Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Deputy Chairperson (Mr Kinahan): I welcome the witnesses, Siobhán Fitzpatrick, the chief executive officer of Early Years; and Pauline Walmsley, its director of knowledge exchange. It is very good to see you. I invite you to make an opening statement.

Ms Siobhán Fitzpatrick (Early Years): Thank you very much. We had an opportunity to listen to the previous discussion on the budget and were absolutely horrified to learn that, without any consultation, £2 million has been cut from the Department of Education's early years fund, which will have an enormous impact on the delivery of early years services. We have just heard about that, and we will analyse the impact, but we feel that it is important to make our point.

We have submitted a paper on shared education that I will speak to, and we welcome any questions. Early Years, the organisation for young children, has been operating in Northern Ireland for 50 years, since 1965. When we started, one of our key objectives was to establish high-quality, inclusive early years services on a cross-community, shared basis. That has been the case from the inception of the organisation. Thousands of communities across Northern Ireland operate early years services that are shared and that operate on a cross-community basis.

Despite the nature of and commitment to sharing in Early Years, we discovered — I think that it has been an impact of the nature of the society that these services have operated in over the past 50 years — that, to embrace fully an inclusive, anti-sectarian approach to early years care and education, staff in settings, parents attending settings and management committees also needed access to high-quality support, capacity building and training to make the services truly shared. That led us to the introduction of a flagship project that has been used in preschool services, and latterly in primary schools. The Media Initiative for Children Respecting Difference programme supports staff, management committees, parents and children to embrace fully an approach to sharing that respects the religious, cultural and ethnic identities of all children and all communities represented in those services. The programme has been subject to a large randomised control trial and a number of qualitative and process evaluations. It has been highlighted as a very successful programme for enabling parents, teachers and children to move away from a situation of mistrust and lack of knowledge of other to implementing with confidence, in both preschool and primary school settings, curricula that really reflect the nature of the society in which children, families, schools and preschools operate.

We welcome the attention being paid to shared education. We were very much involved on the ministerial advisory group and had the opportunity to bring representatives from that group to see services in practice. However, if we are to support fully an agenda of shared education, we feel that it is not appropriate just to provide money to schools and ask them to get on with it. We believe that there has to be attention paid to capacity building for preschools and schools. There has to be attention paid to the current preschool and foundation curriculum that really embraces an approach to respecting difference and sharing in the curriculum, not just an expectation that teachers and children will come together to achieve narrow educational outcomes. We believe that, if teachers and those associated with supporting children, such as management committees and ancillary staff, are to embrace fully a shared education agenda, initial and ongoing teacher training also needs to be reformed to ensure that teachers in particular have an opportunity to explore their experience of difference in the past and to be given the skills and strategies necessary to embrace fully a shared approach to education. We know that the work that we are doing in the preschool sector — the informal sector — has not been trammelled by many of the controls that have perhaps affected the formal sector in the past and that that work is viewed internationally in other areas of division as an exemplar of practice. We would welcome an opportunity for the approach that has been developed in preschool to roll up the system as opposed to what often happens, which is that initiatives in the formal sector roll down to preschool. There is an opportunity to create strategies and structures that will allow young children, older children and the youth sector in Northern Ireland to begin to experience a very different educational experience than children here experienced in the past.

The Deputy Chairperson (Mr Kinahan): Thank you very much. I think that your organisation is a beacon for, and an example to, us all. We are very keen to push that.

The Bill that is coming in focuses mainly on the definition, and I wonder whether you have any comments on how it seems to be defining "shared education" as controlled and maintained, socio-economic and political. Do you have any comments on that?

Ms Fitzpatrick: We welcome an all-embracing approach to sharing, but it is critically important that it does not ignore the particular issue that divides us, which is religious and class divisions in Northern Ireland, especially given our context. That must be recognised as being particularly important. We welcome an all-embracing approach that allows schools and preschools from differing sectors to have an opportunity to begin to create shared experiences. We have had a very good example in rural County Fermanagh through the Fermanagh Trust and the shared education programme funded by the International Fund for Ireland. There, we have been able to develop a truly embracing approach to sharing in a rural context. That embraced a variety of forms of education provider, but there was a strong focus on ensuring that the key issues of identity and religion were fully embraced.

The Deputy Chairperson (Mr Kinahan): You are happy with people being specified, but it may make them have to be put into boxes where they are not in boxes. I like and very much take on board the all-embracing aspect, but it is a concern that runs through the Committee.

Ms Fitzpatrick: Yes.

Mr Newton: I thank you for coming and for your obvious enthusiasm, commitment and passion. I agree with the Chair that, in many ways, you have been a beacon.

I know that you will be well used to measuring the outcome, given all your projects and history, and so on. I am struggling with something at the minute. If you were making proposals to DE on shared education, how would you measure the outcomes — I was going to say "value for money", but it is a bit wider than that — and whether shared education is delivering for our folk?

Ms Fitzpatrick: That is a very important question. Given the austere financial environment, it is even more important, but it is also very important in policy terms. From the very beginning of our work on developing the Respecting Difference programme for young children, that very issue was at the core of what we were doing right. Therefore, we began by thinking about the outcomes that we wanted to improve, and we developed those outcomes from Professor Paul Connolly's evidence base, which showed that children in Northern Ireland were, importantly, developing very strong and positive senses of identity but also very negative attitudes to others whom they perceived to be different, mainly on religious grounds but also on grounds of race, ethnicity, physical disability — the whole range of differences. That led us to thinking about the types of outcomes. We then set an outcomes framework that we would work to, through which we aimed to achieve a situation in which all children in Northern Ireland, regardless of their background, could grow up and become inclusive in inclusive communities. We measured their confidence in their own identity and also their understanding, respect for others, willingness to engage with others, understanding and respect for other traditions and cultures, and the removal of fear of others.

We also set indicators and outcomes for teachers and parents. Before we commenced our work, the baseline analysis indicated that, in the main, teachers here had neither the confidence nor the inputs through their initial and ongoing professional development to address issues of difference and sharing adequately. It was very important for us to be able to measure the degree of competence and confidence in teachers. Then, for parents, it was also very important that there were opportunities to measure their confidence and their willingness to be engaged in activities for sharing and also to support their own young children. Therefore, setting an agreed outcome framework is critical for the policy.

Mr Newton: Yesterday, the Ulster Teachers' Union (UTU) made the point about the need for investment in teachers to be delivered. Perhaps I took the UTU up wrong, but it is less clear how you get parents to become involved. If teachers are involved and parents are not, or vice versa, how do you encourage teachers and parents to work together? What strategy is needed?

Ms Fitzpatrick: That is a critical factor. We know from evidence and research that 80% of what children know and understand does not happen in the school; rather, it happens in the family. Creating a real strategy and partnership between schools and families is critical. We have found that a first step is to support the board of management to develop a strategy for parental engagement around that type of work. The programme that we have developed has, as an intricate part of the service design, a number of parent workshops over the year. If it is a single-identity school, the workshops happen with parents first in their own identity grouping, and, if it is a shared environment, they happen on a shared basis. It is critical that identical support to what is happening in the classroom be given to parents to support the work in the home environment. We have found that to be a very successful strategy. Indeed, we have found that parents very much want the opportunity to have a different experience for themselves and their children from the one that they had.

Ms Pauline Walmsley (Early Years): What has also been important, particularly in interface areas where we have been working, is the whole idea of clustering schools, preschools and Sure Starts so that you are really working with children and their families from age two to age eight; so that, throughout that period, the whole involvement and engagement of parents is deepening; and so that their understanding and confidence around the issue and their willingness to address it is really evolving. That has proved to be very positive.

Mr Newton: Give me just one example of how the schools' management teams have engaged with parents that had a successful outcome.

Ms Fitzpatrick: Schools approach us. The County Fermanagh example is a good example of sharing. The management boards in primary schools in County Fermanagh agreed that they wanted to embrace that type of approach.

The first step is that management boards have an opportunity for training and reflection and the development of a shared policy in the school. The management committees, some of whose members are parents, then engage with the parent workshops. The first element of the workshops is to provide parents with an opportunity to reflect on their experience of living in a divided society and of being educated separately and what that has meant for them.

There is then an introduction to what the Respecting Difference curriculum will look like for their children. That is used as a way of embracing a whole-school approach to sharing around other curricular content areas. Activities and other events engage parents outside the school environment. As Pauline said, it is a whole-community-based approach to shared education.

Ms Walmsley: On a shared basis.

Mr Rogers: You are very welcome, Siobhán and Pauline. You put it very well when you said that developing shared education is not a matter of giving money to schools and letting them get on with it but a matter of capacity building. Can you tell me a wee bit more about how you built capacity in your organisation for sharing education?

Ms Fitzpatrick: Absolutely, Seán. That is a critical point. Teachers and preschool teachers are very willing, but they need the support and the strategies. We started by developing training for teachers so that they can implement the curriculum in preschool, primary school or further up the system.

We have also developed a range of culturally and contextually appropriate resources that support teachers in delivering a new curriculum. You may not be surprised to hear this, but, when we started the work, there was very little in curriculum resources that reflected the reality of a Northern Ireland context. There were lots of resources about ethnic minorities from other environments but not anything that reflected the tensions in Northern Ireland's divided past. We firmly believe that the preschool and primary-school curriculum needs changing to reflect that greater focus on sharing.

We know from our practice and from international evidence that as much focus and support for teachers needs to be centred on the emotional development of children. There is the issue of respect for their own identity, understanding that and then a growing of the emotional intelligence as well as the knowledge intelligence around understanding and respect for other identities and cultures.

The Deputy Chairperson (Mr Kinahan): I need to nip out for 15 minutes. Apologies.

Mr Lunn: You do know that it is unpaid, Nelson.

Mr Craig: We went for the oldest. [Laughter.]

Mr Lunn: Siobhán, you are welcome. The Deputy Chair already said this, but I admire the work that you do, and long may you do it.

You are heavily into understanding, respect, identity and the Respecting Difference programme. That is grand. Our inquiry is about shared and integrated education. I do not think that the word "integrated" has been mentioned yet this morning. Do you find it necessary to do much work with integrated schools? Do you not think that an integrated school is a perfect example of the type of instruction that you would like to see in our schools?

Ms Fitzpatrick: Apologies for not using "integrated". We would use "integrated" for the integrated sector, because we believe that everything that we do in our organisation and in our sector is fully integrated. It is interesting that, when we began to be more proactive in this type of work — creating shared and inclusive spaces — we assumed that a lot of it would have been carried out by the integrated education organisation, but it actually came to us for some of the training that we have since developed, so we have a very positive relationship with the integrated sector. Yes, we would love to see schools fully integrated in the broadest sense, but I suppose that we have had to deal with the reality of the Northern Ireland situation. Our latest estimate was that only 5% of children are formally educated in the integrated sector. We had to make sure that our approaches were reflective of where children were in the informal preschool environment and where they would be when they entered the formal system.

Mr Lunn: It is actually 7%, but we will not —

Ms Fitzpatrick: It is 7% now.

Mr Lunn: It is slightly over 7%.

Fair enough. When the Department talks to us about the shared education programme, its emphasis is unashamedly on educational attainment. If you forget about trying to define it, shared education was going on long before the term "shared education" was ever invented. It has been a necessity and an invaluable thing down the years in a quiet way, and Fermanagh is perhaps the best example that we have of it. I do not think that there is any conflict between what you are trying to do and what the Department is trying to do, but there is a different emphasis.

Ms Fitzpatrick: I worry that the Department will have a focus on narrow cognitive educational gains, when we know that, especially in the context of a divided society, children and young people also have to have outcomes that reflect their ability to be citizens in an inclusive society. Unfortunately, we know from all the evidence, and there is increasing evidence of this, that young people are growing up with prejudicial attitudes formed when they are between three and six. If only the educational focus on outcomes is addressed, with the other issues — inclusion, respect and citizenship — not being addressed, we will continue to have some of the problems that we have.

Mr Lunn: Those aspects are more likely to be addressed in a school in which there are pupils from all sides of the community. I am deliberately not saying "in an integrated school", but they are more likely to be addressed in a mixed or amalgamated school. It perhaps happens more at secondary level. Obviously, the grammar schools are quite well mixed and integrated these days.

Ms Fitzpatrick: One would assume that, but unless there are intentional strategies around the issue and a move away from neutralising the environment to recognising, celebrating and respecting the environments that children come from —

Mr Lunn: I do not think that you are saying that integrated schools neutralise the environment.

Ms Fitzpatrick: No.

Mr Lunn: They confront the situation head-on.

Ms Fitzpatrick: In other environments, it can be ignored.

Mr Lunn: OK. Thank you.

The Acting Chairperson (Mr McCausland): That was an interesting exchange from the oldest member of the Committee. I just thought that I would say that since he had a go at me.

Mr Lunn: I have not had a go at you yet.

The Acting Chairperson (Mr McCausland): I want to pick up on the issue. In paragraph 3.2.7 of your submission, there is an important statement, which is:

I agree with that absolutely. You have set out already this morning the important role that that plays. In the next paragraph, you talk about the dangers and pitfalls around colour blindness and tokenism. What are the examples of good practice or of how the children's identity can and should be validated in the school?

Ms Fitzpatrick: I will give you a couple of examples. We have taken a very intentional integrated approach to the development of what we are doing. Using curriculum resources, particularly with young children and primary-school children, we have persona dolls, which have been developed by the local context. Therefore, there are personas representing the Protestant loyalist community, the Catholic nationalist community, Traveller children, children with disabilities and ethnic minority children. That is one example. We are helping children from across the various identities to identify with those personas and understand and develop respect for the other personas.

We have also taken a very intentional and sensitive approach to many of the cultural and sporting symbols that divide us in Northern Ireland. When we started our work, we were really surprised that there were very few resources for children in classrooms celebrating the Orange Twelfth of July march, St Patrick's Day, Gaelic games or other games, Irish dancing or Scottish dancing. Therefore, we have found that introducing all those traditions in a developmentally appropriate way has been very important to growing, and continuing to grow, a confidence in one's own identity and beliefs, while, at the same time, growing a confidence of and respect for others. The outworkings and implementation of that in many of our settings have been parents being able to celebrate other traditional events with children and families from different communities in a community context. We feel that that is very positive.

The Acting Chairperson (Mr McCausland): I was interested in what you said at one point about very young children developing a strong sense of identity. What was in my mind then was how and where you learn about that identity can shape the child's appreciation of the identity. Therefore, to be Irish, British or whatever will be influenced by how that is transmitted, because children from different backgrounds and with different experiences will have different understandings of each. Does that suggest that it is important that these things be explored in schools and in early years provision so that children get an authentic, accurate, comprehensive experience and understanding of what the identity is and so that it is not very sharp-edged or abrasive?

Ms Fitzpatrick: Absolutely. We began this work in 2001, after the Good Friday Agreement, when a lot of people were thinking that the generation of children aged three to six would not have been affected by the past. However, when we looked at the murals, flags etc and heard the voices of the adults, parents and others whom those young children are constantly influenced by, it is no wonder that positive identify is skewed one way or the other. This leads, unfortunately, to negative attitudes and beliefs about others. For us, this is extremely important.

We have also found that adults, teachers and parents may have an emotional dislike or perception of the other that, when examined, was often based on a total lack of understanding. As part of some of the experiential elements of the training, some teachers and parents were saying, "We don't like the green Hibernian marches", but they did not understand what those were about, and vice versa for the 12 July marches. There needs to be a real approach to deconstructing history, culture and identity before you can reconstruct it in a very positive way. That is critical.

The Acting Chairperson (Mr McCausland): In that area, do the teachers whom you come across and talk to about this come with their own perceptions about the other culture and maybe even about the culture of the community from whom they come?

Ms Fitzpatrick: Absolutely. I think we are all products of our past and our history. One of the first things we do is help teachers to explore in a very experiential, positive and safe way their understanding of the other. It is very interesting when you get a teacher to write 10 very positive things about a Traveller family. When they see what that looks like, it begins to help them to reflect on where they got their beliefs. It is the same if they write 10 positive things about the Catholic community. This is the starting point for us. We have found that teachers want support to develop strategies and curriculums to create shared environments.

Mr Newton: I think that Trevor covered my question, Chair, so I will forgo it.

The Acting Chairperson (Mr McCausland): Is everyone content? Thank you very much indeed, Siobhán and Pauline.

Ms Fitzpatrick: Thank you very much.

The Acting Chairperson (Mr McCausland): We appreciate your presentation.