North-South co-operation in education is thriving at school level. At third level, however, it is underdeveloped and failing to keep pace with political developments, argues Andy Pollak

The extraordinary growth of North-South educational co-operation over the past 20 years is one of the untold success stories of the Northern Ireland peace process.

However, this is a classic grassroots movement, largely driven by individual idealism and funded by foreign sources, and almost entirely unaffected by government policy. If it is to continue and flourish as part of the new dispensation heralded by today's return of power-sharing, the politicians will have to seriously consider its future role in building peace on the island.

The new links effectively began in the late 1980s with the European Studies Project, an ambitious initiative thought up by a Northern Ireland Department of Education inspector. The project brought together secondary students in both jurisdictions to study history, geography, environmental and contemporary European issues. Twenty years on, its website still shows 153 secondary schools in Ireland, North and South, participating, along with schools from England and 21 other European countries.

However, the real expansion came in the 1990s, to the extent that the decade following the announcement of the IRA ceasefire in 1994 may well come to be seen in retrospect as the "golden age" of North-South educational co-operation. It was fuelled by generous funding under the first round of the EU's Peace Programme, which emphasised "bottom up" cross-border and cross-community co-operation, and thus was tailor-made for enterprising school-based and youth groups.

A study of school and youth exchanges published in 2005 by the North South Exchange Consortium (made up of Léargas, the agency responsible for managing Ireland's educational co-operation programmes, the British Council and the Youth Council for Northern Ireland) showed just how dramatic this increase had been. It found that, during the previous five years, nearly 3,000 school and youth groups had been financially supported to do cross-border work, involving more than 55,000 young people (this rose to an estimated 90,000 if non-funded exchanges were included). Nearly two-thirds came from the schools sector, with just over one-third from the youth work sector.

The study also came to the somewhat surprising conclusion that participation by Northern schools and youth groups from a Protestant background was broadly in line with their proportion of the population. There was clearly no "chill factor" stopping young Northern Protestants crossing the Border as part of these exchanges.

There is room here only to touch on a few of the myriad exchanges that have taken place at primary and secondary level: the Wider Horizons youth training project; Education for Reconciliation; Dissolving Boundaries; the Pride of our Place local studies project; the Civic-Link citizenship education programme; the Immigration, Emigration, Racism and Sectarianism schools project; the North-South Student Teacher Exchange project; Citizenship and Science Exchange; Diversity and Early Years Education; the North South Education Forum; Co-operation Ireland Exchanges programme; Causeway programme; the Cross-Border Human Rights Education project; the Pushkin Prizes; the Let's Talk project; the Right to Hope project; the Cross-Border Schools Science Conference; Future Youth Games; the Cross-Border Youth Arts Network; the Cross-Border Schools Orchestra.

The exchanges have been less impressive at third level. Indeed, the number of students from the Republic going to Northern universities - who were then entitled under EU rules to study without paying fees and to receive grants - fell by 50 per cent in the late 1990s and has been falling ever since, partly because of the scrapping of fees in the South and their reintroduction in the UK. The flow in the other direction has been very small for most of the past 30 years.

The acknowledged authority on Irish higher education co-operation, Prof Bob Osborne, has noted that the level of research collaboration hardly increased in the 1990s.

Universities Ireland, founded in 2003 by the nine university presidents on the island, has struggled with very small resources to improve both student flows and research collaboration. Next week sees the applications deadline for a generous scholarship scheme to increase the cross-Border flow of postgraduate students, which Universities Ireland is undertaking in partnership with IBEC and the northern branch of the Confederation of British Industry.

Another hopeful sign was last month's signing of a memorandum of understanding between Queen's University Belfast, Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin, which promised greater collaboration in everything from Irish studies to cancer research.

Perhaps surprisingly, the institutions which have taken most enthusiastically to North-South co-operation have been the teacher training colleges.

In 2003, led by Prof John Coolahan, one of Ireland's most distinguished educationalists, the colleges set up the Standing Conference on Teacher Education North and South (Scotens). This new network, managed by the Centre for Cross-Border Studies, has so far seed-funded 21 cross-Border research projects, including one which will see the distribution of a "toolkit" for teachers working in multicultural and multilingual classrooms to every primary school on the island next September.

However, outside a few flagship projects (the European Studies Project, Wider Horizons), the main problem facing all cross-Border education projects is funding. Over the past decade, four-fifths of this has come from abroad, largely in the form of European and American money through the EU Peace Programme and the International Fund for Ireland. The first of these is proposing to cut the number of projects (in all sectors) it will fund in the next five years - from more than 6,000 to 250 - while the latter will wind up by 2010.

This means that the €70 million spent on North-South educational co-operation in the five years up to 2005 is unlikely ever to be repeated, unless - and it is a very big unless - the governments in Dublin and Belfast step in and take over.

Up to now there has been no policy at governmental level for cross-Border co-operation in education. This is in stark contrast to the approach of the French and German governments from the 1950s onwards, when they put large amounts of money into joint education and training programmes to help the coming generations overcome the deep mutual mistrust between their two peoples following the second World War. It was an investment which has paid off handsomely, helping to lead to probably the closest relationship between any two major states in Europe.

Now we need this island's politicians and educational policymakers to work towards the same vision of a future of mutual learning and understanding for our young people.

Further details on the Universities Ireland scholarship scheme from Patricia McAllister of Universities Ireland.

E-mail: p.mcallister@qub.ac.uk

Andy Pollak, a former education correspondent of The Irish Times, is director of the Centre for Cross- Border Studies