Promoting a culture of tolerance: education in Northern Ireland
by Fiona Stephen
The capital costs attached to the three models ranged from £49.9million for the containment model to £79.8 million for the proactive programme. The actual school developments for the five year period 1994-98 amounted to 5 primary schools and 10 second-level, matching the containment model at primary school level but exceeding the reactive model at secondary school level. As second-level schools are considerably more expensive to establish, the financial burden of development is far greater. DENI nervous of the financial scale and slightly unpredictable element of integrated new school development became keen to focus on the transformation of existing schools to integrated status.
Paradoxically, the rate of school development also assumes that the number of integrated school places while continuing to increase, will still remain less than the level of demand. The resulting over-subscription then permits the continuance of a mixed enrolment, with enough pupils from both sides of the community to maintain cross-community confidence in the integrated nature of the school in question. vi The integrated education supporters have always campaigned on the basis that integrated education was something which should be available by right as a real choice - alongside the traditional Catholic and state Protestant systems - not as a replacement. However, the reliance on over-subscription to maintain some form of religious balance in the enrolment carries an inbuilt exclusion factor with the implicit acceptance that not everyone can attend an integrated school who might wish to. This creates an uneasy tension alongside the aspiration that integrated education should be available to all as a basic right; a conundrum which has largely been created by the open enrolment legislation and exacerbated in some areas by Education Board refusals to permit the schools to increase their intakes.
The location of new integrated schools has in every case, been a sensitive issue. The sites chosen have been often a compromise between where suitable land was available and an array of other considerations such as the acceptability of a particular location to all sides of the community. In general, there has been an attempt to build on the edge of a town in an area where new housing was being developed rather than close to existing schools. There is however, a finite number of children of school age and teachers, so an element of redistribution and change affecting controlled and maintained schools is unavoidable.
This issue is central to the opposition to planned integrated schools particularly as voiced by the teachers' union UTU (Ulster Teachers' Union). Concern has also been expressed by representatives from both the maintained and controlled sectors that the very act of developing integrated schools implied that both the Catholic maintained and Protestant controlled schools were sectarian. A further criticism has been that the 'creaming off' of the more moderate or liberal parents and pupils by the integrated schools was likely to leave the Catholic and Protestant systems more polarised and divided than they were originally (an argument which might just as equally be levelled at the grammar school system for different reasons). More recently, DUP Assembly member Iris Robinson expressed yet another fear: that transformation of existing schools to integrated status was threatening to leave the Protestant community without any schools to call their own.vii This echoes the dilemma faced by the Church of Ireland and Presbyterian Transferorviii representatives, namely how to protect their interests without appearing sectarian. In the interests of parity the Department of Education Northern Ireland (DENI) have recognised the Transferor Representatives Council for representation along with the Council for Catholic Maintained Schools on consultative committees such as the working parties set up to consider the future development of integrated education and Education for Mutual Understanding (EMU) following the Good Friday Agreement.
The emergence of integrated schools, often in the face of fierce opposition,
has it seems stimulated the maintained and controlled school systems into
participating in other initiatives within the cross-community contact scheme
or the joint churches organisation YouthLink - designed to bring the young
people of both systems into contact out of school, but within a framework
defined by both the Catholic and Protestant churches. Whatever the merits
of the various arguments, the issue still remains as to what can be done
more generally, to encourage positive interaction not just between children
and young people, but people from all sections of the Northern Ireland community.
This is a question which encompasses adult and further education not simply
the formal school system. Supporters of planned integrated schools would
suggest that they go a long way towards offering this level of interaction
with the close involvement of parents within the schools, the parent councils
and the cross-community composition of pupil enrolments, teaching and ancillary
staff as well as governing bodies and all committee structures.
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