There are two major differences between the multidenominational school movement in the Republic and the integrated school movement in Northern Ireland. First, the northern movement is much larger than its southern equivalent - 37 schools with nearly 9,000 pupils in the North compared to 15 schools with just over 2,000 pupils in the South.
Second, 14 of these 37 schools are second-level schools, compared with none in the Republic. Up to three years ago all but four of the schools were primary schools. In fact, after Lagan College and Hazelwood College were started in Belfast in the early Eighties, all but two of the next 18 integrated schools were primary schools, most in towns outside Belfast.
All this has changed over the past three years. On September 1st, 1994, the day the first IRA ceasefire started, the the first of a new generation of integrated second-level schools - Erne Integrated College in Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh, and Shimna Integrated College in Newcastle, Co Down - opened their doors.
Even the famously conservative Department of Education of Northern Ireland (DENI) appeared to have a rush of blood to the head in the new atmosphere of peace. In the following year, for the first and last time, it sanctioned the construction of first phase permanent buildings for the two new schools. Most integrated schools, even those in existence since the early Eighties, still operate out of temporary and mobile accommodation.
Eight more second-level colleges have opened in the past three years: in Dungannon, Omagh, Loughbrickland (Co Down), Ballymena, Coleraine and, last month, south/west Belfast, Carrickfergus, and Newtownards.
In the early years there was no government funding. In 1991 this changed to a policy of paying teachers salaries and equipment costs where enrolments were considered viable. Parents still have to buy or rent sites and pay the cost of buildings for three years before DENI provides retrospective capital funding.
However, the three schools which started last month opened without even basic recurrent funding. DENI ruled that the last two did not meet criteria laid down by the previous Northern Ireland Education Minister, Michael Ancram, that new integrated schools should have 100 pupils in their start-up year with a religious balance of at least 70:30 between the communities in their area. Malone College in Belfast lost its DENI approval when planning permission for its chosen site was slow in coming through.
The parents, with the support of the Northern Ireland Council for Integrated Education (NICIE), went ahead, pointing out that Ancram had decided last year to make it more difficult to open integrated schools by raising the starting threshold from 60 to 100 pupils. This, they said, was against the spirit of the 1989 Education Reform Order, which had required the British Government to "encourage and facilitate" integrated education.
What Ancram was worrying about was the huge cost of the new second-level schools - whereas the threeyear cost to government of setting up a primary school is estimated at £1 million, the cost of a second-level school is more like £4 million.
The policy-makers at DENI had not foreseen the sizeable leap in demand for places in integrated second-level schools. NICIE's senior development officer, Brendan Heaney, puts this leap down to a number of factors. Apart from the improvement in the communal climate brought about by the 1994 ceasefires, he cites the coming of age of children in integrated primary schools and the growing perception that allability integrated schools also benefit children academically.
In the early Nineties, the British Government's first `league tables' in Northern Ireland showed Lagan and Hazelwood regularly among the best-performing schools in the Belfast area when it came to exam results. This made the North's only real `comprehensive' schools increasingly attractive to parents as an alternative to the region's elitist grammar schools, which choose their students from the best performers in the selection tests taken by 11-year-olds. Lagan, which now has about 1,000 pupils, has become the most over-subscribed school in its education and library board area.
The British Government's response to the growing attraction of integrated education to parents was to encourage the option for existing schools, particularly in the state-run and mainly Protestant `controlled' sector, to `transform' themselves into integrated schools. This is seen as integration `on the cheap.' It allows existing schools where at least 10 per cent of the students come from one community to apply to become integrated. Concern has been expressed that this new system may lead to some schools with falling pupil rolls applying less out of a commitment to integration than as a way of guaranteeing their mediumterm future.
However, the state schools are beginning to queue up. Last year there were five `controlled' integrated primary schools and one `controlled' integrated college. A large primary school in Bangor and three more second-level schools in Holywood, Lisburn and Downpatrick have applied to go integrated next year.
Two more Co Down primary schools have put in for conditional approval to become integrated. One is in Kircubbin. The other is in Rostrevor, the home village of Presidential candidate Mary McAleese, a critic of integrated education.
These two schools will be trying to follow the example of Portaferry primary on the tip of the Ards peninsula, which was threatened with closure until it went integrated two years ago. As an integrated school it was more attactive to the majority Catholic population of the area and has seen its numbers grow in that time from 38 to nearly 60.
NICIE and the parents in the three schools which started without funding this year are now waiting for the North's new education minister, Tony Worthington, to review the criteria for funding new integrated schools.
They are not holding their breath. In June the new Minister turned down their resubmitted proposals for funding. Worthington has said he is "hamstrung" by his predecessor's decisions - he warns that the capital resources needed to develop the integrated sector could not be provided at the expense of other schools. He is also constrained by Tony Blair's promise to stay within the last Tory government's spending limits.
In recent months the three parties with paramilitary connections - Sinn Fein, the PUP and the UDP - have all come out in favour of integrated education. Sinn Fein chairman Gerry O hEara has been a strong advocate in the Western Education and Library Board area, a Catholic stronghold which has often been less than favourable to the cause of integration.
However, even here, the much-respected outgoing chief executive, Michael Murphy, said two years ago that the future for many villages would be for Catholic and Protestant children to come together to share the local school. It was time, he said, for the Catholic Church and the education boards to look at the possibility of joint management bodies in such schools, for the sake of the children and the wider community, as well as for sound financial reasons.
Brendan Heaney makes the same point: "Given the government's financial constraints, it's clear that future initiatives in integrated education lie very much in the context of transforming existing schools. There is a huge potential - particularly in the smaller towns and rural villages - for communities to share schools."
