Why education matters: moving beyond segregation
NICIE calls for the education system to model a genuinely integrated and shared future.
A failure to engage with historic divisions finds its latest expression on our streets in disputes over flags and parades. These protests challenge the forward motion of the peace process and impact on confidence and optimism about building a better future.
Richard Haass has been tasked with solving the issues of parades, flags and the past. It is not surprising then that, in a briefing prior to coming here, he alluded to segregated housing and schooling when outlining his task.
Our segregated educational system is a legacy of our past. Reform of that system is key to sustaining and developing a peaceful future.
Our peace process is based on the belief that ‘separate but equal’ is not good enough; that there is an imperative to move beyond ‘benign apartheid’. Apartheid, in our schools or in our communities, is never benign.
President Obama in his address to young people in Belfast in June this year said:
“Ultimately, peace is just not about politics. It’s about attitudes; about a sense of empathy; about breaking down the divisions that we create for ourselves in our own minds and our own hearts that don’t exist in any objective reality, but that we carry with us generation after generation.”
These are the sentiments which motivated parents to establish integrated schools. Since 1981 when the first integrated school opened, parents have established forty schools. Another twenty-two schools have transformed to become integrated. Daily encounters where learning together is the norm, where division is challenged and difference is celebrated, where what Seamus Heaney described as the ‘energy of difference’ is harnessed: this should be the entitlement of all of our children.
Through the on-going process of area based planning, initiated by the Minister for Education, an opportunity exists to introduce significant reform. NICIE, working through area-based planning, seeks to expand integrated provision through innovative approaches, and has developed a means to increase integrated provision through a new route to integration. This approach allows schools to move from single identity to integrated, at the school’s pace and with the full consensus of all involved. Through such a route NICIE seeks to ensure:
• parental choice is prioritised and parents seeking an integrated choice for their children are guaranteed that choice;
• there is integrated provision in every area, with a third of all provision being integrated;
• pre-school education is genuinely non sectoral and welcoming to all;
• the needs of local areas are put before the needs of sectors;
• there is meaningful engagement with parents at local level to determine educational needs.
Evidence from polls shows overwhelming support for integrated education; evidence from the census points to an increasingly diverse society. Our population can and should no longer be branded ‘orange or green’. Younger people hold a multiplicity of identities. We must develop schools where this diversity and fluidity is reflected.
All schools should recognise the diversity which exists within them, welcome that diversity and move beyond the damaging assumption of single identity. The Department of Education and the education and library boards, under their statutory duty to facilitate and encourage integrated education, should support them in doing so.
It is time for the educational system to model the type of society we seek to become. We have the means to do so. Let us not lose this opportunity to move beyond segregation and division.
Northern Ireland Council for Integrated Education (NICIE)
25 College Gardens
Belfast, BT9 6BS
Tel: 028 9097 2910
Fax: 028 9097 2919
Web: www.nicie.org.uk
Email: info@nicie.org.uk
