Shared Education and False Promises
Introduction by Admin
The False Promises of the Belfast Agreement
When the Belfast Agreement was signed in April 1998, one of its more positive terms was a commitment “to facilitate and encourage integrated education and mixed housing” as essential elements in the process of reconciliation and the creation of “a culture of tolerance at every level of society”. Since 1998 these commitments have been ignored, watered down, and compromised by the Stormont Executive parties.
From Integrated to ‘Shared’ education
More than fifteen years after the Agreement was signed, a commitment to facilitate and encourage integrated education was replaced in real terms by a commitment to support what is called ‘Shared Education’ part of which involves a continued commitment to educating children in separate schools, but with shared campuses. A 2013 document prepared for the Integrated Education Fund (IEF) noted this shift away from integrated education in official documents and most party manifestos:
"The current discourse on shared education assumes that the vast majority of our children will continue to be educated in separate schools for the foreseeable future. By accepting this political parties move towards education policies that plan for separate development rather than structural change and reform of the separate school system."
Strule Shared Campus
Also in 2013, work began on building the first ‘shared education’ campus on the site of a former army base in County Tyrone. The plan for Strule Shared Campis envisaged six schools, and more than 4,000 pupils moving to the new site.
Over the next twelve years, the project would be plagued by delays and rising costs , and by 2025, only Arvalee Special School had been built on the site. In addition, the project is now due to cost £374m, up from the initial estimate of £169m.
Funding
By March 2024, the Department of Education declared that it did not have enough money to continue to fund the project, which an independent review in 2023 had deemed “unaffordable”.
Following the Fresh Start Agreement (2015) significant announcements were made for ‘Fresh Start’ capital funding which outlined contributions of up to £500 million over 10 years of new capital funding to support Shared and Integrated Education, subject to individual projects being agreed between the Executive and the UK Government. However, with the return to Stormont in 2024, Education Minister, thw DUP's Paul Givan, said that £150m of Fresh Start money from Westminster which had previously been ring-fenced for improving integrated and ‘shared education’ school buildings, had now been scrapped. By May 2024, £150 million in Fresh Start funding from the UK Government/Treasury that had been ring-fenced for both ‘shared’ education and integrated infrastructural projects was reallocated solely to the Strule Shared Education Campus.
Below Odhrán Cassidy from Workers Party Youth outlines our opposition to this enormously wasteful and ultimately reactionary vanity project.
The decision to reallocate £150 million in Fresh Start Funding from the UK Government Treasury to the Strule Shared Education Campus as further evidence that the Executive is not interested in living up to the commitments made in the Good Friday Agreement to promote integrated education. Instead of 6 schools being integrated into 1, we are getting 1 campus with 6 separate schools – without integrating the schools themselves. This reallocation has resulted in ten planned Capital Projects for Integrated Schools being stalled, with these projects now placed on the Department of Education's capital waiting list, despite an overwhelming majority – 65% - of people in Northern Ireland supporting integrated education. This shows the Executive’s reluctance to enact this key pillar of the 1998 agreement.
The Workers Party made a detailed submission to the consultation proposals on integrated education and were critical of the lack of vision and commitment shown in those proposals. Workers Party Youth are demanding that integrated and secular education is given the status it deserves. According to the Integrated Education Funds statistics, parents overwhelmingly support the integration of their schools, yet mainstream political parties, politicians, and the churches have been and remain the biggest obstacles to achieving a fully integrated education system for our young people.
Shared education represents the illusion of progress that provides a 'shared' veneer but fails to deliver on the aims of integrated education, while using some of the funds originally ringfenced for integrated education. Parents who want this generation of children to be educated together should have the right to do so and should not be fobbed off with shared education as an alternative. Shared education is not an alternative to integration.
Workers Party Youth will be writing to the Minister for Education seeking a detailed costing of the Strule campus including capital and revenue costs and an outline of what is proposed for the existing school buildings, including the costs of maintaining those buildings after the completion of the Strule Campus.
The Workers Party (including our Youth) will carry out an awareness-raising campaign on the need for an integrated and secular education system. The value of high quality integrated and secular education, in mending the sectarian scars that run deep in our society, cannot be understated.
It is therefore unconscionable that our political system is prepared to spend £600,000 per day on a system that keeps our children apart and perpetuates the sectarian divide in Northern Ireland. We demand only what the majority of people want; integrated education for all, and a fair chance for every young working-class person to live free from the cycles of sectarianism and hopelessness that the Agreement of 1998 promised, and failed, to break.