'How Can Northern Ireland’s Education System Still Be Divided Across Religious and Community Lines? (2024)

Education is a core determinant in human development. In regions that have undergone conflict, educational programmes are invaluable foundational tools in fostering community cohesion and reconciliation. Why then is Northern Ireland’s education system still divided across religious and community lines?

Since the formation of Northern Ireland in 1921, education has been splintered into two sectors: controlled state schools structured mainly to accommodate students from a Protestant background; and Catholic maintained schools run by the Council for Catholic Maintained Schools (CCMS) and attended by students from a Catholic background.

For the last century, children have been segregated down religious lines from the age of five, allowing societal division to flourish.

A parent-helmed initiative for integrated education, aimed at removing community division and teaching children together, led to the successful launch of Northern Ireland’s first integrated school in 1981.

Following this watershed, further support was extended to integrated education in the 1989 Education Reform (NI) order and, as a central pillar of reconciliation, a commitment toward “initiatives to facilitate and encourage integrated education” was included in the Good Friday Agreement.

But there was nothing in law to compel Northern Ireland’s devolved government to support integrated education initiatives.

What followed was decades of inertia and backsliding.

By 2010, the concept of integrated education was replaced with the notion of ‘shared education’ – a watered-down idea that maintains separation but encourages the occasional shared learning experience. In 2012, a Ministerial Advisory Group on Advancing Shared Education was established, but it made no reference to integrated education in its mandate.

As a result, progress on integrated education has been painstakingly slow and has relied almost entirely on the initiative of motivated parents.

There are only 71 integrated schools across Northern Ireland. According to the school census of 2022/23, out of the 355,156 total pupils enrolled in schools throughout Northern Ireland, only 8% attend an integrated school. In 2001, this figure stood at 4.2%. Integrated education provision has increased by just 4% in 23 years – should this be allowed to continue, further generations of young people could continue to be moulded by this socio-political climate of apathy toward segregation.

The current system of division designates a community affiliation on children, and their individual school unforms provide a marker so as to make clear to other young people which community they supposedly belong to.

Once in this divided education system, young people are then taught different versions of Northern Ireland’s shared history – with UK-based charity Parallel Histories reporting a bias between controlled and Catholic schools, with the majority of Catholic schools teaching the entirety of Northern Ireland’s conflict, while four out of 10 controlled state schools excluding it.

Political support for the reimagining of Northern Ireland’s conflicted education system has been lukewarm at best.

Parties, prioritising their electoral bases, have often neglected or opposed mechanisms to increase integrated provision, which led Alliance MLA Kellie Armstrong to table legislation that would create a statutory duty on the Department for Education to do more in 2022.

The Democratic Unionist Party opposed Armstrong’s legislation and attempted to use the Petition of Concern – a mechanism in the Good Friday Agreement designed in good faith to protect minority rights – in a plot to block the proposals.

The legislation passed into law with 49 votes in favour and 38 in opposition – a monument to the inertia, apathy, and hostility toward a more secular and inclusive education system. Why? Due to the nature of Northern Ireland’s consociational system, political parties are still divided down community lines – unionist, nationalist, or other. A divided political system benefits from a divided society.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, both the Presbyterian and Catholic Church have opposed efforts to advance integrated education, each vying to maintain their own relevance and ethos.

It is often purported by opponents of integrated education that the current systems are already ‘unofficially’ integrated. While there are some examples of schools that are not formally designated as integrated hosting a mix of pupils from different community backgrounds, statistics from NISRA in 2021 confirm that 7.6% of pupils in controlled schools come from a Catholic background, while only 1.2% of pupils in Catholic maintained schools come from a Catholic background. By comparison, integrated schools boast a more even representation from the two main communities: on average 35.5% Protestant and 34.7% Catholic pupils in 2021/22.

A divided education system deprives young people of the opportunity to build a broader understanding of the complex post-conflict society to which they belong, and stymies wider reconciliation across communities.

A 2023 survey by think tank Pivotal demonstrated that 77% of the 250 young people surveyed believed that more integration in education would help build greater understanding between young people from different backgrounds, while 67% believed that a new integrated school system would help move Northern Ireland forward.

And it isn’t just young people that prefer integration. A 2023 Lucid Talk poll revealed that 66% of respondents “support integrated education or believe it should be the main model”.

All the while, segregation in the North endures. A recent publication by the Ulster University – titled ‘The Cost of Division in Northern Ireland’ – has estimated the additional cost of maintaining a “divided education system at £226 million each year, or over £600,000 every day of the year”.

It is reasonable to conclude that Northern Ireland’s divided education system is less about giving young people the best start in life, and more about the self-interest of two opposing traditions.

The 2022 Integrated Education Act represents a step change, but integrated education is still at a disadvantage. Demand outstrips supply, integrated schools remain reliant on charitable funding from organisations such as the Integrated Education Fund, and changing to integrated status requires a grassroots campaign from local parents.

Since 2019, there have been 26 parental ballots in schools seeking to pivot to integrated status wherein parents returned a ‘yes’ response. The average ‘yes’ response percentage is 91%. Yet, opponents claim that there is not sufficient evidence of demand.

Education continues to be an under-utilised tool in peace and reconciliation. It is no panacea to all the ills and traumas that foment in a post-conflict society, but it is a foundation from which community cohesion may grow. With a new Labour Government comes a new opportunity to make good on the myriad unfulfilled promises of the Good Friday Agreement – a deal Labour helped broker.

Advancing integrated education should be a core objective of the new Secretary of State, in tandem with commitments to increase shared housing. Rather than have young people divided into opposing educational sectors that are dominated by religious and political identities, Northern Ireland should have one primary education system that is integrated as the norm.

How can we expect the next generation to take forward the peace process if they continue to be subject to the segregation and reinforced division that defined the experiences of their parents and grandparents? Rather than pitting opposing education sectors against one another, young people in Northern Ireland deserve the opportunity to navigate their formative years in the care of an inclusive system everyone can share.