy Forum for Northern Ireland, where the cost-of-living crisis and the lack of a functioning executive at Stormont for almost a year lent a topical edge to arguments that have been going on for many years.
Peter Osborne, chair of the Integrated Education Fund charity, said that the Northern Ireland education system needs more money but must also address the “duplication” that happens when different resources are being allocated to different types of schools even though, in many ways, the curriculum is largely the same.
“This is not a normal education system - it is abnormal,” he said, adding that “the level of duplication and segregation” made school “an abnormal experience” for children in Northern Ireland when compared with children “in other places”.
He said that he had recently spoken with visitors from the USA and Bosnia who - given their countries’ respective experience of reversing schools’ racial segregation in the mid 20th century and of ethnic violence and genocide - “couldn’t get their heads around” the division in the Northern Ireland schools system.
Mr Osborne added that the 93 per cent of Northern Irish pupils in non-integrated schools in 2023 is the same level as at the time of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
He warned that it was damaging if, from an early age, large sections of the population interacted only sporadically, because if they “don’t relate to each other that’s the antithesis of the peace process”.
Mr Osborne said that “change won’t happen overnight” and that it might be a 20-year process, or even longer, but that there was a financial imperative as well as an ethical one - it made little sense, for example, to train teachers separately for different types of schools when ultimately they would be covering “largely the same curriculum”.
Jackie Redpath, chief executive of the Greater Shankill Partnership, a community regeneration body in Belfast, said there should be a focus on the early years of education: “If we want to change outcomes and young people, we have to begin at the beginning.”
He made that point after Pauline Walmsley, chief executive of Early Years, the organisation for young children in Northern Ireland, had told delegates at yesterday’s conference that spending in the early years was “lagging behind” other parts of the UK.
Mr Redpath also stressed that children only spent 13 per cent of their waking hours in school between the ages of 4 and 18 and that there had to be a focus on the other 87 per cent through a “whole-community approach”.
“If we don’t get all these contexts together working in unison, then schools will be left with a job that they simply can’t do on their own,” he said.
He added: “It doesn’t matter what system we have if we don’t recognise that schools can only do so much.”
Meanwhile, Mary Montgomery, principal of the non-selective Belfast Boys’ Model School, said it was “too simple” to see integrated schools as a catch-all solution to Northern Ireland’s problems in education, which sat within a “very complex system”. She stressed that attainment had broadly improved over the past 20 years.
Yesterday’s event was organised as Dr Keir Bloomer’s landmark review of education in Northern Ireland continues, and delegates identified several key issues that had to be addressed.
Peter Campbell, principal of Bangor Central Integrated Primary School, said the difficult financial situation faced by the education system in recent times had resulted in less investment in teachers’ professional development. The education workforce is not short on “enthusiastic teachers”, he said, but there is a “lack of expertise and leadership in schools”, and a “real deficit in knowledge and skills of teachers and potential leaders”.
Mr Campbell also railed against the “abnormal” divisions in Northern Ireland’s school system, which fuelled “mistrust” and a “divided society”.
He also highlighted the impact of Northern Ireland continuing to run selective tests for a relatively small number of grammar schools.
“The whole [primary] curriculum has to be covered in six years because selection tests are held in November [of the seventh year],” Mr Campbell said. He questioned the fairness of primary schools’ planning and work being shaped so much by the needs of grammar schools.
Mark Roberts, an English teacher and director of research at Carrickfergus Grammar School, who has also worked in England and written many pieces for Tes, also underlined the importance of improving the professional development of teachers in Northern Ireland.
They needed “more agency over their own learning” and less judgement of their classroom practice.
“Teachers tend to thrive when they have the opportunity to be coached rather than to be judged,” said Mr Roberts.
