Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Miss M McIlveen): I welcome Sir Robert Salisbury. You are no stranger to the Education Committee.

Sir Robert Salisbury: Yes, I seem to have been grilled a few times. [Laughter.]

The Chairperson (Miss M McIlveen): Thank you for your submission. I ask you to make an opening statement, and members will follow that up with some questions.

Sir Robert Salisbury: Good morning, everyone, and thank you for the invitation to come along. I had expected to look at the view at Shimna this morning, but it is not easy to see it today.

I made my submission as a private citizen. I have lived in Northern Ireland since 2001. Before that, I was a professor in the school of education at the University of Nottingham. Before that, I was a vice-principal of a prestigious school in England, and I then took over the Garibaldi School, which, at the time, was the seventh worst school in the whole country. I did that to see if you could apply a different way of running a school to raise standards, and it was a fascinating experience.

I am firmly based in education and, since moving here in 2001, I have been asked to chair the literacy and numeracy task force, the review of funding for all schools and a review of further education colleges. I have had the absolute privilege of looking at hundreds of schools over the years I have lived in Northern Ireland and meeting thousands of teachers, head teachers and so on. That has given me a unique chance to look right across the board from nursery schools to universities that I appreciate greatly.

Some of the points that I raise in the paper are peripheral to the review that you are conducting into shared and integrated education. However, I think that they have a bearing, and that is why I put them into the short, bullet-point submission. As an independent individual, I have no vested interest whatsoever, and I do not come, as many of the other submissions do, with an agenda to say what you should hear from me. My paper is independent; I do not have any axes to grind one way or the other. These are just my observations, some of which relate to the subject under discussion.

The first point is that it strikes me that virtually all world leaders from outside Northern Ireland repeatedly say to us that we should look at an integrated system of some sort. That message has come over very clearly. As a relative newcomer to Northern Ireland — as I said, I first came over in 2001 — I really could not believe that division was so entrenched in the system from the age of three and that there were separate routes through education. Some research that I read about said that only a tiny percentage of 16-year-olds had ever had a meaningful conversation with somebody from the other tradition. It seems to me that the first major point is that integration and shared education both have virtues, and it is about whether that is the pointed issue or whether the whole system should be review and looked at. To most outsiders, separating children from the age of three seems incompatible with 21st-century education.

The second point is one that you have heard from me many times before. It was brought home again only last week when a business leader said on the radio that we educate for too many teachers, pharmacists and lawyers and cannot get enough people for modern technological industries. A point that you have heard me make before is whether we still steer our schools through our rear-view mirrors and educate for a world that is no longer with us. Are we underpinning our education with the right core skills for our young people? What will make them marketable in the next 10 or 15 years? What will make them successful citizens worldwide? Are our schools doing the right things in that area?

When I look at schools — as I said, I have looked at a lot of them — I ask whether we are teaching flexibility and adaptability. One thing that I am certain of is that the rate of change in the world will increase, not decrease, and that its direction is fairly unpredictable. We want flexible and adaptable young people, not prescription.

It seems to me that many schools still drip-feed a prescriptive way to pass examinations, and the world is not like that.

Are we teaching enough about global opportunities? Angling is one of my passions, and I write about it for four magazines. I was sitting at my desk in Seskinore writing something, and an email came in from an editor in Australia. I have never been to Australia, but the editor said, "We have read some of your writing. Would you like to write for our magazine?". I sent an email back saying, "I have never been to Australia. I have attached a couple of pieces". Ten minutes later, she replied saying, "I love them. I have attached a contract. Will you sign it?". I was still sitting at the same desk, and only 15 minutes had gone by. The world is shrinking. What I am trying to say to schools is "Start having a global view of the world, not just of Northern Ireland".

That view has its pitfalls. Every notice in the school that I ran was in seven languages to give the view that the world is out there, and the bottom one was Arabic. It said "head teacher" on my door in seven languages, the bottom one being Arabic. Every Arabic-speaking family who came into the school and passed by my door always looked at it and smiled. It was only after I retired from that school that I wondered if it really did say "head teacher". Sorry, I am being flippant, but I was just reminded of that.

Cooperation, networking and confidence in meeting ever-changing circumstances are crucial. I go round school after school where youngsters are sitting in rows, saying nothing. If we are teaching communication skills and the ability to meet new circumstances with confidence, are we doing that in our schools? Those are crucial things that business leaders say to me that we should be trying to teach: technological competence, communication skills and so on. Have we looked hard enough at the underpinning skills that are taught in our schools?

The third, almost peripheral, point is that, if we were the best in Europe in our schools and our achievements were the highest in Europe and could compete with the world's best, there would be great virtue in sticking with what we have. Some of our top students achieve good results — we know that — but we have a huge, long tail of underachievement. I was staggered to learn that the achievement of some of our poorest performers in our inner cities was one click above Roma children. Some of the Protestant boys in Belfast are one click in achievement above Roma children who do not attend schools. However we look at that, it is pretty disgraceful for a country like this. This is a country that has superb youngsters, good teachers and a culture that values education. It does not have many of the major issues that we had to contend with in England, such as migration, shifts of population and ethnic groups. We have nothing like that, yet the results in some parts of Northern Ireland are very poor.

The next point that I would like to make is that, whatever we think about the future of education, it has to address the achievements of all children. That ought to be a fundamental point that we take on. It has to be about raising achievements for all children.

The fourth peripheral thing is that, when I was doing the funding review, it struck me that, overall, there was enough money in the system. It was spread so thinly because we had too many small schools and too many types of schools. To give you an example, Omagh, where I live, has six post-primary schools. That means six principals' salaries and six buildings to run, with caretaking and everything else that goes with that. Retford in north Nottinghamshire, with a bigger but similar population, has two schools. If you replicate that across Northern Ireland, you can see why we do have not enough money in the system. There are all sorts of hurdles in the way of addressing that in Northern Ireland, but doing so is a goal that we should be looking towards. There are too many small schools and too many types of schools.

The fifth point is that amalgamation and the closure of some schools is inevitable. Some of the smaller primaries that I looked at in the funding review could not really offer a proper educational entitlement to youngsters. For example, there were not enough pupils to form sporting teams. Amalgamations are inevitable, and we have not made nearly enough of the positive things that parents said to me about moving their youngsters to bigger schools. I have not heard that said by anybody, but parents have said to me, when schools were amalgamated and became bigger, suddenly the whole thing was better. There was a wider range in the curriculum and more sporting and cultural events; there was more that you could do. So, working out how you can amalgamate schools is a further thing to think about.

I was disappointed that the area-planning process was based again on a divided school system. If you remove a school totally from an area because it is either Catholic or Protestant, you have bigger transport bills, less convenience and all the rest of it. It struck me, particularly in Fermanagh, where there are many small rural schools, that the first thing you should offer to communities is the chance to amalgamate before you close a school. That way, at least you retain a presence in the area.

It may be that you have to offer some sort of inducement to some principals to retire early. It struck me, again in rural Fermanagh, what block development can mean. You have two principals who are, obviously, interested in their own career and do not want to come together if one of them is going to lose their job. There may be some merit in looking at systems that make that easier.

Lastly, there is a cost in transport and financial support for small schools. We hear a lot about the right of parents to choose a school, and that is quite right. However, my school — Drumragh Integrated College — was limited in the number of youngsters it could have. It seems to me that there is a clash between saying that parents have that right and saying that you can limit that to a number of pupils. Why not let popular schools expand and let the unpopular ones — I will not say "wither on the vine" because that was tried in New Zealand and it failed — but close them if they are not — [Interruption.]

Does the school bell mean my time is up? [Laughter.]

Moving on to the main point of your review, the integrated school movement has made strides over the last few years.

I was involved with the Integrated Education Fund when I first came to live here. There was more emphasis then on building new schools than on trying to draw existing schools into transition. The whole thrust of the integrated movement in the early days was simply to build new schools, and I made the point that, if you are adding to the problems that I have just outlined, there must be a finite limit to how many new schools you can build. You ought to be thinking about that.

I felt that, in the early days, the integration movement was less encouraging to heads and governors who wanted to transform their schools into integrated ones. One said to me at a conference that I was speaking at, "I feel a bit like a pariah here. Nobody wants to speak to me because I am not for pure integration; I want to transform my school." There was that kind of feeling in the early days. I also felt, in the early days, that the idea of integration alone was enough to promote a school. I always felt that integration had to go along with very high standards. Integration on its own is not enough; you still have to compete and have the highest standards you can.

I also felt, as an educationalist who had worked in education for a long time, that some of the earlier integrated schools aped the selective schools and did not create a true integrated ethos. One principal who did do that put it to me very clearly when she said, "I want a school where everybody is equal and where we can cater totally for youngsters with special needs and youngsters who want to go to Oxbridge." In the end, she had a school like that; it catered for everybody. Schools that have streams, so you have a grammar school within a school, have missed something about how you truly create a proper integrated school.

This sounds a bit critical, but it is not because the movement's intentions were in the right place. We have not had strong enough or committed enough political support for integration either. We have characters like May Blood who do a great job in promoting integration all over the place, but there has not been a real commitment to push it forward and maybe there should be. There has been some covert pressure to block it too. My wife was head of an integrated college in Omagh until 2004, and she was blocked consistently from going into any Catholic primary schools to talk about the possibility of integration. The heads were told, "No, they can't come in." There was covert blocking, which seemed a little bit sad. I do not know whether that still goes on because it is a long time since she was the head of a school. I was speaking at a conference and one head said to me, "The shared education lot have stolen our thunder." I said, "Surely it's all about the same thing: bringing youngsters to be educated together." That resistance was a little bit sad, I thought.

Shared education is believed to be a step in the right direction, but there are some serious flaws in the way it is being viewed at the moment. You might not like some of the things I am about to say but I am going to say them anyway; it was a long journey from Omagh. The shared education movement is fashionable, partly because it has got a lot of funding. However, when I was doing the funding review, I found that some of the schemes were clearly designed to protect schools that were under threat of closure. They had no other educational virtue than that. It was simply a way of saying, "Let's come together to try to ward off the possibility of being closed." That seems to me to be the wrong sort of thought to underpin a new education system.

In nearly all the submissions to the Committee that I read, educational outcomes were viewed as really positive: this is happening, that is happening, everything is possible and everything is positive. It struck me that, if it is so good on such a limited interaction, how much better would it be if you fully integrated? That is the question that I ask everybody. If it is so good when you come together a couple of times a week, would it not be a hundred times better if you were together all the time?

Years ago, when I was a vice-principal, I was asked to timetable for five schools in England that were trying to amalgamate sixth forms. They were five large schools, and I had the lovely job of timetabling them together. Anybody who has ever worked in schools will be smiling now, thinking of the difficulty of doing that. I have to tell you that, logistically, there is a limit to how much shared education you can have. If you start to share with more than one school, it will soon impact on your own curriculum. Trying to put those five schools together made a shambles of the internal timetabling lower down the school. A classic example was one French class having three different teachers because you had used all your teachers in the combined scheme between the other schools. Those five schools have all amalgamated now and so the problem is over, but there is a limit to joint timetables, arranging transport and moving staff and students around.

When I was doing the funding review, I met people from almost all the shared education schemes and said, "If your funding stops or you can't get any funding for transport, what will happen to your shared education scheme?". Without exception, they said that it would fall. That is a key point for you to consider. The scheme might be running now with funding, but what happens if the funding stops?

There is one scheme — I think it is the Moy programme — where young people share the same building but come in different uniforms through different doors. That is unbelievably absurd. I thought that it was a joke when I first read about it. I could not think of a better scheme to distance and divide youngsters than having them like that. I wondered what happens to all the non-believers and the Muslims who are milling about outside saying, "Which door do we go in?". It seems an absurd scheme to me. I am sorry to be so brutal about that but, when I read about it, I did not know where people were coming from in having youngsters coming through different doors wearing different uniforms.

I would like all shared education schemes to be time-bound, because there may be a feeling that you are doing something and moving in the right direction but wondering where it will be a few years down the line and how it will develop. If things are working and there is positive benefit, how do we push it to something else? Having a time-bound scheme would, I think, work better.

I also think that, in the long run, if shared education schemes are to develop, you have to look at the whole notion of how you govern schools, how you recruit teachers, how you share teachers, how their contracts come together and how governing bodies work. That is a whole new area of development for somebody.

This will sound awful, but I feel that, in some ways, the movement of shared education is lip service to something that we should be doing. If the whole world is saying, "Do something about bringing youngsters together", this is a way of saying, "Well, we are doing it through shared education", but it seems to me that it will make little impact further down the line. We might, 10 years from now, still have those smaller schemes rather than doing the overall picture that I have been talking about. It is a bit like somebody who is overweight eating a five-course meal, then going afterwards for a gin and tonic and saying that it has to be slimline tonic. It might give you a bit of satisfaction and pleasure, but it will not make a jot of difference to the overall picture. Do you see what I am talking about? OK.

There are things that we can do straight away. When we were looking at the funding review, I wondered why you did not have fully integrated preschool and nursery school places. That would seem straightforward and easy. I was truly disappointed that the teacher training thing wobbled. I was astonished when I first came to live here that you have separate training for teachers. That seems to me to be something that could and should be done pretty quickly. It is nonsense.

Lastly, it struck me in the FE college review was that there is a golden opportunity for bringing together sixth forms because, at the moment, school sixth forms are very limited towards medicine, pharmacy, law and so on. The sign of a small sixth form is, "You can take this subject, but you can't take this. If you take this, you've got to take that subject". I have three sons. Two of them stayed in a school sixth form. They had a choice of French or German in languages. My third son went to a joint sixth-form college and had a choice of 11 languages in any combination, from Mandarin Chinese to Russian or whatever. There is a whole world there that we could easily bring together and integrate. It would be cost-effective, but, more to the point, it would give the youngsters going through the system the pointers that I was talking about earlier. That would be very easy to integrate. It struck me in the FE review that you have school sixth forms and FE colleges vying for the same people. There is a massive saving to be had in that area.

I am getting to the end of this, you will be pleased to know. We have moved forward. I sincerely think that, when I meet youngsters in Northern Ireland — my wife is currently working at a school that is doing cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) with youngsters, and I meet quite a lot of them — they are superb young people. We definitely have some of the best young students I have met anywhere, including in the school that I ran. With a few tweaks and some major changes, we could easily have the best system in Europe for all of our children.

The reason why I stay passionate about education and I am prepared to drive over here this morning is that I believe there is a much better future for our children if we take bigger steps and move in the right direction. Long term, it seems to me that educating our children all together is the way forward.

Of the submissions that I read, the only one to say that integration was the way forward, full stop, was from the National Union of Students. It might be a good start to forget some of the vested interests and ask young people, "What do you think ought to happen in the future?". In all the different schools, I have asked youngsters this same question: what sort of schools do you think we should have in the future? They all said that some sort of integration is the way forward. A good starting point would be simply to ask youngsters, "What do you think?". We have to try to equip youngsters for the next 10 or 15 years, not the last 30.

Thank you for the invitation, I hope that it has not been too drastic.

The Chairperson (Miss M McIlveen): Thank you very much. You referred to vested interests and said that perhaps they should begin to soften their traditional resistance to change. How do you think that could and should be encouraged? Do you not see shared education as starting to do that?

Sir Robert Salisbury: I did when I first looked at it. However, I started to think that, unless you have progressive development of it, with — as I said earlier — some time-bound scheme, I can see us sitting on these minor schemes or small schemes indefinitely, because it placates the wider interests. It needs fairly root-and-branch change; we need to challenge some of the vested interests. As, I hope, you have understood, I do not think that we can afford the number of types of school that we have. Year by year, finance gets tighter. I talk to many head teachers who can barely manage and are talking about redundancies etc. That is because you have too many schools. There is an economic argument and an educational one. The vested interests have to be challenged, but it will take a major decision by somebody to do that.

The Chairperson (Miss M McIlveen): The fact is that we have parental choice. You have said that it is right that we have that, but it comes at a cost. While parents still choose to send their children to whatever type of school they want, that obviously, in some ways, creates or adds to the problem.

Sir Robert Salisbury: There is pressure on sending children to certain schools, but, at the moment, there is no transport. I do not know where the transport review has got to, but it has some serious considerations to come up with. The transport bill is huge. The cost that I refer to is that parents may have to pay for transport if they choose a different sort of school. The key point for me is whether parents really want to make that choice, or do they have another choice? Let me put it another way: if you had an integrated school in a village, would they choose that or choose going further afield and losing the convenience of having a school in the area? That is the question that I would like to ask parents.

The Chairperson (Miss M McIlveen): Are you removing choice?

Sir Robert Salisbury: In some ways, yes; but then you remove it, as I said, by having a restriction on the number of pupils that a school can take in. That, too, restricts choice.

The Chairperson (Miss M McIlveen): We go back to the view that there is also a vested interest in integrated education, and there is a view that that model is the right one. Not everyone agrees with that.

Sir Robert Salisbury: I just think that there is probably less resistance than we think in choosing schools. I think that it should always be put to communities that, in the area-planning exercise, it is scheduled that a school might have to close and move out, but, if you had the opportunity of amalgamating two schools and keeping that presence in the area, would you choose that? You might not be pushing at the closed door that you think you are.

The Chairperson (Miss M McIlveen): Change is not going to happen overnight; there will have to be a process. Do you consider that shared education is a road in the right direction to that change?

Sir Robert Salisbury: I like to think that. I am always an advocate of trying out new schemes to bring schools together, as long as it is not something that you do and do not develop. As I said, if it is lip service to integration, I would not like it. I think it should be a case of, "OK. Try something small; next year, enlarge it, enlarge it and keep moving forward", but it ought to be time-bound and challenged.

The Chairperson (Miss M McIlveen): Often, when we look at this, there is, I suppose, a misconception that all schools are — I do not like to use the word — segregated, but that is not necessarily the case. There are very good examples of schools that have a natural integration without being called "integrated". Is that something that should, perhaps, be more encouraged?

Sir Robert Salisbury: Absolutely. As I said at the beginning, my reservation about the integrated movement in the early days was that it did not take on the notion of transition schools. We should absolutely promote the notion of integration through the ordinary channels. I do not think it is necessary to change the name of it, but if you can encourage parents into integration in that way, I would be absolutely fully supportive.

Despite what you were hinting at earlier on the choices that parents make, they usually base their choice on where they think there is a good school. You can go and look at Methody; it has all sorts of youngsters. It is almost an integrated school. That is what I thought when I had a look around it. Why? Because it has a good reputation. If you have a good reputation, people will come, whatever its traditional background. St Dominic's is another one; it is a girls' school in Belfast. It has a very mixed catchment area, but, in many senses, is an integrated school.

The Chairperson (Miss M McIlveen): Many of the choices that are being made by schools around shared education are also linked to delivery of the entitlement framework, academic outcomes and educational outcomes, as opposed, perhaps, to the societal outcomes. In your view, would or should the educational outcomes come first over the societal outcomes?

Sir Robert Salisbury: I think that you can have both together, but remember that I said that there is a limit, logistically, to how far you can go with that. I think that you would have to do both. It is no use having groups coming together and fostering integration if you do not have some educational outcomes from it. That is why I said in the paper that sometimes the outcomes were vague and hard to quantify. I definitely think you have to have that harder edge to making sure that integration or shared education is working. What are your objectives? How do you manage them? Are they really worth the money that you are putting into them and the disruption they are causing in transport and moving people around? Are you getting something out of that? So, the answer to your question is yes, if you get society working better together, that is great, but you also have to have some educational outcomes at the other end of it. I think that you can do both though. Some of the schemes I looked at were warm, sort of fuzzy, schemes. They felt right, but when I asked, "Tell me what the harder educational outcomes of your scheme are?", it was harder to quantify. I think that you do have to have both.

Mr Lunn: Sir Bob, I have a problem with you, because —

Sir Robert Salisbury: I know you have.

Mr Lunn: I cannot disagree —

The Chairperson (Miss M McIlveen): He is being honest. [Laughter.]

Mr Lunn: I cannot disagree with a single word that you say [Laughter.]

It is heartening to hear a senior academic with your experience express an honest view about something like the Moy situation. I completely agree with you.

I really am a bit lost for questions, because you keep answering them before I have asked them. You are an Omagh man: what is your view of the expense of the Lisanelly project, which will build new schools for schools that already exist on a site that just happened to become available? There is no sense of integration or amalgamation between those schools, and it would not have happened if the Lisanelly site had not been available. What is your view of that?

Sir Robert Salisbury: I have to be a bit delicate with my answer, Trevor. When I first came to live in Omagh in 2001, the council asked me to talk about education in Omagh. I went and talked about pupil numbers, the number of schools and the usual stuff that I have been talking about here. When I was presenting my second-to-last slide, I asked why they did not do something innovative with the army site and create an integrated campus. I was shot to ribbons. I told my wife that I had suggested an educational village, that they shot me to ribbons and that you lose some and you win some. That has been resurrected, but I still fully endorse the notion of doing it. It is potentially a huge step forward, except that what I had in mind when I first suggested it to the council was a truly integrated educational campus in which all the youngsters would come together with all the notions that I outlined earlier of huge opportunities for sixth forms and across drama, sports and all the rest, which, potentially, it still has. The idea of having totally separate schools just seems to be a wasted opportunity. I had it in mind that the schools would come together and interact fully in all the art, design and music and all of that. It would be fairly easy to interact in those areas. If the project is built in the end, I am hopeful that, as things develop, they will see those opportunities and how silly it is to have totally separate schools. It is expensive, but if it works in the way that I tried to outline in the early days, it could be a tremendously exciting project. If you have five schools that still retain their boundaries and their separate entities, it will be an opportunity lost.

Mr Lunn: OK. You obviously talked a lot about the shared education projects. Four years down the line, when Atlantic Philanthropies has gone home and we start to hit funding problems with the shared education projects, it will be quite hard to assess their success, either in educational or societal terms. What do you think is the mark of success of a good shared education project?

Sir Robert Salisbury: If it continues when the funding stops. If the teachers, the governors, the parents and the youngsters see it as a really valuable part of school life and the powers that be generate funding to make sure that it runs, it will be a success. If it folds, you can draw your own conclusions. I would see it as a success as well if it goes on to develop into other things. If these small steps suddenly start to say to people, "Let us think about wider integration because it is working", I would deem that to be real success. If, eventually, the fear factor that exits in some schools was eroded and we moved on to a bigger project, that would seem to me to be working. As I said earlier, when I said to most people, "If the funding stops, will the scheme stop?", they said, "Yes". That was in the early days, and I am optimistic to say that they may see virtue in it and see the wisdom of raising the money from somewhere else.

Mr Lunn: I would have thought that the main measure of success would probably be the acceptance of an integrated solution. It might take longer than four years, but, if the shared project as a whole has a virtue and is something that we could cling to as being a genuine ambition, it would be that schools, such as that in the Moy, see the virtue of it and make a decision to come together. The parental decision in the Moy was taken by a relatively slim margin. You said that you thought that most parents would accept an integrated solution if one were available. In the Moy — I keep repeating these figures — the 85 responses to its consultation were in favour of the solution that was on the table, but 70 responses were in favour of the integrated model. It is close. You talked about vested interests. The main barrier to progress in the whole area is CCMS; let us be honest about it. Its attitude to all this is completely destructive.

I am inviting a comment.

Sir Robert Salisbury: One question that I have been asking regularly for 10 years is this: what do you actually lose out of a school if you become integrated? What is it that you lose from one sector or the other? Nobody will give me a straight answer to that.

Mr Lunn: I see it like this: what do you gain? We heard young Gabriel — I think that you were not in the room at the time —

Sir Robert Salisbury: I asked him what he said outside.

Mr Lunn: I have heard it twice. He and any of the pupils that are here from an integrated school — we heard from some of them at Drumragh a couple of weeks ago — could tell you in 10 minutes what they gain from an integrated process. The others from the dedicated sectors that we have at the moment cannot tell me, as they cannot tell you, what they would lose. I am sorry; I am not asking you questions. However, I said at the start that I agreed with everything that you said. Thank you very much for your presentation.

Sir Robert Salisbury: I would like to say one thing to CCMS. My wife ran an integrated school, and she was taken away to be a troubleshooter of schools in England after that. However, one thing that she said that stuck in my mind was that, when she was in Drumragh College, children who had the Catholic faith, Presbyterian faith or whatever, tended to maintain it in the integrated sector simply because all faiths were taught. At the end of it, they still maintained their faith. I talked to a lot of youngsters at CBS in Omagh, and they said that their faith had gone because they have been through that school. CCMS should consider this question: why is it that a lot of youngsters who go through the system do not finish up with the faith at the other end? That is a very good question for somebody — not for me.

Mr Hazzard: Thank you, Bob, for a fairly thought-provoking presentation. Like Trevor, I find myself agreeing with much of what you say. I may just have thoughts rather than questions.

The Chair touched on the question of vested interests. How do we smash through vested interests? It seems to be very, very difficult. Vested interests seem to be entrenched in every walk of life, be it politics or the schools themselves. I would like to hear a few thoughts about how we could smash through vested interests, as that is exactly what we need to do.

Another question goes back to a reference you made to world leaders. If I just touch on Obama and Cameron, when they came here, and the stuff around visiting an integrated school. The two of them oversee education system divided between those who can afford a good, private education, and the less well off who cannot and perhaps suffer. Is there a risk that, by tackling religious or ethnic division, that we open up massive fault lines in socio-economic division, and that we need to ensure that bringing together — integrating — is also socio-economic. For example, Shimna does it very well, but we have made reference to Methody and some of these big, super grammar schools in Belfast that consider themselves to be super-mixed. If you look at the impact that they might have on the same inner-east Belfast Protestant boys we talked about earlier, is there not a danger that we lose that? Maybe you could give a few thoughts on that.

Finally, then, there is the need to facilitate the growth of popular schools. Say there was a development proposal, hypothetically, for an integrated school, but it was going to have a massive impact on a controlled school, perhaps closing it. That controlled school will, rightly, say, "We are going to take that decision to judicial review. We are going to take you to court because you are having a detrimental impact upon our school, and that could lead to the closure of our school". Would they not have a right to do that? In my own head I am not sure, so this is just a few thoughts around what I have heard this morning. I would love to hear the —

Sir Robert Salisbury: I will take the third point first. In New Zealand there was a scheme which just let popular schools expand, and the unpopular ones withered on the vine. They have stopped doing that now because that is the worst of all worlds. You need leadership there. You cannot just let a popular school expand. You have to say to the unpopular one, to be fair to the pupils and the students and the parents, "This is going to close; you have not enough numbers" or whatever. Then the popular one can expand. The point that I am making is that you cannot just let market forces dictate; you have to have planning.

It seems to me that, if a school is really working and the parents want to get there and you have a limited budget to expand schools or new build, you have to plan that. Keeping open schools that nobody wants to attend by propping them up with huge finances seems to me to be going nowhere. That is the first point.

The integrated comprehensive system in England often gets a bad press. It is linked to private education. There are some good private schools and some awful private schools; there are some poor comprehensive schools in England, and there are some brilliant ones that never seem to get the headlines. I could take you to half a dozen schools across England that cater for all abilities and all religions and perform as well as any grammar school in Northern Ireland. Sweeping generalisations about what happens are not helpful.

If you look at London schools where the London Challenge is in place, you will see that they have made massive strides forward in all schools. It can be done if heads and governors are challenged and targets are set. It sounds like a hard economic world, but it can work.

You are right: it is difficult to use a system in one country and lift that entirely into a new one. Often we hear about Finland and how well it is doing, which it is, but there are so many differences in the Finnish system that you could not lift that and pop it into Northern Ireland. For instance, teachers are taken away every three months and given another month of training in Finland. Nobody could afford that in the UK. All the teachers have second degrees. It is different. I worked in Finland; I know what it is like. It is dark for six months of the year anyway; you have nothing else to do, so you might as well read. [Laughter.]

There was a third part to your first question.

Mr Hazzard: It was on vested interests.

Sir Robert Salisbury: Vested interests: that really is a tough one to crack, is it not? The teacher training issue has proved that. You can do it only by persuasion and funding, but it takes hard, strong leadership to do that. I often think that of Liverpool Hope University. There were two colleges in Liverpool. They messed about for years trying to come together. In the end, the Government got fed up with them and simply said that they would stop the funding to both of them unless they came up with a solution. Three months later, there was a solution, and Hope University was formed. It sometimes takes tough decisions. It is so difficult in Northern Ireland in that a lot of it is sort of covert, and what people say publicly is not quite what they do in practice. You get returns that say that 80% of parents want integrated education, but they do not opt for it when it comes to it. It is that kind of thing.

Mr Hazzard: I have one final question touching on the patronage process in the South and Educate Together. We met just after Christmas. It was very thought-provoking. What seemed as though it would be a very worthwhile process when it started off has stalled. It seems to have stalled big time. I think that, in the past few days, it has picked up again. Even there, where I think that well over 90% of schools were in the control of the Catholic Church and even it wanted to free up a few of them, it was becoming very difficult. Can we take any lessons from that process in the South? Again, I am presuming that you know something about it; you might not.

Sir Robert Salisbury: The South of Ireland is doing quite well in the OECD score. What they have there is not quite the same. They do not have some of the challenges that I have been pointing to today. It is strange in the South in that, daily, it is becoming more secular. It is changing as a country. It will be hard to predict where it goes. I worked on a scheme to put in a policy of entrepreneurial and enterprise skills. I have been working with the Dublin Government on that. They had agreed that it was vital for the future of Ireland, but they had no money to do it. Change there is hog-tied by the money that is available.

Mr Rogers: You are very welcome to south Down. Hopefully, you will come back some time and try out some of the fishing in our rivers as well.

Sir Robert Salisbury: I will do, yes.

Mr Rogers: Thank you for being, let us say, controversial, because that challenges us and makes us think about things. When I say "controversial", I am talking about when you said that the Moy situation was absurd. Have you visited the Moy and spoken to the parents or principals of the two schools?

Sir Robert Salisbury: No, I have not. I read all the details of it. I visited a school in Scotland that had a similar process. It just struck me — maybe I am being too harsh on the scheme; I have not spoken to the two principals — that, with a little bit more movement, youngsters coming in through the same doors and a little bit more tolerance on both sides, you could have had a better scheme. I cannot envisage what it must be like for a youngster to have a separate uniform, come through a different door to the same school and meet for some things and not others. It seems odd, to say the least.

Mr Rogers: I see it not as ideal but as an important step in the journey. When you listen to some of those people from Moy, particularly from the preschool, which was originally in a GAA club and was then moved into the controlled school as it had free classrooms and so on, you know that they have come a long way on the journey. I also have experience as a former head. I come from a town that, 30 years ago, was very divided. Thirty years ago, the only cross-community experience that my students had was the annual football match, but today there are really good joint curriculum experiences as well. What I got out of listening to the people in Moy is that we need to actively bring our community along with us. Moy is on that journey but has a long way to go.

You talked about area planning: do you believe that we could amend the area planning process to better facilitate shared or integrated education, or do we need to start again from the beginning?

Sir Robert Salisbury: There are two points on that. If the Moy arrangement is time bound and moves pretty quickly to something else, I will applaud it. It is my dream that, within a year, they will suddenly say, "It is crazy having any difference here. Let us move to having an integrated school." I would then give the people there a real pat on the back, as it would have been proven to have worked. If, 10 years from now, they remain as separate schools, that will be disappointing.

I was disappointed with area planning in that the CCMS came up with a plan early, and that was imposed on the rest. I asked the guy at the Western Board, "Why did you not have an area plan that looked at all schools, particularly in the Fermanagh area, where, in some cases, you have only one school in a massive area and closing it would have a tremendous impact in terms of inconvenience, extra travel and so on?" I felt that a more radical view would have sufficed. In Tempo, for instance, there are two schools, and fairly limited shared education is going on. I asked the two heads, "How will this develop in the future?" They both said, "It will more or less stay as it is." It seemed to me that there was no vision to bring those two schools together. They are only a few hundred yards apart, and it seemed to me that neither had quite the funding, the curriculum width or the cultural or sporting capacity to offer the very best to the youngsters. Coming together, they would have had a much better school. However, you have two heads who are not likely to do that because of careers. That is why I suggested a scheme that says to one of them to take redundancy or whatever and then amalgamates the two schools. There is no doubt that the concept in Tempo is right in that they are talking to one another and working together. However, the next step would be so much more massive in its impact on society and in its achievement. Do you see what I am getting at? That is the first stage, but the next stage would jump them forward massively.

Mr Rogers: I liked what you said about technology and communication, which applies to this as well. We are really steering our schools through a rear-view mirror in all of this.

You talked briefly about the fact that we tend to be exam-driven and whatever else. Do you believe that, if we could scrap these league tables altogether and look at the value that we get out of education, we would be in a much better place?

Sir Robert Salisbury: I have always been a supporter of league tables in that you need some objective measure to see how well a school is doing. Maybe you do not need to publish the league tables as a league, but you do need to measure the performance of a school. We have not looked enough at the sort of outcomes that we get. The private schools in England were recently accused by their own inspectors of spoon-feeding their youngsters, with a predictable outcome; "If you do this, you will pass this. You will get an A* grade". Everything is spoon-fed in order to get them over that hurdle. Their achievements are good, but are they any good long term? Look at the dropout rates in many of the universities, particularly Queen's. Youngsters get there, and suddenly they are not being spoon-fed. There is a flaw there somewhere because, as I said, the world is not predictable and the rate of change will be even greater. We should be trying to say to youngsters, "You need to be adaptable and flexible in your studies".

Looking back, I do not think that spoon-feeding them to get them through exams is the way forward. We have to have a lot more. It is not difficult to do. A teacher challenged me on that and said, "It is all right you saying, 'Teach communication skills', but I have this examination to get through." I asked, "How do they hand their homework in?" She said, "Just in books." I said, "Every day, get three of them to read it out and tell you and the rest of the group what they have done. It will not cost you any more time, yet you will be practising communication."

A long time ago now, when I was head of a school, once it was developing and moving forward, we published a paper for the 'Nottingham Evening Post'. The editor said to me, "Why don't you bring the team that did it down to see it roll off the press?". I took seven or eight youngsters, and we got out of the bus at a big, glassy, flash office in the middle of Nottingham. We went through the door, and those seven youngsters were dumbstruck. A young reporter came up to one of them and said, "Do you fancy getting into the newspaper business?". She could barely answer. All the way through, it was embarrassing how tough they found it meeting this new circumstance. On the bus on the way home I said to the teachers, "Whatever else we do in this school, we are going to teach youngsters how to meet new circumstances with confidence". The whole of the school has moved towards trying to teach that and to get people to speak. That is what I am getting at.

Last year, I did a pupil pursuit in a school. You will know what that is: it is when you follow one pupil around for a whole day and they think that you are stalking them. Wherever they go, you stay in the background and watch. This girl, who was 13 or 14, did not ask one question all day and was not asked a question all day. The only times that I saw her speak were at break and lunchtime, and I suspect that it was like that for the rest of the week. If our school systems are aiming to teach communication skills, what are we doing?

One last thing: I noticed you smile when I mention timetabling. That is how I knew that you had been a head. [Laughter.]

Mr Rogers: A nightmare.

Mr Newton: Thank you for making the journey down from Omagh this morning.

Sir Robert Salisbury: It is a pleasure.

Mr Newton: Thank you, too, for being challenging. I want to be a wee bit challenging as well. I think that the two principals in Moy deserve a lot of credit for what they have done, particularly the principal of St John's, who showed us the whole case study of what he had to go through to get to the decision. They deserve credit. Getting to where we are going in education, shared education, integrated education and the various sectors of education is a marathon, not a sprint. I believe that, eventually, we will get there.

On teacher education, when I first joined the Committee for Employment and Learning I was surprised at the divisions in teacher education. Particularly at this time, had we not used the Budget as a blunt instrument, we might have made more progress on the matter.

Like you, I have some concerns about area planning. As it was described to us by another witness, they did not believe that it was area planning and that it was a cut-and-paste exercise. Having amalgamated the five education and library boards, we have an opportunity now to look at area planning in a much more effective manner. If you were offering some advice or support, what would that advice be? How should the views of parents and young people, which you have stressed are so vital — I agree with you on that — specifically in that area planning process be sought on a way forward on education provision?

Sir Robert Salisbury: First of all, with the Moy, I think that my strong words were about impatience with moving forward. I am not going to decry the work that is already being done by those two heads, because I do not know them and that would be unfair. It is impatient of me to say, "Let us get to the next stage as quickly as we can". That is what was behind that, because it seems that the long-term view of that is well worth doing.

With area planning, it struck me that it was not a wide enough exercise to have a look at where you needed schools and what the best pattern of schools should be. It was one system imposed on another system. I asked the chap at the Western Board why that was so, and he said that that kind of challenge just seemed too much to take on, and I do not like the thought of that. I do not think that it is too late to have a fresh look at it under the new regime, because I think that you can definitely get a better plan, and there will be some natural places where integration will be the right way forward and can be done quite easily and be acceptable to all communities.

Convenience was a major consideration with all the people that I spoke to in Fermanagh. Having a convenient school in an area almost overrode what kind of school it was. That is why I made much of saying, "Ask people first whether they want to retain a school in the area". It seems to me that we should try to get out to as many schools as we can to probe youngsters about what they think schools should be. I have done that, and it seems to me that there is nowhere near the resistance to working with other schools or integrated that we often perceive it to be. Yes, there are traditional routes that people take into different schools and there is great pressure on that. When my wife was head of an integrated school a long time ago, in 2004, many of the parents said that they had great pressure from their peers and from religious leaders on both sides not to send their children to an integrated school. That existed in 2004, but I do not know whether it still does.

It takes a fairly determined parent to go against that kind of pressure. If you are asked, "Why on earth are you sending them to an integrated school when it is not the tradition?", it takes a fairly strong parent to come up with an answer to that. I would definitely devise some scheme of asking youngsters whether what they are getting from education is what they want. I just think that it is sad. I have lived all the time in England, and I find, as I said, youngsters who are 16 and 17 and have never had any contact at all with anyone from the other tradition, whether in entertainment, sport, education or whatever. I would have been pretty miffed if I had been brought up in Northern Ireland, mainly because I played rugby at school and I would have liked to have played Gaelic — it looks like a good game to me. The musical traditions that I have found in Ireland are tremendous. They were missing in my school. I think that, living here, you have only half a culture. Do you know what I mean by that? Whatever side you are on, there is a tremendously rich culture on the other. I would have been pretty miffed to have been exposed to only half a culture.

Mr Newton: You would need to get the grammar schools to embrace soccer, then. The other area that you have missed out, perhaps, is the role of the transferors. You have referred to vested interests, and they are one. You referred to the Catholic Church, the Presbyterian Church, the Church of Ireland and so on. What do you see as a consultative role for them?

Sir Robert Salisbury: That is a hard one for me. When I was doing the funding review, I met all the religious leaders. The question of integration was raised. I asked whether they would be prepared to relinquish their automatic positions on the governing bodies of schools, and the answer was clearly that they would not. So there is an influence — well, I am hesitating here. You can see where I come from. I would always have the governance of schools at a wider cross-section. I would not have automatic positions on governing bodies. When I ran a school I recruited my own governors, depending on what the school needed. Sometimes you had a group of politicians, business leaders, finance consultants or insurance people — people that I needed to support me as a head — and that was a very effective governing body. Where there are fixed positions, obviously they are going to try to defend their vested positions. That is why I made the reference to looking afresh at the whole notion of governance and how you put it together. I think that we just need a fresher sort of governing body on schools. Chris here made the point about private schools in England, which have a different sort of governance. They have people from the community who are going to assist the school in one thing or another. That is what I tried to copy from them in the structure of the governors. I needed a group of people — parents, business leaders, politicians, media — all of them around to support me and what I was doing. I think that that is the way that we should work — religious leaders if they have something to offer.

Mr McCausland: Thank you indeed for your presentation to us this morning. I have a number of questions. One is around the issue of the size of a school. We have around 1,100 schools in Northern Ireland, for a population of 1·8 million or thereabouts. What do you think is small for a primary school?

Sir Robert Salisbury: Anything below 80 is very small; I think 100 is more likely. If you can go up to 150, the opportunities suddenly become greater. Where you have schools that still exist with 20 or 25 pupils in them, the educational experience, by definition, must be limited. When I was doing the literacy and numeracy review, I asked, "How many small schools have a maths specialist?". It was surprisingly few. There was usually an English specialist in the school, but, if you have got a primary school with nobody leading mathematics and helping to support the other teachers in the school, it is difficult. There are quite severe limitations once you drop below 100. If you have not got enough youngsters to run a football team, Gaelic team or hockey team or to run a proper school play or a choir, a whole chunk of stuff is being missed.

Mr McCausland: In urban areas, I suppose you are talking of 140 being the figure set by the Department. Most schools in urban areas are above that, but there are issues with a few. This is obviously more a rural issue.

Sir Robert Salisbury: I was talking about a rural school. It definitely becomes easier to run and organise a school once you are up into 200 or 300 youngsters, because you have a range of staff and more money.

Mr McCausland: At one stage, you mentioned schools that are not officially integrated education schools but which have an integrated intake. You mentioned Methody as an example.

Sir Robert Salisbury: I am only quoting Methody because, when I looked around it, the head said it was integrated. I have no hard evidence that it is.

Mr McCausland: OK. When you look at the figures for Methody and Belfast Royal Academy, you will see that there are a number of schools where there is a very mixed intake. I was interested in your reference to St Dominic's; I assume that that is the Dominican College at Fortwilliam. Has it a significant intake from —

Sir Robert Salisbury: Again, I have no idea. My wife does CBT there. She says that it seems to be a school that is working extremely well with a mixed intake. I do not know whether that mixed intake means different denominations or socio-economic backgrounds. It is a successful school, but whether — I do not know.

Mr McCausland: I think it is probably more a case of socio-economic. I am going to an event at the Dominican College on Friday, so I must ask.

How do you see the Irish-medium sector, which is one of the sectors we have here, fitting into a single integrated system?

Sir Robert Salisbury: That is another huge question. When we were looking at literacy and numeracy, I felt that Irish-medium units at schools were more practical than a straight Irish. I have no basis or hard facts, but, when I first looked at it, I could not see that you would have a huge demand for totally Irish-medium schools. I visited a post-primary school in Belfast and several primary schools. They were all vibrant schools; I liked them. They had a lot going for them, but, long term, I could not see that there would be a huge demand for Irish-medium schools across the Province. Having Irish-medium school units fixed to other schools would be a practical way. It is a vague answer, but I am vague about that. It is part of the initial agreement in Northern Ireland, so you have it anyway.

Mr McCausland: If we are looking at challenging vested interests of all sorts, is everything on the table?

Sir Robert Salisbury: Personally, I would put everything on the table.

Mr McCausland: Following on from that, you mentioned at one stage the cultural diversity of Northern Ireland. Chris Hazzard talked about not just religious division but ethnic division, which is a reality. In some ways in Northern Ireland, religion is a synonym for a deeper ethnic division, of which religion is one element.

Bringing together cultural identity, cultural expressions and ethnicity, and bearing in mind the different cultural traditions we have here, how do you see those being worked out in integrated schools? The chairwoman of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, whose name I have forgotten, was in Belfast the other week to give a lecture at the Children's Law Centre, and she talked about education rights, so some thought is being given to this. How do you see the rights of children, integrated schools and the cultural mix we have here playing out?

Sir Robert Salisbury: The cultural mix in many schools in England is huge. A school I worked closely with in north London has 30 languages and people from all over the world. You just celebrate cultures in the school, and it happens easily and smoothly. There is no dominant culture and, where anything is worth celebrating, it is done.

If you look around the schools, there is a clear mix of all kinds of cultures. It is just encompassing, and I think that can be done. It is done very well in integrated schools. Look around this one. I do not think it is a difficulty if you have the initial concept that all youngsters and cultures are equal and you celebrate the lot. There were a lot of youngsters from Asian backgrounds in the school I worked in, and we celebrated their ceremonies like everything else. It was just accepted. It is hard for me, coming from that background, to even consider that as a difficulty.

Mr Hazzard: My question is around secular education. To a large extent, our integrated movement here in the North is still a non-denominational Christian-based schooling. Is there a space for secular schooling in the North? How does that fit in with the view of where we need to go?

Sir Robert Salisbury: I took the view in the school that I ran that the culture was humanitarian. You had a moral base to the school, but religion was taught in religious studies classes. I took morning assembly, and I do not think I mentioned religion once. There was always a moral view, and you get to that if you have a very diverse population. If you have a diverse audience, you cannot start to say the Muslims do not attend, the Hindus do not attend, the Buddhists cannot attend. You have more outside than you have in the assembly. I wish all education was secular, but there we are.

The Chairperson (Miss M McIlveen): Thank you very much for attending and for supplying us with a written briefing.

Sir Robert Salisbury: It is a pleasure.