NICIE has long argued that educational reform is necessary and urgent; the NIAO report provides further evidence of this.
This important report published today highlights the problems with our educational system. These problems are well rehearsed: the failure of area planning to address the surplus of school places, the weaknesses of leadership in post primary schools.
It notes the structural factors which inhibit the delivery of sustainable schools:
the number of sectors involved in education, the failure to implement ESA, the problems besetting are planning and the open enrolment policy. NICIE argues that unless these structural problems are addressed then the weaknesses outlined in the Audit Report will continue.
We operate a duplicate and triplicate system of education here organised around two great divides: of segregation and of selection. We separate our children at the age of 4 on the basis of perceived /inherited identity and send them to single identity schools. 26 years after the Education Reform Order of 1989 which paced an obligation on DE to ‘encourage and facilitate’ IE, we still have more than 90% of children educated separately. Area planning instead of planning on an area basis, used the discredited ‘needs model’ and reorganised within sectors further entrenching division and maintaining duplication. Such planning ignores the changes in society around us, and the expressed preference of the public, in public opinion survey after survey for an integrated system of education.
Such an integrated system would also resolve the other deep structural divide created by selection. Integrated colleges are all ability and coeducational. The selective system creates a hierarchy of education with grammar schools portrayed as the best. Such a system is detrimental to the majority of our children who are not educated in grammar schools; limits opportunity and as with single identity schools freezes NI in the past. All major countries in the developed world have long moved away from a selective schools system recognising that the needs of the global economy demand that all young people be educated to a high level.
The Audit Office Report identifies the factors impacting on developing a sustainable and cost effective school system but it does not engage with these factors in its recommendations. Until we, as a society, deal with the structural divisions we have inherited from the past, it will be impossible to offer an education based on equality of respect for identity and for background, one which secures equality of opportunity for all.
The urgency of dealing with these issues is underlined by the imperative of protecting education budgets in a time of austerity and by the need to build a socially cohesive future for our children. The report identifies that area planning is a highly contested space. The time has come for an independent commission on education to bring our system into the 21st century.
