Response to the Report of

The Post Primary Review Body

By The Workers Party

June 2002

2. The Workers’ Party believes that education should be a learning experience, a critical experience and a creative experience. However education and the education system itself must have a vision of what constitutes the good society. A vision not just for the few or for the commercial interests of business but for the benefit of all our children - a vision that will energise, enable, empower and develop all our children on the basis of a new and radical education system.

3. The report clearly shows and we agree that it is time for a complete shake up and re-evaluation of the education system.

4. The corner stone of this new innovative and radical approach to education should be the phased introduction of an integrated education system into Northern Ireland. We would stress that we do not see integrated education as a panacea for the vicious sectarianism which pollutes our society. Nor do we believe that the present segregated system is responsible for that sectarianism.

5. Over the years, and in particular during the past thirty, there has been a confirmation, entrenchment and consolidation of the artificial division between the citizens of Northern Ireland. (This has been substantially re-enforced by the formalising of the "Two Communities" concept in the Good Friday Agreement). Some of the consequences of that sectarianism for Northern Ireland society was the development of separate educational systems, which are exclusively, or almost exclusively, Catholic or Protestant. The Workers’ Party believes that there are no good moral, social or cultural reasons to sustain that division.

6. The Workers Party welcomes and supports the recommendation in the report that the 11+ should be abolished. However it is regrettable that the report has decided against the introduction of comprehensive education. The Workers Party has a long -standing policy in favour of a comprehensive system of education for all our children. We have consistently opposed the selective system of secondary education as discriminatory, divisive and demoralising for the vast majority of children and teachers alike.

7. In our view published research material, by Gallagher and Smith reinforces and upholds the widespread recognition in Northern Ireland society that the present system of selection results in unfairness and unacceptable low levels of achievement. It would appear that even those who hold the high academic standards achieved by grammar schools share this view.

8. The Workers Party however believes that it is the selection system itself, which produces this situation, and that it requires fundamental change. Initiatives to tackle under-achievement on their own would not in our view adequately address this issue.

9. In our view then the case against selection is overwhelming. It is a view widely held in society even though some people who recognise the unfairness and waste that selection produces, are anxious that the high academic standards achieved by grammar schools and to which many parents understandably aspire for their children, is maintained. In our view there is no contradiction between this parental ambition and a system, which is fair to all.

10. It is clear that the status quo is unacceptable to the vast majority of educational opinion and within society in general. Delayed selection is simply a postponement of selection. In Craigavon in spite of more pupils gaining grammar school places there is no evidence that the fundamental criticisms of selection at 11, in terms of inequality and status of schools, are any different at 14.

11. The idea of differentiated upper secondary schools is in our view another variation of delayed selection, which produces the same inequalities.

12. Moreover any system which differentiates between academic / vocational and technical routes not only reinforces social inequality and disadvantage but is a denial of the broader purposes of education.

13. On the subject of giving ‘priority to parental choice’ it is our view that this is a misconception. To speak of parental choice in a community riven by sectarianism, in the absence of a government long term programme of remedial action, is tantamount to cynical approval of the sectarian status quo, whose contribution to all that was worst in our history of 30 years past is beyond dispute.

14. The recent study by Connolly, Kelly and Smith, argues that the present segregated system reinforces sectarian attitudes in children as young as six. Although the study was limited it cannot be denied that it raises urgent moral questions for all those who claim that separate education has no real influence on sectarian attitudes compared to other factors.

15. It is, in fact, only organisations such as the Northern Ireland Council for Integrated Education, whose purpose is the promotion of the concept and practice of Integrated Education, and the ending of structured apartheid amongst our children, which has created a situation, albeit marginal, in which some parents are enabled to make at least one fundamental educational choice.

16. Behind the words "parental choice" there is a plethora of politicking and double-speak running counter to the spirit of the Belfast Agreement and having the capacity to accentuate, in the near future, problems which this report seeks to resolve in a very limited way. Therefore we would suggest that the policy of "priority of parental choice’ be completely reappraised in the light of the concept of the common good. It is our view that the common good trumps parental choice.

The Workers Party recommends that:

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