A recent working party progress report, Towards a Culture of Tolerance: Integrating Education, published by the Northern Ireland Department of Education, illustrates some of the pitfalls for integrated education while educational rights in Northern Ireland remain unresolved.
The Working Party on Integrated Education was established by the Minister of Education in 1998 following the Belfast Agreement to consider "ways of assisting the further development of the integrated school sector while taking account of the interests of other schools." The working party threw out these terms of reference as "too narrowly-focused on the formal integrated sector" and failing "to recognise the important contribution which other schools could make to the promotion of tolerance" - as, it claimed, the Belfast Agreement required.
Even if they had stuck to their terms of reference, this kind of working party is hardly an appropriate way to "encourage and facilitate integrated education" which the Department has a duty to do. The Education Reform Order requires it to respond to parental wishes from both sides of the community. Consultation with "educational partners" makes sense, but the future of integrated education is too important to be left to a vote of various "educational partners" meeting in private.
Only four of the 12-member working party were from the integrated sector. It was not even representative of the two main traditions in Northern Ireland. Less than a third were drawn from the Catholic community.
Religious balance is central to the democratic basis of the whole integrated schools movement. The real integrated education partners - parents, teachers and pupils - were hardly represented at all.
The report acknowledges that the growth of integrated education requires new thinking. But, though it suggests that school viability might be assessed by all the education partners, it's not clear if the Council for Catholic Maintained Schools plans to be a willing "partner" in this.
Continuing strong parental demand projected in an Integrated Education Fund (IEF) Development Plan is also accepted - 20,000 new integrated school places are anticipated over the next 10 years, taking the total to 34,000 or 10 per cent of the school population. But even this relatively modest progress assumes an increase in the largely unproven transformation of existing schools to integrated status.
This requires Protestant schools to recruit a minimum 10 per cent Catholic pupils - hardly the cross-community partnership envisaged by founders of integrated education such as All Children Together . Catholic school authorities will not even consider such a minimalist commitment.
The report also ignores a key issue: Why shouldn't churches themselves become involved in shared provision? Instead it talks of the "development of pluralism in all schools" through more EMU, cross-community contacts, civic and political education and support for "mixed" enrolment schools.
This is positive, but doesn't go far enough. Pluralism in schools is about democratic structures which provide respect for cultural and religious diversity. Segregated education providers may not wish to go the "whole way", but should they have a veto on parents and pupils' rights?
If the Belfast Agreement means anything it is that change is required to create a peaceful society. This is a matter of the two communities working together locally within a framework of rights - not private deals between so-called "education partners." All the parties agreed that integrated education must be part of reconciliation: "An essential aspect of the reconciliation process is the promotion of a culture of tolerance at every level of society, including initiatives to facilitate and encourage integrated education and mixed housing."
The right of parents - and pupils - to choose integrated education and the Department's duty to provide it must be recognised alongside all the other equality rights which the two new Northern Ireland Commissions - on Human Rights and Equality - will be required to protect under the European Convention of Human Rights and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The Fortnight Educational Trust, Belfast
