The Northern Ireland Council for Integrated Education (NICIE) is disappointed with the report of the education committee into Shared and Integrated Education. This important inquiry conducted over many months presented an opportunity to examine and make recommendations on the structural divisions in our education system. It failed to do so. Instead, the report accepts without question our segregated school system; its recommendations do not challenge this flawed status quo. Instead the report focuses on Shared Education with only passing and inaccurate reference to Integrated Education and with one associated recommendation.
The report argues strongly in favour of extending and embedding Shared Education both as an agent for improving educational outcomes and of promoting community relations. The educational benefits of collaboration are evident and supported. We welcome the acknowledgement that our children and young people should have an opportunity to learn together. However, Shared Education, as a method for promoting societal reconciliation is both expensive and cumbersome. Operating, as it does, within our segregated system, it will always be partial and limited and will sustain a divided system. Shared Education proposes a method for ensuring children spend some time learning together during their school career. A simpler and more direct approach would have been to recommend an active support and incentivisation of Integrated Education, where children are educated together on a daily basis as the norm.
NICIE is disappointed that the value and potential of the integrated model was not promoted. Indeed, the report displays a lack of understanding of the integrated model. Integrated Education is based on creating an environment where there is an equality of esteem for both of our main traditions, and where diversity is welcomed and cherished. The child attending an integrated school does not have to leave a part of his/her identity at the school door. The integrated learning environment nurtures mutual understanding and mutual respect, qualities not much in evidence as our politicians, educated through our segregated system, stagger from one political crisis to the next.
The integrated school models the type of society that many people thought they were voting for when they supported the Good Friday Agreement. The assumption then was that in building peace, we would build a shared society. Instead we have developed a separate but equal approach, we share out and jealousy protect our own share. The vested interests hold onto their areas of control and do not consider wider societal impact.
Noreen Campbell, CEO of NICIE said: ‘This is a disappointing report. We know that the general public supports integrated education and want to see their children educated together as the norm. This has been substantiated by many independent market research polls over the years.
Many hundreds of children were unable to secure places in oversubscribed integrated schools this year. This September, two additional schools joined the integrated family, two more schools are working towards integration. Fifty schools across the province have indicated an interest in becoming integrated through an additional route to integration, developed by NICIE: Positive Partnerships for Integration. No funding can be found for this initiative which would support schools with mixed intake to deepen their inclusive ethos and develop an integrated ethos. Yet it is planned to spend more than thirty million of European funding on encouraging the schools who to date have had no contact with the ‘other side’ to do so. That same money used well could see many of our schools, controlled and catholic, become integrated in ethos and welcoming to all.
‘When presenting to the education committee, NICIE called for an independent commission into our education system. We did so because it is only through such an independent review that we will see an evidence based approach to reforming that system. We repeat this call. Education is the building block of a prosperous and inclusive system. Northern Ireland deserves an education system that better reflects modern society.’
