The education system in Northern Ireland has many strengths. Teaching is valued as a career and the profession is generally held in high esteem in the community. Teacher education has remained firmly within higher education, and is considered to be performing well. Academic attainment is often cited as being as good as, or even better than, that in the rest of the UK. There are, however, aspects of Northern Ireland’s education system that may be working less well. In this blog post I provide a brief background to the Northern Ireland education system, while explaining why children have ended up ‘learning apart’.

Twenty-six years ago, the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement heralded an end to the violence that had blighted Northern Ireland for a generation. The conflict had a particularly notable impact on the young (McGrellis, 2005). Segregation through education was endemic, with Protestants largely attending Controlled schools and Catholics largely attending Catholic Maintained schools. The Agreement recognised that, although this was not the cause of the issues that separated the British/Protestant population from their Irish/Catholic neighbours, the enduring division of the school system had done little to ameliorate mistrust between the two communities. There was a commitment in the Agreement to develop more Integrated schools – where Catholic and Protestant pupils are educated together, sitting alongside each other in the same classrooms. Notwithstanding this promised change, around 92 per cent of pupils in Northern Ireland still attend schools that cater predominantly or exclusively for one or other of the two main traditions. While Faith schools are common in Great Britain and elsewhere, their potential for contributing to enduring division in Northern Ireland is enhanced by other factors, including housing (Peach, 2020). Nonetheless, ‘compared with residential segregation, schools are significantly more segregated’ (Campbell, 2021).

‘Notwithstanding the promise to develop more Integrated schools, around 92 per cent of pupils in Northern Ireland still attend schools that cater predominantly or exclusively for one or other of the two main traditions.’

Many pupils travel from deeply segregated residential areas to attend schools separated by faith, culture and national identity. Opportunities for meaningful cross-community contact are therefore very limited. The system is further fractured by the widespread practice of academic selection at age 11 – nominally separating children by academic ability, but effectively by social class (Brown et al., 2022).

A complex configuration of publicly funded administrative and support organisations has been created to ensure that those schools that share an ethos/culture are administered, represented and maintained by an organisation specific to them. Consequently, the Northern Ireland Department of Education provides direct financial support to nine Arm’s Length Bodies and provides grants to fund the running of three further sectoral bodies.

Teachers are required to attain a specific religious qualification if they are to be able to apply for work in primary schools under the authority of the Catholic church. This has, historically, been one of the main justifications for the presence of two separate initial teacher education colleges in Belfast. Until very recently, teachers were specifically exempted from the protection offered by hard fought-for legislation to prevent religious discrimination in the workplace. A large proportion of teachers are therefore employed in the same sector that mentored them, having had little or no experience of teaching in a school on the other side (Milliken et al., 2020).

Furthermore, the laws that dictate the operation of the Boards of Governors for schools in Northern Ireland, frame and prescribe the composition of each according to the school’s sector and size. Places are reserved for denominationally determined church representation; effectively ensuring that the composition of Boards of Governors reflects the segregated profile of the staffroom and the classroom.

It is within this context of ‘byzantine complexity’ (Sheeran, 2023) that the issues that underpin Northern Ireland’s education system will be examined in this special issue. Some of these issues are specific to the region, but most are universal – specifically how power and control inform the dominant philosophy that determines the purpose of education and results in a system that is characterised by inertia and a systemic disinclination to listen, learn and change.

References

Brown, M., Skerritt, C., Roulston, S., Milliken, M., McNamara, G., & O’Hara, J. (2022). The evolution of academic selection in Northern Ireland. In B. Walsh (Ed.), Education policy in Ireland since 1922 (pp. 371–399). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91775-3_12

Campbell, B. (2021). An assessment of religious segregation in Northern Ireland’s schools. Stockholm Research Reports in Demography. Preprint. https://doi.org/10.17045/sthlmuni.14605086.v1

McGrellis, S. (2005). Pushing the boundaries in Northern Ireland: Young people, violence and sectarianism. Contemporary Politics, 11(1), 53–71. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569770500098649

Milliken, M., Bates, J., & Smith, A. (2020). Education policies and teacher deployment in Northern Ireland: Ethnic separation, cultural encapsulation and community cross-over. British Journal of Educational Studies, 68(2), 139–160. https://doi.org/10.1080/00071005.2019.1666083

Peach, C. (2020). The consequences of segregation. In F. W. Boal (Ed.), Ethnicity housing (pp. 10–23). Routledge.

Sheeran, R. (2023). Keeping the kids apart. New Humanist Magazine, Winter 2023. https://newhumanist.org.uk/