Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Miss M McIlveen): I welcome Tina Merron, the chief executive of the Integrated Education Fund (IEF); Sam Fitzsimmons, the communications director of the IEF; Professor Brandon Hamber from the University of Ulster; and Professor Alan Smith from the University of Ulster. I apologise for the delay. You were here for at least part of the previous session, so you understand the engagement that there is with members. I did not want to curtail that conversation too much, but I want to extend my apologies to you.

Would you like to make your opening statements? I assume that you have spoken among yourselves about how you wish to organise that part of the session. We will follow with questions.

Mrs Tina Merron (Integrated Education Fund): Thanks very much for inviting us. The Integrated Education Fund will go first, so it will be me followed by Sam, and then it will be Professor Brandon Hamber and finally Professor Alan Smith. The IEF's presentation is very brief, which might help with the timing.

Let me introduce myself, first. I am the chair executive of the Integrated Education Fund, and, as I said, I would like to thank you for inviting us. I want to give you a brief background on the fund and outline some of our plans and some of the points in our submission. It will be brief.

The Integrated Education Fund is an independent charitable trust that is dependent entirely on fundraising. The trust is needed because the Government does not adequately plan for the development of integrated education in Northern Ireland. The dual purpose of the fund is to increase places across Northern Ireland to meet parental demand and to support the meaningful reform of our education system into a single system.

Without educational reform, the vast majority of our children will continue to be educated separately according to their religious or community background. The cost of inaction will mean another generation growing up with limited contact with one another. Northern Ireland has reached a point where most people agree that educating our children together is the way forward. That is evidenced by regular independent surveys and polling as well as community support.

The task ahead is to encourage and challenge everyone to imagine what it could be like if our children were educated together, rather than apart, and to bring about the changes needed to make that a reality. We recognise that reforming a well-established education system will not happen overnight, but we have already come a long way and some major steps have been taken.

Further change is needed in planning and the Integrated Education Fund wants communities to be put at the heart of that educational planning. Any future decisions for our education system must include the views of the community. Educational planning that does not take account of parental demand or aspiration is neither sufficient nor acceptable. It cannot be left solely to the existing education providers or sectors to determine the future of schools in any area.

The Department of Education must seek a method to find out what parents want in the types of schools in their local area. To do that, it needs a process of engaging and involving communities in the area-based planning process. The IEF asks the Education Committee to be supportive in helping to find an independent mechanism to assess parental demand. We should not assume that the types of schools that we have are what parents want. Putting communities at the heart of education should threaten no one.

I will now pass over to Sam.

Mr Sam Fitzsimmons (Integrated Education Fund): Again, I would like to thank the Chair for inviting us to give evidence. My presentation will be quite brief as well, but I will expand a little bit on what Tina said.

In 2014, the fund published an alternative manifesto for education, in which we advocate a move away from the current divisive nature of our education system. Education is central and vital to creating an inclusive society, and that can only be achieved by establishing a unified and coherent education system. The IEF alternative manifesto sets out our shared vision for an inclusive and equal society in Northern Ireland, which is free from social and cultural barriers. It is a road map that indicates opportunities to deliver sustainable change and alternative approaches to six key areas of Northern Ireland's education system.

The first of those is area-based planning that is shaped by the community and which reflects parental choice, community needs and the desire for a shared future in physical localities. The second is a single authority for the administration for education. The third is a single teacher-training system. The fourth is a single model of governance for all schools. The fifth is the extension of fair employment legislation to the recruitment of teachers, and the sixth is the application of section 75 of the Northern Ireland Act to all schools.

The Integrated Education Fund challenges the Committee to recommend that a comprehensive independent review of the economic impact of both shared and integrated education is carried out, with the principal aim of better informing policy decisions. We also encourage the Committee to recommend establishing an accessible evidence base on shared and integrated education that would be used to underpin policy decisions on strategic investment and the reform of our education system.

I thank the Committee again for taking the time to hear us.

Professor Brandon Hamber (Ulster University): Thank you very much for inviting me to address the Committee. I appreciate the invitation. I am here in my capacity as a practitioner and a researcher who has been working on peace-building and reconciliation issues in a range of societies over nearly two decades. I am also the director of the International Conflict Research Institute at Ulster University.

Given the limited time, I will be very brief in my opening comments. I will speak for about three to four minutes and will focus on the challenges that education here faces from an international perspective. Incidentally, that is not something that you can do in three or four minutes, but I will give it my best shot. Before I do that, I want to acknowledge the substantial progress that has been made towards peace. All those involved should be commended, and that is recognised internationally. That said, Northern Ireland remains a deeply divided society that is emerging from conflict.

As you all know, 90% of children are educated in schools that are predominantly Protestant or predominantly Catholic. DE figures show that almost half of Northern Ireland schoolchildren are still being taught in schools in which 95% or more pupils are of the same religion. When I share that fact with politicians, practitioners and peace builders around the world, they are astounded, as integrated education is internationally considered to be a fundamental building block of sustainable peace. That is not to say that schools that are dominated by one tradition or another are inherently bad, and many serve their children very well with very sound academic education. However, I think that it is questionable whether they are able to fully supply the core skills that children need in today's society.

The consultation document on a shared education policy, which was launched in January 2015, raises that very issue. It asserts that:

In addition, there is growing international research that shows that diversity increases productivity on a number of levels. In Northern Ireland, research has also convincingly confirmed that separate schooling on grounds of religion can create negative social attitudes of those who are perceived as the other. I can share all that research with you and will not quote it all.

The United States Institute of Peace, which is one of the largest state-funded peace-building organisations in the world, funded by the United States Government, concludes that:

It goes on to state:

are inevitably conveyed about other groups in society. That is from a report from 2006.

It is interesting to note that several high-level documents and local policies specifically recognise the importance of integrated education too. As you know, the 1998 agreement sees integrated education as an:

and key to:

The Consultative Group on the Past says:

The consultation document on a shared education policy notes:

It states that:

As Tina mentioned, social surveys also show that the vast majority of the general public routinely see integrated education as key to the future. In fact, the consultative document that I quoted before notes:

Yet the provision and, therefore, the choice are simply not available to many parents. Indeed, there is an inequality in provision. Comprehensive research on the subject has concluded that the main reason for preferences for integrated education not being met is insufficient numbers of shared spaces to accommodate demand.

Other divided societies continue to learn from the work of the integrated education movement in Northern Ireland, yet, within Northern Ireland, there appears to be little political will to support that ground-breaking and internationally recognised movement. Instead, the learning from what has been achieved by the integrated education movement seems to have shifted into the direction of shared education.

At face value, sharing and contact between groups is, of course, positive. The research in that area is promising and shows, among other benefits, that the type of inter-group contact that shared education offers can lead to more positive relationships and perceptions of others and can build into school collaboration. In many senses, however, the move to shared education merely proves the obvious. International social psychological research has shown for decades now that, under certain conditions, contact between groups can promote positive views of others. Of course, any increased contact between school-age children of different traditions is to be welcomed, but, as recent research on shared education notes, an environment that seemingly reinforces a monoculture order can limit the potential of such programmes. In other words, contact programmes taking place within an overall segregated social context, despite their positive indicators, are not necessarily conducive to creating positive attitudes between groups over the long term. It is, from a policy perspective, counter-intuitive to set up a new large-scale community relations programme to bring children into meaningful contact in schools with one another through various collaborative ventures at great expense financially and in terms of resources when the context itself will continually undermine any potential achievements unless this is part of a wider strategy to fundamentally change the context.

Of course, there are many reasons why the context cannot be changed instantly, and we must foster contact where we can, but to lose sight of the fact that, logically and economically, the most viable place to foster contact is in an integrated classroom on a day-to-day basis is missing the most obvious long-term sustainable solution. Shared education should not become a policy end in itself. I therefore urge the Committee to be bold in its recommendations and set a staged long-term timetable for integration. This will truly offer the children the best opportunity for the future locally and globally and give Northern Ireland its rightful place as an exemplary peace process.

Professor Alan Smith (Ulster University): Good morning. I am also grateful for the opportunity to meet the Committee. I provided a written submission. I hold the UNESCO chair at the University of Ulster. I have worked in this area for most of my professional career, from the early 1980s, both as a teacher and then as a development worker in promoting, what has now come to be known as, shared education in communities such as Strabane, Enniskillen and Limavady — interestingly, the same sort of areas that seem to be promoted and still engaged in shared education today.

My interest here is in trying to give some kind of independent critique, really, on what I see as where shared education is being introduced into legislation and its policy aspirations, but maybe trying to ground that a little bit by looking at the realities of what is represented in the actual operational plans that are proposed by the Department of Education. I think that the inconsistencies there are often the things that should be of most concern for us.

There is a more detailed submission, which has highlighted some significant limitations in the Department's operational plan for this policy, particularly in terms of the impact; the numbers of pupils who are currently affected — I think that my academic colleagues at Queen's estimate that about 10,000 pupils are currently involved, which is actually less than are involved in integrated schooling at the minute; the additional financial costs of what is already an expensive separate school system, particularly around sustainability after the philanthropic input over the initial four-year period is no longer there, and how those costs are likely to be absorbable by schools given other competing priorities; the added logistical and bureaucratic burden if this is actually scaled up to the level that is proposed in the Department's operational plan, which, I think, is hugely ambitious; and evidence from other international contexts, which you are familiar with from other inputs. Shared campuses may seem like a well-intentioned, perhaps, stepping stone in some people's eyes towards greater integration in the education system, but evidence from other contexts suggests that it might actually increase animosity.

I am willing to respond on the detail behind any of those. I would just like to conclude with three comments about how things have moved on since my making that written submission and, now, the Minister's statement and the Shared Education Bill, which is, in some sense, overtaking your deliberations on this. We are now in the situation where the Bill commits to the promotion of shared education as yet not defined. I am not quite sure if it is very common in the legislative process of many jurisdictions to actually create legislation to commit to something that has not been defined, but that is the situation that we are in. There would be concerns around the definition of shared education. It is not clear what problem it is actually designed to address. Is it about creating better community relations? Is this another iteration of a community relations programme? Is it about trying to address intolerance amongst children and young people? Is it about addressing socio-economic deprivation? Is it about economic inefficiencies? Is it to improve learning outcomes? It is not clear from the definition provided here. It is very minimalist. It includes a reference, surprisingly, to children's political opinion. I am not quite sure how primary schools will ascertain that in their engagement and involvement in this programme. I imagine that most schools would look on that as a huge challenge.

In operational terms, it is significant that the statutory duty is on the Department to encourage and facilitate integrated education, which, as some of the members have already indicated, has been quite a passive approach. It has been in the statute book for 25 years. We still have the same level of segregation in our education system. It is also significant that this is not about integrated schools: the statutory duty is about integrated education and the Department's responsibility to do something about increasing integrated education, not simply consolidating an integrated school sector. However, the shared education power through the Education Authority rather than in the Department actually goes further than that statutory duty on integrated education. The consultative documents talked about encouraging facilitation. I see in the draft that it is about actively promoting shared education, which I think will bring a tension between the statutory duty of the Department to encourage and facilitate integration and the statutory power of the Education Authority to not only encourage and facilitate but actively promote shared education. So, you are already introducing some kind of differential here in the priority that you are giving to these two policies. I think that will lead to trouble further down the track.

Another point is that there is a main limitation in that most of the evidence that I have heard so far is that shared education seems to concentrate on attitudinal change between children; nowhere in the Department's plan are there targets or indicators to suggest that this is a stepping stone towards anything other than more sharing between children and young people at a cost every year. For example, there are no targets for increasing diversity of staffing in schools that are sharing or indeed for recognising diversity at the level of school governors.

Finally, my biggest concern is that this policy may actually deepen inequalities. After the initial four years, the Department's own plan suggests that only 65% of schools will actually be eligible to receive funding from this because the rest are too culturally isolated. One of the criteria to access funding is that you are already involved in some sharing. Of course, we know that the most culturally isolated schools are also mapped very strongly onto the most socially disadvantaged areas. So, we will have a programme for four years that gives those who are already sharing the opportunity for more sharing, and we will not allow access to those who are possibly the most important target group; children who are in schools where no diversity of learning environment is already in place.

The Chairperson (Miss M McIlveen): Thank you very much. I will be very brief because members have indicated. If we were starting from a blank sheet, I think that we would have a very different schooling system. Given where we are, in some ways, we have to work with what we have. I am not entirely sure whether there is hostility to shared education or whether you just have genuine concerns as to the route of travel. I have read your submissions, and I find them very interesting, particularly Alan's comments in relation to where we are going with the investment of money. In your paper, you have given us alternative proposals for discussion. I am interested in how you see voluntary amalgamations working across the traditional school sectors and whether you see that as a viable option.

Professor Smith: I think that the question has not been asked. The decision already seems to have been made to put the financial investment in inviting schools to put forward proposals to share. No one has suggested that there is an equivalent amount of funding available to school governors or parents in communities who would like to come together in processes to explore the possibility for rationalisation of the educational facilities in their area. All I am saying is that it is not a very aspirational goal. You are already foreclosing those in communities who would be willing to engage in discussions about how there could be integration of schooling. You are only making the funding available to those who want to share.

The Chairperson (Miss M McIlveen): I have been on this Committee, with the exception of a short time, since 2007. I have been through three variations of the Education and Skills Authority (ESA) and, as it became, the Education Authority. I became very aware of how entrenched people are within their systems and the challenges that there are to get over sectoral interests. If you were to go down that route — I think that it is something that should certainly be explored — I have that experience of how difficult it is to get people together, and to cross that barrier of sectoral interests is a huge challenge.

Professor Smith: But there is not the opportunity in the fund. You have a £25 million fund and it is only open to invitations for proposals to share. None of it is open to groups that would like to investigate the possibility of voluntary amalgamation.

The Chairperson (Miss M McIlveen): I am not sure that it has been closed down, but the Committee may want to explore that with the Department.

Professor Smith: I have read the business plan and looked at the criteria.

The Chairperson (Miss M McIlveen): As a Committee, we will certainly explore that.

Professor Smith: It would be fantastic if it were to be broadened to be inclusive of that, because that would be responding to parental demand and community interest, not simply through sectoral bodies.

The Chairperson (Miss M McIlveen): There are certainly challenges in all of that. All of you referred to section 75 in your submissions and said that it should be applied to schools. Obviously, you heard the previous presentations, and neither organisation was promoting that. Will you expand on that point?

Mrs Merron: Sorry, I did not hear the beginning bit of the other presentations.

The Chairperson (Miss M McIlveen): It is in relation to section 75.

Mrs Merron: Sorry, we were not there. We only came in in the middle of it, so we did not hear what the Community Relations Council (CRC) or the Equality Commission said on section 75.

The Chairperson (Miss M McIlveen): Neither of them promoted what you have been suggesting — that it should be applied to schools. Where have you come from in order to have that conclusion?

Mrs Merron: We are looking forward to common features across all schools, whether a common form of governance, administration, in terms of section 75 or the fair employment legislation, so it is standardised across all schools and they start off on the same platform. That is what we are trying to work towards — a single system.

Mr Hazzard: Thanks for the presentation. On a point of clarity on the money, I was at the briefing when the Department was here. They clarified that all moneys available were available for both shared and integrated projects. I may be wrong on that, but that is certainly what I took from it. I look forward to getting clarity on that.

What should take primacy here — parental choice or the concept that integration is best in theory for going forward? Tina, you talked about ascertaining what parents really think. If parents come back and say that they want choice in the system, is the Integrated Education Fund content with that, or would you still think that that would be a segregated system and that we need to get rid of that system? What should take primacy?

Mrs Merron: Integrated education is always about parental choice; it is about what parents want. We surmise, however, that a lot of parents are not actually asked. There are integrated schools in so many areas, but a lot of areas do not have them. By asking parents, I mean asking through an independent process like a community audit, where someone goes out into the community, talks to people over time, has polls, ensures that they get all the information from the different sectors and that they understand the difference, and then asks the community as a whole what it would like. It is not about sectors deciding what everybody should have; it is what the parents want. I am not aware of any full community engagement or audit the Department has had across all the different sectors. It should go into one area, especially an area where there is going to be major change. You should ask the parents what they want — not what they have got, but what they would like to see in the future.

Mr Hazzard: The opposing argument is that a parent in Belfast has that choice available at every single level. There is that good choice there, for every system, yet the vast majority of parents still do not pick integrated. It suggests that they are being asked, but that you, perhaps, do not like the answers that are coming back. Again, I am playing devil's advocate here.

Mrs Merron: Let us put it this way: are they being asked? Two integrated schools in the Belfast corridor have just had their enrolment numbers increased because of demand. I would say that they are not being asked. What you have got is the current system. No one has actually asked them through an independent mechanism — not just polls, but going into an area and asking parents what they want. If the parents want what they have got, that is fine. It is not about making all schools integrated schools, but asking the community. We did a lot of community engagement work about two or three years ago, mostly in rural areas, and it is amazing how pragmatic parents are. They want a local school for their child, fairly close — they do not have to travel miles and miles — and they are quite happy for it to be a community or integrated school. They are less worried about the type of school as long as it is close to them.

Mr Hazzard: So that variety of choice is fine. I find it difficult to match that with the language used, like "segregation" or "benign apartheid". The integration movement itself says that choice is fine if that is what parents want, but is it really fine if you are describing it as segregated?

Mr Fitzsimmons: The Integrated Education Fund does not describe it as segregation. OFMDFM's T:BUC document says that we have a segregated education system. Also, the 2008 United Nations rapporteur report said that we had segregated education and that we should take steps to address that. Chris, maybe it is a higher authority —

Mr Hazzard: That is why I was talking about parental choice earlier. Maybe we keep falling back on parental choice when we should not.

Mr Fitzsimmons: I will take up what Tina said on community audits. Michael Wardlow from the Equality Commission referred to a deliberative poll that took place in Omagh in 2007 or 2008, I think. Parents were informed about the options for education provision that they could have, and they opted for either greater sharing or more integrated education. That is probably where we, and the Department, need to move to. We need to inform parents of the options that they have, rather than allowing institutions to dictate rationalisation within their area. To date there has been a deficit in engagement with communities and parents.

Professor Hamber: The way I hear the recommendation is that it is really about truly understanding the issue of choice. It seems to me, from the comments you and others have made and from listening in before, that there are a lot of different understandings of what choice is. Parents actually make quite complicated choices when choosing a school. Sometimes it is purely pragmatic; sometimes it might be about culture and other backgrounds. We do not really know that landscape of choice exactly. When there is only a 7% opportunity within a certain type of schooling, there is not an equal choice. It cannot by definition be an equal choice, in the same way that it cannot be an equal choice if one school is ten miles from your house and another is one mile away; that is not an equal choice. That does not mean that we need to be pie in the sky and say that we can simply change that, but we need to understand what we mean by choice in a much more detailed way.

There are all sorts of dimensions to choice. Take my personal situation: if I want to take my son to an integrated school after he turns 11, that school is much further from our house than another type of school. I happen to have a good job at the university, so I have that choice, because I can get into my car and drive him there, but if I did not have that job, I would not have that choice. I therefore understand a more complicated sense of understanding what we really mean by choice, which also tries to help square the circle — if that is the right terminology — and explain the fact that we have all these high-level surveys that clearly show that people are in favour of integrated education and greater levels of sharing, when that is not really happening. There is something there that needs to be explored. I would understand a much more detailed analysis of all of that.

You made a point about segregation and its challenges. My position would be that you can look at a range of international research which suggests that an education system that is divided in different ways has a much greater potential to lead into different types of narrow perceptions of the other. That is quite well established by research. The point was raised whether we were presenting hostility to shared education or a genuine concern. For me, it is a genuine concern that we need to outline the road map. When I read these documents, I have no sense of what this will look like in 25 years. It seems like a series of initiatives that are being outlined. When I say "a long-term vision", I am thinking that that is where you as politicians have to provide direction. Yes, that might bump up against choice at different moments in time, but that is what leadership is.

Professor Smith: While you may not agree with all the terms, the common feature in many of these situations — whether you call it separate schooling or a segregated system — is that the state is systematically funding separation of our children based on identity factors. The system is being funded systematically by the state. The missing piece in our situation is a choice which has been able to secure the confidence of sufficient parents from across the whole of the community as a legitimate choice. Societies that have made the transformation from highly sectorised education systems have not done it through voluntary integration. Desegregation in the United States would not have happened if it had been left to parents to integrate voluntarily. The ANC took a decision not to continue with separate schooling in South Africa. There had to be elements of leadership, legislation and state governance in order to provide an option that parents would have confidence in across the many different identity groups in society. There is a missing piece in our jigsaw, and that is a missing choice that the state has not yet provided. There was an aspiration at the foundation, and there is a history.

Mr Hazzard: I go back to issues related to South Africa and America. You were talking about race relations. Here, of course, a lot of fears are about national identity, and there is a contest over constitutional issues that may not have existed there. This is another issue in America. The Coleman report concluded that educational outcomes stayed exactly the same after desegregation. So do we need to look at —

Professor Smith: Except in areas where there was socio-economic mixing. This is where there is confusion — sorry for interrupting you.

Mr Hazzard: That is another part of it, and I think it is very important. There is some confusion. Is it the case that we want to get to the point where there is entire equality of choice, so that every single parent has the choice of an integrated solution? If that is the case, then, of course, public funding will have to be used differently. Or is it the case that we want a single system, because anything else simply will not do? That brings me to some of the criticism of shared education, which I do not understand. We say we want equality of choice across the board: well, shared education brings different sectors together in different ways, and surely that can only be a good thing. I am confused.

Professor Smith: That would be fine if that was not taking that option. The political leadership, if you like, is challenged to say, "Which direction are we going in this society?" There is not an open chequebook. We have got to be realistic, and we have got to make that choice. All these diverse groups have their own schools and their own options. It is the most expensive option.

Mr Craig: I have listened with interest to what you are saying. In some respects, I have no argument with what you are saying about schools being segregated, because if you have a faith-based education system of any description there has to be a level of segregation. Parents have chosen that option. Are you saying that under no circumstances should government fund faith-based education?

Professor Smith: There is a difference between faith-based education and faith-based schooling. In most societies that have resolved this issue, there has been an ability to provide faith-based education in the context of more plural schools and learning environments. I think that that is the resolution of it. It is similar to the question about religious education. Of course that can be provided within the context. It happens in many schools, and it happens in faith-based schools.

Mr Craig: I am listening carefully to what you are saying. I get the idea that you are saying there should be no Catholic maintained sector in Northern Ireland. I cannot take anything else out of what you are saying. Is that impression right or wrong?

Professor Smith: No, I am not saying there should not be. I am saying that part of the dilemma we have found ourselves in is that we have a highly sectored and, therefore, politicised education system in terms of governance, in terms of those employed within it and in terms of the enrolment of children in those separate schools. The shared education that you presumably support is trying to find a way out of that. I am raising critical questions about whether that is going to be the way that we will find out of that. There will need to be some kind of more structural, systematic change, and there may well be a place for people who want faith-based schools, as well as faith-based education. I think you need to distinguish between faith-based schooling and faith-based education. It is possible to provide faith-based education within a plural school system.

Mr Craig: We can play about with words all we want. We all know what we are hinting at here.

Professor Smith: Sorry, I am not clear on what you mean by that.

Mr Craig: Faith-based education and faith-based teaching seem to go together in the Catholic maintained sector. It is either right or wrong; I do not know. I do not send my child to a Catholic maintained school, so I have no idea. It is a choice that thousands of parents across Northern Ireland make every year. I am not going to sit here and question that choice that they make; I think they have every right to make it.

Professor Smith: Of course, if they want a faith-based education for their children, they have a right to have it. I am saying that, within the structural arrangements we have at the minute, that does not necessitate the governance, employment and enrolment also being determined by faith within their education institutions.

Mr Craig: Another thing that has always puzzled me about the integrated sector is the high-level indicators that tell us that everybody is on for the integrated sector. It puzzles me, because, after 30-odd years, 7% of children are being educated in the integrated sector. There is another thing that absolutely baffles me around this. I watched with interest one of our local primary schools transform into the integrated sector. It was heavily pushed by the senior management in the school, but it was a process which literally took 10 years. There were several parental meetings around it, and several times the parents rejected that option. On the last occasion, it was passed by three votes at a parents' meeting. That does not tell me that there is a huge, huge sway of people out there really interested in integrated education. Does that not indicate that some of those high-level indicators that you are talking about just cannot be right?

Professor Smith: I think that that is a question for the representatives of the integrated education movement.

Mr Fitzsimmons: The attitudinal polls that reflect the community's aspiration that their children be taught side by side cannot be ignored. The fact that —

Mr Craig: But are they right?

Mr Fitzsimmons: Are they ready?

Mr Craig: Are they correct?

Mr Fitzsimmons: Well, they are scientifically conducted polls which are approved by the British Polling Council, and I think that the methodology cannot be questioned. The actual results are pretty consistent with successive polls over the last 20 years. The challenge that you put down that 79% would support their school transforming to integrated status, whilst only 7% actually send their children to schools, was dealt with when Professor Brandon Hamber suggested that there is a whole host of reasons for that, including the geographical locations of integrated schools. Many parents just cannot access an integrated school. Integrated schools are not planned by the Government or the Department; they are set up by parents. No other school sector or education sector has those challenges or barriers put in front of it. That is one of the reasons why we have only 7% of children going to integrated schools. I think that Trevor referred to the fact that the Community Relations Council and the Equality Commission thought that if the same incentives were put for integrated education as have been put in front of shared education, perhaps we would have more children going to integrated schools.

Mrs Merron: One of the things that has helped unblock the growth of integrated education recently has been the Drumragh judicial review. Since then, about 10 development proposals have gone through for integrated schools to increase, and the majority of those — seven or eight — have gone through. They were all for increased numbers. The majority of them are for primary schools to go for double enrolment and for post-primary schools to increase numbers as well. Therefore, that has opened the door, and the Department now recognises that it has that duty, and those proposals have gone through. As I said, seven or eight of those have gone through, and there are more in the system. You will see more of those coming through, and there will be an increasing number of integrated places available through that. However, that is mainly through the existing schools growing.

Professor Hamber: To look at the growth of integrated education outside the context of an extreme political conflict would not do justice to its development. To expect that people would have been able to come together and create all those integrated spaces in the midst of a conflict over the last 30 years, when the conflict itself was driving those things apart — you could turn it around and say that 7% is quite a remarkable figure in that context. To just assume that it could grow at the same rate, notwithstanding the information from my colleagues here, does not take into account the context in which it was developed.

In relation to your other comments, I do not envy the challenge that you have to deal with. All that I can do from my perspective is read the information, integrate it, have a look at it and feed some of that back. In that context, it is very hard to see how maintaining a multiple form of choices over a long period of time is a financially sustainable way of going ahead with the education system. I think that the type of comments that have been made by IEF — that one needs a much more detailed sense of the cost-benefit analysis over a long-term period with some sort of a vision — is a much safer way to go than to simply say, "Yes, we understand the context, we understand why there are all those multiple choices; everyone has that option, and we are just going to stick with that." When I analyse the documents, I cannot see that that is a sustainable form of a future. If you add shared education on top of that, as much as I am in favour of it, you might just be investing in another ongoing and very expensive community relations project, when actually there might be another way of restructuring. That is notwithstanding your point. You are absolutely right: it will take 10, 20 or 30 years — of course it will. However, that is the challenge that we face.

Mr Craig: This is my last question, Chair. You seem to be saying that there should be almost some sort of forced movement towards it. That is what I am getting at: that there should be some sort of legislative rationale behind forcing people down that route. You quoted two big examples — South Africa and the United States. I have researched both of those countries with some interest, because I have family there. What I found fascinating about the figures that I have seen is that, when you down the route of forced integration, you may force the integration from a racialist point of view, if you know what I mean — you mix the races — but, ironically, from a social point of view, you seem to separate the haves from the have-nots. The haves will choose to send their children to private, almost elitist, education, which is out of the Government system altogether. Would that not be the inevitable consequence of doing the same thing here?

Professor Smith: That question was also asked in the context of the inquiry into academic selection. The conclusion was that we do not have an economy that could sustain a private schooling system here. We are a very small system — 1,000 schools or something like that. Parents who wish to have private education are very well served by grammar schools in this system, so there is no real incentive for them to send their children to private schools. I do not think that would be viable.

Professor Hamber: I did not use the word "forced", but what I would say is that your first step is to decide on your vision and, when you read the policy documents, the vision is quite confusing. I quoted a number of those policy documents, because, in a number of them, it is stated that the lack of integration in schools is a problem and that we need to fix it. There are numerous documents coming out of government in different places that make that sort of statement, but there is no real policy to match that to trying to find a way of answering that question.

So, before we say that we are going down the route of forcing people in a certain direction, I would ask the Committee what its vision is of the education system that it would like to see. That might be something like, as we saw in the T:BUC strategy, "by 2025 we want peace walls down." It might be by 2040 or 2050. How are we going to get there, and how will we get there so that we do not repeat the mistakes that others have made, and take that information and do it better? That is more of a legacy that is linked to the hard work that people have done on the peace process than not posing that vision.

For me, the vision and what you want to get to is step one. There might be cajoling, forcing and different types of incentives in that process, but that will be a long-term and complicated process. You cannot say that we will force something down x, y and z tomorrow.

Mr Lunn: I would normally say, "Thank you for your presentation," but that would really not do justice today. That was the biggest dose of realism and common sense that I have listened to in seven years of sitting here. If I start with you, Professor Smith, you have laid bare the deficiencies and the contradictions in the Government's proposals and so have you, Brandon. I do not need to comment on the work of the IEF, because you know that I support it absolutely.

I only have one question, Chair. It is pretty simple, and I will address it to you, Brandon. You talked about the international context and perhaps the international perplexity at the way in which we have continued to do things here. What is the international view of something like the Moy solution? Are you familiar with that?

Professor Hamber: Broadly; I cannot say intimately.

I cannot speak for the entire international community, but, broadly speaking, people think that the idea of trying to move schools under the same type of roof and build a system around that type of structure seems quite antithetical to a lot of what is in the international literature. That is not to say that there would not be support for areas of integration, transformation and connection. I do not think that anyone is naive enough to say that one should not have some of that as well. I think that people would be quite perplexed. The most well-known case — Alan can speak about it — is the Bosnian case. That attracted a lot of international attention.

Mr Lunn: I am not too sure about learning from Bosnia. Alan, do you have any thoughts about this?

Professor Smith: The figures that you quoted on the parental views in Moy tell the story. There is a fairly equal group of parents who would prefer to see one school, and there is another group. Both those groups have contacted me since that 'Spotlight' programme. There are already differences of opinions among the parents. It will be an expensive experiment, and we will see how it unfolds. I hope that it will be a positive experience.

Mr Lunn: I sincerely hope that it is a one-off. It is one of the three programmes that the Government has selected and is going to support, and it just seems unreal to me that they could come up with a solution like that and not go the whole hog. Through a wee bit of cajoling, encouragement or incentivising, they could do the obvious thing, which they will probably come to in 10 or 20 years anyway.

Professor Smith: Those solutions tend to avoid the two other big structural issues that I referred to in my opening remarks, which relate to institutional change. What are the arrangements for the shared governance of those schools or the schools on the Omagh site? What are the arrangements for shared staffing and the employment of teachers, so that all the pupils in all those schools on the same site, or under the same roof or whatever, have their learning opportunities enriched by being taught by educators from different backgrounds? If we keep focusing on children and changing their attitudes and their perceived intolerance or whatever else, we are just avoiding those other key issues.

Mr McCausland: I have two quick points. Alan, you referred to the issue of areas of particular disadvantage, where there may not be the same extent of sharing. I was not clear on that. In north Belfast, there are very high levels of disadvantage and more interfaces — violent and troubled interfaces — than anywhere else in Northern Ireland. There are schools there — I will not name them, but I can think of two that are a couple of hundred yards apart on either side of a very difficult peace line — which are involved in a number of programmes. So there is as a high level of disadvantage and a high level of division, yet they are doing that. Is there some documentary evidence for the point that you made?

Professor Smith: I drew on the statements from the Department's business plan, which made the statement that only 65% schools — I am not sure of the exact number; 762 or something — would access that funding, because the other areas are too culturally isolated. It would be interesting if the Department would tell us how those culturally isolated groups map to social deprivation.

Mr McCausland: Is that not more to do with rural areas where huge swathes of the country are either overwhelmingly Catholic or overwhelmingly —

Professor Smith: We do not know; the Department has not clarified that. I am saying that the possible consequence of mapping social disadvantage to cultural isolation will be that we only fund those who are not culturally isolated and will, therefore, widen the inequalities gap.

Mr McCausland: A bit of clarity is needed around where the lack of sharing occurs at the moment and how that correlates with economic disadvantage.

Professor Smith: It would have been good to have thought of that in advance.

Mr McCausland: I will pass that on to the Department.

The other point is that there are two sectors with different positions insofar as integrated and Irish medium are concerned. You talked about Catholic schooling and Catholic education; presumably the same thing could apply to Irish-medium schooling and Irish-medium education. In a shared situation, how do you see Irish medium fitting in?

Professor Smith: I cannot speak for Irish medium; I can give only an opinion and interpretation of it. In a sense, I see Irish-medium education kind of caught in the same dilemma as integrated education, in that it did not intend to be a sector. The intention of the early integrated schools was to demonstrate that theirs was a viable option and another way that the system could be organised with more inclusive schools. Equally, my impression, based on the contact that I had in the 1980s with those advocating Irish-medium education, was that they did not intend to become a sector; it was to have available throughout our system an entitlement to Irish language education. In a sense, integrated and Irish language or Irish-medium education are, in a sense, collateral damage of our highly sectored system.

Mr McCausland: Looking to the future, how would it fit in?

Professor Smith: Irish medium? Well, I think that all pupils in Northern Ireland should be entitled to have access to a mother tongue language instruction. That presents a huge challenge. Whether in a state school, a Catholic maintained school or whatever, there should be the opportunity for mother tongue language instruction. That is a kind of universal right. The implementation of it is difficult, and it would be the same, I assume, for Ulster Scots.

Mr McCausland: There is no desire there for schools, I can assure you.

Professor Smith: Sorry.

Mr McCausland: There is no desire there for schools, even though, technically, it would be an entitlement, there is no desire for it yet. I think that their cultural rights can be met within the controlled sector or whatever sector. OK, that is fine.

Professor Smith: Basically, I am saying what my position would be on this entitlement or —

Mr Hazzard: I am interested in a couple of points to finish, perhaps. What do you think the Department should do straight away? What is the most important thing that we could get on with to fulfil the ambitions that you talked about? Equally, in your opinion, what is the most important thing that the Committee inquiry needs to be addressing or saying? Lastly, do you feel that there is a duty on the Department to provide secular education to those who want it? I often feel that that is the white elephant in this whole debate, in that, to me, integrated is still ecumenical, still faith-based to a certain extent, because we are still talking about religion and not about the entirely secular separation of church and state. Do you feel that there is an onus on the Department to provide that?

Mrs Merron: The integrated movement would certainly like to see an analysis of the benefits and costs of shared and integrated education, going forward. I would also like to see the vision that is missing, which Brandon talked about. As well as that, one of the key things for us is to have community engagement to really find out what communities want, and not assume that what is there is what they want. Do you want to add anything to that, Sam?

Mr Fitzsimmons: I just reiterate the need for community engagement and community audits. I would like to see some accessible evidence base that would help policymakers in their decision-making around strategy and the fiscal element, in particular. I suppose that the independent review of shared and integrated education and its impact would feed into that.

Mrs Merron: In terms of secular education, the integrated movement has always struggled with that scenario. The aim was to have multiple faiths in one school, with the option for parents to opt out. However, we thought it easier to put everything in and let parents decide later whether they want to withdraw their child from religious education. It has always been a case of putting everything in and get everybody to agree that, and then, if people want to withdraw, they can.

Professor Hamber: It is a difficult question. From my side, I would probably cite some of the things that IEF just outlined in terms of the cost-benefit type of analysis. I would like to see us moving away from trying to assess what strategies are being proposed in quite a narrow way, for example, by saying that, if we start getting greater sharing, this might improve relationships. We should maybe step back from that and ask in what context we are trying to improve relationships and how is what we are doing impacting on this wider context. I alluded to it at the beginning of my submission. In the international context, others around the world are focusing very much on trying to educate their children with as much diversity and cross-cultural input as possible to make them as competitive in the world as possible. Here, every time we raise issues such as integration and other things, there seems to be a rolling back from that. There is a massive opportunity right now to do this differently, and I would like to see some vision in people grasping that and taking it forward. The simple thing would be — I know it is almost impossible — for there to be some way of getting round the table saying, "This is where we want the system to be", and asking, "How do we get there?" There might be multiple avenues to get there and it is going to be complicated, but, for me, that would be the single thing.

You asked a question about secularism. I am an educator; I work in a university and would say that, for me, the primary role of education is to teach people to think critically. What I would like to see — some integrated schools achieve it but not all, and other schools achieve it — is an environment in which people can learn about whatever religion they want and can express whatever sense of secularism they want or they can express their atheism in whatever way they want, and we teach young people to have a critical engagement with that and move away from the idea that this is embedded in this type of sectoral learning. Granted, I accept the comments about whether that means the end of the Catholic-based education system; I do not know what that looks like in the long term. My advice, simply from looking at international lessons, would be that, if we can bring that all into one place and let people engage with their religions and their secularism in different ways, we have much better hope for the future.

Professor Smith: On secular provision, personally, I would encourage my children and engage with them on whether they wanted to participate in religious education or, indeed, religious instruction in some of our schools. However, my position is that any school that is in receipt of state funding from the taxpayer should have a responsibility to provide education for all faiths and none. I do not think that the opt-out is sufficient. If my child was opted out of any faith provision, I would expect his or her time to be used constructively and that he or she would not simply be left to twiddle their thumbs or be supervised in some room. Quite a lot of research has been done in the Republic of Ireland on that, where many parents who did not want their children to be involved in religious education provision were complaining that their children were being neglected and not adequately provided with educational alternatives. The responsibility should be on all schools.

What should the Department do? Well, it seems that the way the legislation is stacking up, this power to facilitate, encourage and promote will be devolved through the Education Authority, however it ends up being defined. It might be defined as Irish-medium education; I am sure that would do in this retrospective definition. So, in a sense, that is a role for the Education Authority with a statutory authority. I would say to the Department that, after 25 years, maybe it is time that as well as the statutory responsibility on the Department to encourage and facilitate integrated education — I am not talking simply about a sector but about finding out how our system could be more integrated — it should have a statutory responsibility to promote it.

The state should start to take responsibility for this, rather than, for 25 years, discharging its responsibility by giving about half a million pounds a year to a voluntary, semi-governmental body to try to change a whole system. That is not good enough. We should have the sort of governance now that can take on these challenges and give leadership on them. Give the Department a statutory responsibility, which is extended to promote as well as encourage and facilitate.

Mr Lunn: I have only a one-line comment to make. The Assembly voted in favour of doing exactly that about three years ago, but the Department did not take a blind bit of notice. It was a private Member's motion; it happened to be mine.

Mrs Overend: Thanks very much for your presentation. It cannot all be done at once, and you recognise that. In going forward from where we are now, would you suggest that there should be more integration at primary level or at post-primary level? If we cannot do it all at once, where would it be more beneficial to begin?

Mrs Merron: I think that wherever the parental demand is now is forcing integrated education. A majority of the integrated primary schools have put in proposals to increase their numbers because the demand is there. That then feeds into the post-primary schools. You may not be aware that a lot of post-primary schools will also this year be submitting development proposals to increase their numbers. A lot more development proposals will be coming through where the parental demand already exists.

Sam alluded earlier to the fact that it is not the Department of Education that plans for integrated education; it is parents who are expected to plan for a new integrated school. To ask parents to do that is to ask them to take on a massive task. The Department, along with the Education Authority, should take that responsibility on, plan for it and look to see where there are potential changes in an area. It should ask parents what they want and, if it is integrated education, it should provide an integrated school.

Mrs Overend: You mentioned asking parents previously. Sometimes, when surveys are done, you find that parents are in favour of integrated education, but when it comes to choosing it, they are not doing so. How can finding out about parental choice be done more effectively?

Mrs Merron: So far, we have been involved in a lot of polling. We have asked an independent polling company to do that, but it has to be more than that. It has to be about community engagement. You need to go into the area and get to the right stakeholders. You need to find out who they are, bring them together and let them be aware of the different types of system. You need to let them know what will happen, what the changes are, where their local schools are, where the surplus places are and what the vision is for the area. You then need to establish focus groups, which takes time. It is not about having a quick poll and that would be the end of it. It can take two to three months to get all that information and feed it back to the parents. Then you can have a final poll or ballot at the end to see what parents want. There has not been anything like this; I am not aware of it except for the deliberative poll that you mentioned in the Omagh area. There has just been a one-off poll; this has not been done before. The Department has said that it is looking for an independent mechanism. It is about helping the Department to find that mechanism and doing this in areas.

Professor Hamber: From a research perspective, we have quantitative data from many years of surveys but we need qualitative data. We need to ask people what they really think and engage with them at a much more detailed community level to understand whether people know what the choices are and how they are making them. What we might find could be quite interesting compared with what we think about how people go about making that decision.

Professor Smith: I will make a quick practical response. Where do we start? Well, it is already in the plan for the Department: appoint 20 people who will go out and be the development workers to try to work with people and find out what the appetite is for integration and how that would take place. These are investments that are now going into our education system that have never been invested in facilitating — the exploration of people's appetite for integration. There are 15 development officers — £36,000 a year. Do the same and promote integrated education in the same way in the spirit of equality.

The Chairperson (Miss M McIlveen): Thank you all for your submissions and for taking the time to come to the Committee today. I apologise again for the delay, but I appreciate your time. Thank you very much.