Newton Emerson: Fading myth of the North’s world-beating schools

For a very long time, Northern Ireland told itself it had one of the best education systems in the world. National and international statistics appeared to back this up.

Over the past decade, a more realistic assessment has filtered into public consciousness. Northern Ireland has one of the best and worst systems in the world. It produces excellent exam results, yet a third of children leave school with few or no qualifications.

Academic selection, still practised across most of the region, defines this divide. Around half of children go to grammar schools from age 11 after passing an entrance exam. The remainder go to non-selective secondaries. This allows the mainly middle-class families whose children get into grammar schools to believe that they, at least, are still in a good system.

Now a further realisation is sinking in: even the good is not good enough to excuse overall failings. It would be pleasant to report this is due to a new mood of social solidarity but it owes more to a dawning awareness of wider economic underperformance.

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Firms are consistently reporting “a lack of basic employability skills amongst graduates”, according to Stormont’s Department for the Economy. There are shortages of qualified workers at all levels in most fields, including for professional jobs, constraining inward investment and causing low productivity. The good half of the system is not meeting demand or fulfilling needs.

Northern Ireland’s “well educated workforce” has been a cliché of official development drives since time immemorial. Realising it is no longer true can come as a shock.

The problem is beginning to crop up in reports on Irish unification, giving an edge to its political prominence. Dublin’s Economic and Social Research Institute has regularly cited the cost of Northern Ireland’s poorly qualified workforce as an issue to be addressed ahead of a Border poll.

A study last year from Trinity College Dublin said the North has “the worst educational system of any region in the UK” and upgrading it to deliver comparable economic performance with the Republic would take 30 years.

This is something people of all persuasions in Northern Ireland struggle to accept, as it runs so contrary to what most of them have always believed.

Naturally, the way to avoid confronting this is to break it down into a pointless sectarian split.

Academic selection

In 2002, Sinn Féin education minister Martin McGuinness unilaterally abolished academic selection. The DUP disputed his power to do so and the resulting deadlock has yet to be resolved. In the meantime, schools have adopted two unregulated tests, one of which can be roughly described as Catholic and the other Protestant. Everyone accepts this is absurd.

An equally ridiculous argument has emerged over unqualified school leavers.

Working-class Protestant boys have the highest percentage figure in this category. However, there are more working-class Catholic boys without qualifications in absolute numbers.

Unionist and nationalist politicians engage in competitive victimhood over this, effectively boasting of letting down their own communities.

January’s New Decade, New Approach deal to restore devolution required the executive to set up an expert group “to address links between persistent educational underachievement and socio-economic background, including the long-standing issues facing working-class Protestant boys”.

The group’s membership was announced in the assembly this week by DUP education minister Peter Weir, who highlighted the Protestant percentage figures. He was promptly chided by Sinn Féin’s John O’Dowd, a former education minister, over the Catholic absolute numbers.

Why could both men not have said they were both correct and that both their parties would tackle a common problem.

It is not as if the experts’ report will be a surprise. It will advise abolishing academic selection, properly this time, like all similar reports before.

Declaring a large group of mainly low-income children to be ‘non-academic’ at 11 and parking them all in the same secondary schools is the link between persistent educational underachievement and socio-economic background. This could scarcely be more obvious.

It is often noted that Stormont has a pile of expert reports on health service reform, all recommending the same changes that politicians dare not implement for fear of public outrage.

Less noted is that the same is true of education.

There is a genuine ideological difference between unionist and nationalist parties on selection as equality of opportunity, versus non-selection as equality of outcome. However, research finds little evidence this divide is reflected among the electorate.

The real political obstacle is that the middle-classes will not give up ‘their’ grammar schools. Although the Catholic Church has made firm efforts to move its sector to a comprehensive model, it has met determined resistance and parents will turn to Protestant grammars if necessary – typically, a quarter of pupils in such schools are Catholic.

Attitudes this firmly ingrained are unlikely to change at the behest of politicians, even if they were inclined to show the necessary leadership. It may take declining career prospects for grammar school children to finally debunk the myth of one of the best education systems in the world.