Educational co-operation across the Irish border is in its infancy. At official level it probably began with the European Studies Project in the late-1980s, which has since brought together around 200 second-level schools on both sides of the border. They looked at common history, geography and environmental themes at junior level and at a range of issues, including social problems like drugs and unemployment, at senior level.
Interestingly, it was generously funded by both departments of education, with relatively little financial support from the EU.
The 1990s have seen increased contact between senior officials in the Department of Education in Dublin and authorities in north Down. The former have helped their Northern colleagues with their Irish-language education programme, and the Northerners have returned the favour by advising on setting up public-private partnerships to build schools.
Probably the single best-funded initiative is Civic Link, an American concept which was a product of last year's visit by President Clinton. It is a transplant into a cross-Border Irish context of Project Citizen, a US programme which involves second-level students exploring and lobbying on local community problems. Twenty-six second-level schools are involved in its first year (with another 46 to follow), and the US Department of Education has pledged nearly $700,000 to it.
The most frequent facilitator of cross-Border school exchanges has been Co-operation Ireland, formerly Co-operation North. Much of the real work of such exchanges has been done by a small number of individual teachers and educationalists, often with little official support. One of the most remarkable prototypes - because it was one of the relatively few to target a partner school in a loyalist town - was a 1980 link-up between Carrick-on-Suir CBS in south Tipperary and Ballymena Academy, Co Antrim.
The originator and continuing energy behind this project, Carrick teacher Nicholas Casey, wants his students to realise that "unionist people in Northern Ireland have values in their lives, including the value of Britishness, which they treasure". He believes that with the coming of peace, the students can experience "the real differences between us, without the distracting business of bombings and killings. "We'll have to accept their Britishness, and they'll have to accept our Irishness, and we can only do that by meeting as people."
Other initiatives include the Horizon project, which brings students from up to 50 schools, North and South, for an annual long weekend of sport, art, drama and social activities; the coming together of County Cork VEC and the South-Eastern Education and Library Board in a Co-operation Ireland-sponsored curriculum co-operation initiative; a link-up between primary schools in north Monaghan and south Tyrone using computer connections to explore local history and the environment; and the Cross-Connect project, which brings together rural secondary schools in the north-west, again using ICT.
Much of the best work is happening outside the mainstream curriculum, for the simple reason that there is no room on the curriculum to accommodate it. OECD observers like Professor Malcolm Skilbeck have been amazed at how little in the Republic's curriculum reflects the huge political and cultural differences and problems on this island. For example, the Civic Social and Political Education (CSPE) syllabus for 12-to-15 year olds contains little or nothing about the North.
One of the most dynamic "outsiders" behind North-South - and Irish-British - school interaction over the past 15 years has been the former Trocaire education director, Colm Regan. For the past three years he has been running "Let's Talk" , which has brought several thousand Irish and English young people - as well as young Africans and Australians - together in a series of conferences to discuss peace and reconciliation in these islands and issues of human rights and justice further afield.
Cross-Border civic and political education is one of the key ways forward, insist people like Regan and Dr Alan Smith of the University of Ulster at Coleraine, Co Derry, who is one of the movers behind a new Social, Civic and Political Education (SCPE) study being piloted for 12- to 14-year-olds in 30 Northern schools this year.
Already this is one of the few areas where there has been real and constructive cross-Border co-operation between practitioners. Those involved in the Republic's equivalent three-year old programme, Civic, Social and Political Education (CSPE), notably its co-ordinator, Stephen McCarthy, have brought the benefit of their experience to assist the University of Ulster team setting up the Northern pilot.
In addition, following a study by the City of Dublin VEC's Curriculum Development Unit, 16 schools - 12 in the Republic, four in the North - this autumn began an 18-month EU-funded pilot project to incorporate a cross-Border "education for reconciliation" element into their CSPE and SCPE programmes.
Smith and his colleagues find the CSPE's emphasis on pluralism, social justice and human rights more suitable to Northern Ireland than the equivalent British programme, which concentrates more on how the political system operates. Above all, Smith emphases the importance of teacher training, whether at pre-service student level or in-service staff development level.
This is an edited version of an article which appears in the just-published ASTI annual journal, Issues in Education. Andy Pollak, formerly education correspondent of The Irish Times, is currently on leave of absence and working as director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies in Armagh.
