WP responds to Consultation on Integrated Education in NI
In its own words the latest Stormont strategy on integrated education for 2025-2030 “aims to set out clear targets and benchmarks for the development of Integrated Education during that period. The strategy encompasses short, medium, and longer-term actions that will enable us to make progress towards achieving our overarching vision for Integrated Education.”
But, in reality, the ‘overarching vision’ is the same prevaricating, piecemeal approach adopted by the executive parties since 1998. While admitting that “there remains a gap between broad support for the idea of Integrated Education as expressed in a range of surveys at societal level and the availability of Integrated Education within the school system”, Vision 2030 refuses to take the steps that would be required to fill that gap. Here, the Workers Party analyses Vision 2030 and finds it lacking.
Introduction
More than 90% of schools in Northern Ireland are segregated on religious grounds, operating with de facto parallel systems for Catholics and Protestants. Less than 2% of pupils who identify as Protestant currently attend a Catholic school, with less than 9% of pupils that identify as Catholic attending Controlled schools and 30% of schools having no pupils from the ‘other’ community.
No more than 7% of pupils here are educated in integrated schools despite decades of opinion polls showing consistently huge majorities of people in favour of integrated education. As a secular, socialist anti-sectarian party, the Workers Party is clear that the main political parties in NI have conspired over the past 25 years to retain an education system which promotes the sectarian division that enables sectarian politics to thrive in Stormont and on the streets of Northern Ireland, where geographical divisions based on background are as bad as ever.
The 2022 Integrated Education Act represented a step change, but integrated education is still at a disadvantage. Demand outstrips supply, integrated schools remain reliant on charitable funding from organisations such as the Integrated Education Fund, and changing to integrated status requires a grassroots campaign from local parents.
Since 2019, there have been 26 parental ballots in schools seeking to pivot to integrated status wherein parents returned a ‘yes’ response. The average ‘yes’ response percentage is 91%. Yet, opponents claim that there is not sufficient evidence of demand.
Education continues to be an under-utilised tool in peace and reconciliation. It is no panacea to all the ills and traumas that foment in a post-conflict society, but it is a foundation from which community cohesion may grow. Rather than have young people divided into opposing educational sectors that are dominated by religious and political identities, Northern Ireland should have one primary education system that is comprehensive, integrated and secular as the norm.
How can we expect the next generation to progress if they continue to be subject to the segregation and reinforced division that defined the experiences of their parents and grandparents? Rather than pitting opposing education sectors against one another, young people in Northern Ireland deserve the opportunity to navigate their formative years in the care of an inclusive system everyone can share. Researchers Anderson Worden and Smith (2017) note that “the lack of committed reform to integrating Northern Ireland schools prevents the education sector from making a substantive contribution to transitional justice efforts and to reconciling divisions in the post-conflict context” (our emphasis) [1]
Rather than hiving integrated education off into a silo where a modest increase in the numbers of integrated schools is counted a success while the basic educational divisions persist, the Executive needs to push for the substantive changes that Integrated education will bring to Northern Ireland. We note that this kind of bold commitment is absent from Vision 2030 and the accompanying Action Plan.
Shared Education is not Integrated Education
According to Vision 2030, “schools often collaborate through Area Learning Communities or Shared Education, which aims to provide opportunities for pupils from different religious and socio-economic backgrounds to be educated together … Together, Sharing Works (2015) and the Shared Education Act (Northern Ireland) 2016 provide a policy and legislative framework which seeks to enable collaborative working between educational settings, on a cross sectoral basis, providing children and young people from different religious and socio-economic backgrounds with opportunities to learn with and about each other. It is not a question of either Integrated Education or Shared Education They are not in competition with each other”. The Workers Party disagrees.
The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 committed to” facilitate and encourage integrated education…” Since then, the main Executive parties have been instrumental in sidelining the progression of integrated education and have connived to set back the integrated education project through disingenuous schemes such as their ‘shared education’ ploy.
‘Shared’ education is not Integrated education. It was never meant to be. Instead, it is a deliberate and reprehensible dodge which confirms, consolidates and copper-fastens divisions in our society at the expense of the integrated education of yet another generation of children.
No religious ethos in schools: for secular education
Census 2021 has shown us that the number of people who have ‘no religion’ has risen sharply in Northern Ireland since the last census of 2011. While almost 80% of respondents declare themselves to be Christians of various kinds, 1.3% belong to other religions, 17.4% say they have ‘no religion’ and 1.6% had ‘religion not stated’. This ‘no religion’ population ranges from 30.6% of people in Ards & North Down council to 7.8% in Mid Ulster council. Among this ‘no religion’ group, 177,400 people (9.3% of the NI population) were brought up in no religious tradition.
According to Vision 2030 “an excellent education system should respect the reasonable rights of parents to ensure that children are educated in accordance with their religious and philosophical convictions” but given the increasingly varied religious demographics of Northern Ireland, how could these ‘reasonable rights’ be practically respected? In particular, the rights of one in 5 people in Northern Ireland who are not religious are not respected in schools based on religious ethos.
The Workers Party believes that religious faith is an individual matter which should not be mediated by the state either through the repression of faith groups or by the positive endorsement of a faith or faiths. The Workers Party believes that education should be secular because it is the only way to fairly accommodate the rights of all children and parents. The only way to fairly “ensure that all learners have the opportunity to learn alongside individuals from other communities and backgrounds” (Vision 2030) is to ensure that the schools are not run by or in the interests of particular faith groups. Outside of schools, individuals and groups are within their rights to promote faith claims and religiously oriented ethical frameworks but the state should not fund or endorse schools which exist to serve faith communities.
Vision 2030 notes that the DoE’s “Community Relations, Equality and Diversity in Education (CRED) policy specifically aims to ensure that children and young people, at each stage of their development, have an understanding of and respect for the rights, equality and diversity of all without discrimination”. Anderson Worden and Smith (2017) describe the introduction in 2007 of Local and Global Citizenship (LGC) as a statutory requirement noting that “the LCG emphasis is on exploring a set of core concepts (‘Diversity and Inclusion’; ‘Human Rights and Social Responsibilities’; ‘Equality and Social Justice’; and ‘Democracy and Active Participation’) which are regarded as problematic from the outset and explored from multiple perspectives through a range of local and international issues”. This kind of education for citizenship can only fully be realised when students from all backgrounds are educated together.
In addition to education for citizenship, rather than following particular faith traditions, RE classes in integrated schools should teach world religions from a comparative perspective. Nelson and Yang (2023) [2] who researched the teaching of world religions in 12 controlled schools in NI note that “some teachers were able to actively promote their views of Christianity as having superiority over other religions while claiming they were promoting respect and tolerance …conservative elements within schools, including religious education teachers, can resist moves to more open and inclusive forms of education and so continue to cultivate labelling and othering among pupils”.
The Workers Party supports the “possible mitigations that can assist in maintaining appropriate boundaries” outlined by Yang and Nelson: a code of practice for teachers of religious education, the inspection of Religious Education by qualified inspectors, a well- balanced curriculum that is informed by a pedagogical model for inclusive religious education in plural environments, and a meaningful and contemporary legal framework for teaching about religion”. But these mitigations will only work in secular schools. Moreover, the Workers Party fights for secular education while recognising that the worst aspects of religious ‘othering’ will only be mitigated in a socialist society.
Duplication of funds
A 2023 report from the University of Ulster [3] noted that the school maintenance backlog amounted to £500 million and that spending per pupil in NI “is lower than in any other region of the UK, and it has been the lowest spending region for the last decade at least”. Against this dire background, the report details the costs of duplicating provision based on sectarian segregation.
While noting that the money amount can only ever be an estimate the researchers estimate the total additional cost of maintaining a divided system at £226 million each year, or
over £600,000 every day of the year. The current system is not only educationally and culturally indefensible, but it is also a significant drain on the public purse.
Conclusion
Against the piecemeal approach of Vision 2030, the Workers Party urges the Executive parties to develop a commitment to only funding integrated schools by a date within the near future. The current system is expensive, unreflective of the demographic realities and unfair to the generations of young people who could and should be educated together.
References
[1] Elizabeth Anderson Worden & Alan Smith (2017) Teaching for democracy
in the absence of transitional justice: the case of Northern Ireland, Comparative Education, 53:3, 379-395, DOI: 10.1080/03050068.2017.1334426
[2] James Nelson & Yue Yang (2023) The role of teachers’ religious beliefs in their classroom practice – a personal or public concern? Journal of Beliefs & Values, 44:3, 316-333, DOI: 10.1080/13617672.2022.2125672
[3] ‘The Cost of Division in Northern Ireland’, Transforming Education briefing paper 18