Northern Ireland Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: Integrated Education, HC 373
Wednesday 28 February 2024
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 28 February 2024.
Members present: Sir Robert Buckland (Chair); Stephen Farry; Sir Robert Goodwill; Claire Hanna; Carla Lockhart; and Jim Shannon.
Questions 51 to 62
Witnesses
II: Seamus Bradley, Assistant Director, Education Directorate, Education Authority; Eve Bremner, Chief Executive, Council for Catholic Maintained Schools (CCMS), Mark Baker, Chief Executive, Controlled Schools’ Support Council; Leo O’Reilly CB, Chairman, Governing Bodies Association NI (GBA).
Written evidence from witnesses:
– [IED0037] - Education Authority
– [IED0038] - Council for Catholic Maintained Schools (CCMS)
– [IED0039] - Controlled Schools' Support Council
– [IED0042] - Governing Bodies Association
Examination of witnesses
Witnesses: Seamus Bradley, Eve Bremner, Mark Baker and Leo O’Reilly CB.
Chair: Thank you for being present in the room and hearing the first panel. You already have an idea that we are trying to focus on specific points. We are extremely grateful to our second distinguished panel for coming before us. I welcome Mark Baker, the chief executive of the Controlled Schools’ Support Council; Seamus Bradley, who is assistant director of the Education Directorate at the Education Authority; Eve Bremner, chief executive of the Council for Catholic Maintained Schools; and then, last but not least, Leo O’Reilly, chairman of the Governing Bodies Association Northern Ireland. Welcome to all of you.
I am going to put faith in Jim Shannon to ask a really short question.
Q51 Jim Shannon: Ladies and gentlemen, you are very welcome. Thank you very much for coming. You heard what the last panel was saying. My opinion of it is quite clear. It is about choice. It is about whether you want state schools, Catholic, controlled or maintained schools or integrated. That is where I am.
What is the role of your organisation and how does it fit into the education system in Northern Ireland? I believe it can deliver for all people. The choices are three, not just one.
Seamus Bradley: Thank you for giving us the opportunity this morning to come and speak with you. The Education Authority is the body that is responsible for delivering education services to children and young people, and to the schools that support them on a daily basis.
We offer a broad range of services to all our schools. The offer to schools is slightly different depending on the type of school. We have a different model for different sectors and different types of schools. We have a very senior role with our controlled schools and schools that are under the local management of the school system, which would include the maintained schools sector.
We provide support services across five directorates: education, children and young people’s services, human resources, corporate services and the finance directorate, and our operations in estates directorate. We include everything from school transport and school meals through to support for school leadership.
The authority itself was established in 2015, as I am sure some members are aware. We have worked since that day to bring together the previous education and library board system and ensure that we give the best support possible to our schools within the constraints that we face financially and structurally.
Eve Bremner: CCMS was established in 1989. We are the managing and employing authority for Catholic maintained schools, and that represents about 40% of schools in Northern Ireland. We are probably the largest teaching employer in Northern Ireland as well, with over 6,500 teaching staff in our schools. We are very proud to be part of a wider family of Catholic education. I would say that maintained schools are not Catholic grammar schools. Our schools are non-selective. Maintained schools are discrete, as it were.
Our key functions are around the employing role. We also have a key role that has been referenced by the earlier panel around area planning. We also contribute to other duties around integrated education, shared education and Irish medium.
You asked, Jim, about the point of choice. I am always cautious about using the word “choice”. It is about preference. Our duty, collectively as a system, is to make sure that every child has access to a good school. The complexity of parental decisions plays out in terms of parents making decisions because of ethos, logistics and family history, but fundamentally it is about being a good school. It is our duty, as a sector and collectively, to make sure that there is no direct or indirect reason why somebody walks past our door.
Mark Baker: The Controlled Schools’ Support Council is a very new organisation, and we exist because the Education Authority exists. Dr Bloomer clearly stated the challenges that the controlled sector has, because the Education Authority’s form and function is flawed and conflicted. That is said with the greatest of respects to my colleagues in EA. Some of you will know that I used to be an assistant director in the Education Authority myself, but the current system lets down the controlled sector.
There are a couple of really important things. The controlled sector is a diverse sector. The controlled sector has many different types of schools, including Irish medium schools. 32 of the integrated schools are controlled integrated schools. We are a body that supports integration. We are also a body that supports our children and young people being educated together. We are a body that supports all controlled schools being open to all, and that must be more than an aspiration. As Eve said, we all have to ask ourselves why there are people walking past the doors of our schools thinking, “That school is not for me”. There is an action that you need to take, and that is a challenge that we put on our schools.
Eve is completely right. Preference is vital here, but the Controlled Schools’ Support Council is there to represent the interests of all controlled schools. That is a complex situation, given the diversity of the structure. We represent the schools with the Education Authority and alongside them in area planning, and we work collectively with all the other bodies. As my colleague Roisin Marshall said earlier, we only move forward if we move forward together.
Leo O’Reilly: I am chair of the Governing Bodies Association, which was founded in 1948. It represents 50 voluntary grammar schools in Northern Ireland. In the context of the current debate, our schools cut across all sectors. They are located in every town and community in Northern Ireland. They are strongly embedded in their local communities and they are supported by their local communities.
The other point I would stress about our schools is that the boards of governors are the employers of the staff, so we are responsible for and accountable for the management and employment of our staff, for better or for worse. We also manage our own budgets, so we are obliged to operate within the finances allocated to us by the Department.
There is that sense of being strongly based in our own community in terms of being local governors with strong support from the local community, and also the fact that our association represents 50 schools from all sectors and communities in Northern Ireland.
Q52 Stephen Farry: Can I ask the panel just to respond in terms of how your organisations respond to the existence and growth of the integrated education option? How do you see that developing in the future?
Also, given that you are all here from four diverse bodies, there is an incredible number of organisations that are involved in the management of education in Northern Ireland across the board, some statutory and others non-statutory. What do you see as the merits of creating a single education system in Northern Ireland, albeit there may well be different schools within that system of a different ethos, background and governance? Is that something that your respective organisations would be comfortable with, or do you see drawbacks from that?
Mark Baker: I will deal with the three points relatively swiftly. How do we deal with supporting integrated education? We will support any school where the community wants the school to transform. We will support that. The key point is what needs to come out of the other end is a sustainable school that can provide high-quality education. When we are approached by schools, as we frequently are being asked the question, we will be very supportive of it.
Remember that, of the 32 controlled integrated schools, 30 of them previously were controlled schools. When a controlled school is transferred to controlled integrated status, it is still a controlled school. The management type has not changed. The board of governors has changed slightly. We support them and we will continue to support them regardless, as we support all controlled schools.
How do we feel about a single management authority? If the outworkings of that are proper, effective support for our schools, then we will look very carefully at it, and we would support it in its broadest sense. However, we have not seen much of the detail of it.
The problem we have at the moment, as I said in my first comments, is that the Education Authority is the managing authority for controlled schools. The Education Authority has multiple layers of duties. Some of those duties are conflicting in relation to its duties towards schools and its duties specifically to the controlled sector. Management is about caring and nurturing. We need to make sure that the bodies that support our schools do that.
Finally, regarding a single system—you would expect me to say this, Stephen—I would slightly refute the argument that we have an incredible number of bodies. There are a significant number of bodies in most education systems. If you have parental preference, you need different types of schools to deal with that preference, and Northern Ireland is a diverse context, as you know far better than I do.
I will not reel off the list, but we have a single Department of Education; we have a single Education Authority; we have a common funding formula; we have a common curriculum. We all work very closely together to deal with things. It is not that we do not have a single system, but we need a system that is far more joined up than it has been. Area planning is a key area where we could be better joined up. Broadly, we would welcome a move that moves towards better support for schools.
Q53 Stephen Farry: Before I go to Seamus and Eve to pick this up as well, it is worth reflecting that area planning does not happen on a single basis. There are two different area planning processes.
Mark Baker: I will give you the line that my colleagues have told me not to say, but I will give it to you. There are two problems with area planning. The first problem is that it is not done on an area basis. Previously, we have not looked at all the schools in an area.
Secondly, it is not planning, because we are not looking at a whole area. We are often looking at schools that are below a sustainability criteria. We do not have a vision for what education should be in an area, and we have a deficit model. It is about closures rather than investing in an area.
If you go into a community and say, “We are closing your school”, that is a deficit. It is about going into an area and saying, “We are going to invest. Yes, you may need to move your school, but look what you’re going to get”. Peter Osborne talked about the isolated pairs. We are 100% supportive of looking at small, rural areas where we need to bring our schools together to keep high-quality education local.
Seamus Bradley: In terms of responding to the growth of the integrated sector, the Education Authority absolutely supports schools that wish to transform, and it supports the existing schools as well.
Early in each area planning discussion with individual schools, the option of transformation will be explored with them, but that is not always a viable option if the school is not sustainable in the first place. Area planning is driven by the sustainable schools policy in its current form. It is not something that there are massive freedoms to change simply in the moment.
Secondly, there are ministerial priorities within the strategic plan, and we respond to those. We play two roles. We are the planning authority and we are also the managing authority for controlled schools, so we facilitate the process for all the sectors, but we also then have a particular focus on bringing forward development proposals for the controlled sector. We do that within the current processes. Within that process, we have seen growth in the integrated sector, and we anticipate continuing to see that growth from the raised awareness that has come from the new integrated Act.
In terms of the merits of the single system, the independent review has made a number of recommendations about the form, function and structures of the Education Authority. Our board is currently discussing those, along with our senior officers, and we are awaiting the Department of Education’s response to the recommendations as well, but obviously there are opportunities, and there is the potential for change to EA in the future. Again, we will work within that.
Q54 Stephen Farry: Apologies, Seamus, if I have picked this up wrong, but in the written evidence that the EA presented to the Committee, you were quite dismissive of the level of demand or the assessment of demand for integrated schools across Northern Ireland. Am I reflecting what you said? It was similar to the Department of Education saying, “Steady on. It is not really what you think it is”.
Seamus Bradley: We have to take the facts and figures that we have in front of us in terms of admissions and what enrolments we are seeing in terms of the schools, and the parental preferences that are coming forward from the admissions to schools. There are other pools and other indicators of demand. With the other bodies and members of the earlier panel, we are currently working with the Department of Education to define demand.
Q55 Stephen Farry: Is it not a chicken-and-egg issue here, to an extent? If parents do not have a viable option in their areas, they are not going to make those types of choices in practice. Therefore, it is not really a reliable assessment of demand. If they had that choice, you may find a different result.
Seamus Bradley: That is the discussion that all of us are having at the moment. How do we define demand, and how do we provide pathways of progression for children that will reflect parental choice into the future?
Eve Bremner: You would expect me to advocate for my scheme, which I will. We are proud of it. The outcomes are good. It was recognised in the independent review, but what you will not hear from me or any educationalist, I hope, today is any denigration of any other sector. That is not what we are about. From a Catholic education point of view, it is about the development of the whole child, in whatever setting that may be. We think we can do that, but we recognise that there are other settings.
I do not have a concern about growth of integrated, but my concern is that the debate has become too focused on a sectoral position in terms of an integrated sector as opposed to the outcome of trying to have a peaceful, prosperous, inclusive society. The independent review showed that there are many models in which that could be achieved, including through inclusion within the existing system as well as integrated schools.
My other concern about it is that looking at integration purely on a religious basis does a disservice to the identities that our children and our future generations will have, which are not only about religion, but about their race, ethnicity, sexual identity and gender. When we talk about inclusivity, that is what that should be about.
It also ultimately distracts us from the argument in education that is common to all sectors, which is that there is not enough money in education in Northern Ireland. It is underfunded. I would love to know where the wastage is, because there is not enough money to run the system as it is, let alone to direct elsewhere. I worry that we are focusing on the wrong thing.
You also asked about the single education system. The report was very clear on this. Regarding people’s interpretation of a single system, there is none. There is a difference between a single education system and how we manage the system. CCMS has always approached that not from the defence of an organisation, but from what is going to be right for schools and our children. Yes, there are opportunities to do things differently.
I will just pick up very briefly on Mark’s point about area planning. CCMS was probably one of the first organisations to take a genuinely area approach to a review of education. That pre-dated area planning.
The difficulty we have now is that area planning is supposed to be about strategic planning on an area basis, but the process that you are required to go through is about making an argument around a single school. It is about arguing why it should be closed. It is about affirming underperformance as opposed to making the argument about building up good performance by making sure there is not a drain on the system elsewhere.
Q56 Stephen Farry: There have been examples in the past where, within the Catholic maintained sector, you have looked at Catholic schools versus Catholic schools in terms of trying to find solutions, and not trying to do it on a much wider geographical basis. There are not necessarily the conversations happening with other sectors to see if area planning can be done better. The current processes between yourselves, the Education Authority and others do not pick up that point about the two struggling schools in the village.
Eve Bremner: There is an appetite to do it. From a CCMS point of view, we are one of the few organisations that has genuinely done cross-sectoral, innovative work. It is about what our future want for an area is, and we have worked with other school types and other schools to develop that. You are right. We need to build on that cross-sectoral approach.
We talk about parental preferences. Our schools are also a reflection of the communities in which they operate, and there is something about recognising that it is not a straightforward process of two schools becoming one. That is an overly simplistic way in which to look at our school estate moving forward.
Leo O’Reilly: On this general point, if parents wish for a school to become integrated, that is entirely something that the Governing Bodies Association supports. However, we do not share the narrative about how we need a single education system, because as my colleagues have already pointed out, we operate under common funding, common statutory, common inspection and common staffing regimes.
What we have is an education system that reflects a different ethos and values, but that is the same everywhere else, including everywhere else in the UK. It accommodates those, obviously within limits. That point is important.
The point about demand for integrated education has also come up in a number of comments that have been made so far. Sometimes advocates for integrated education refer to polls. Polls are quite a common thing that they refer to, saying that 66% or something of the population want the schools to be integrated, so why has it not happened? However, polls are notoriously inaccurate. If I am asked if I support integrated education, I would say yes. If I am asked, “Should parents have an option for integrated education?”, I would say yes, but that does not mean that I want all the other schools not to be there. I want parents to have those choices as well. That particular point is very important.
There are also constant references to parental demand. There have been, as we know, various ongoing debates as to how the demand requirements in the new legislation will be satisfied. There is, as has already been alluded to, a very simple available measure of demand that is available every single year, which is when parents are asked which school they wish their children to go to. That data is available in the education system every single year, and that shows the demand across the system for different types of schools, including at primary and secondary level. We do not need to rely on inaccurate polls. You can look at hard data that is available on what parents want in terms of choices for their children.
Q57 Stephen Farry: You accept the point I made earlier on that data will be skewed by what are, in practice, the existing options available to them. It does not reflect what it could have been if a different pattern of options were available.
Leo O’Reilly: The point about what is available is very important. As we pointed out in our evidence, it is about where you are looking at. In certain areas of Northern Ireland, including Greater Belfast, there is an excess demand at the moment for school places. Therefore, many, if not most schools, are oversubscribed, simply because parents are struggling to find schools for their children.
However, in other areas of Northern Ireland, as we also pointed out in our evidence, schools are undersubscribed and have places, including integrated secondary schools. Where parents have the choice available to them, they make the choice available to them. As I say, the picture in Greater Belfast is distorted by the fact that there is a shortage of places.
Q58 Stephen Farry: The point I am making is that across Northern Ireland there are concentrations of integrated schools, but there are places where there are no integrated primary or post-primary options available to parents.
Leo O’Reilly: There are statutory mechanisms in place that enable schools to be created if that is what parents wish to happen.
Eve Bremner: Leo has probably made my point, but it is the reality that there is not every type of school in every type of area. That is true for all our sectors. There are plenty of kids in Fermanagh who now have to travel into Enniskillen to get to any type of school, let alone whether it is integrated. I would just make that point. That is the reality of our country and provision.
Q59 Claire Hanna: I just wanted to pick up on the Integrated Education Act of 2022. Could you each comment on how it has affected your work and your sector, including any challenges?
Leo O’Reilly: I would highlight just two points about the Act, to keep it brief. Regarding integrated education, it is about definition and demand. Starting with the definition point, the most recent legislation, in its definition of integrated education, highlights four characteristics. It talks about children in a school together of different socioeconomic backgrounds. It talks about children of different abilities. It talks about children coming from different cultural and ethnic groups in a single school. Those characteristics, I suspect, would be shared by a very large majority of schools in Northern Ireland, and probably all schools at a primary level.
It then mentions this fourth point, which is also that to be an integrated school, to quote the legislation, there must be “reasonable numbers of Roman Catholics and Protestants”. We have asked the Department several times how it defines this term, “reasonable numbers”, and we have not got an answer yet.
This is not just a pedantic point about a particular wording in a piece of legislation, because it brings to the fore the point of what we mean by an integrated school. Is it a school that is integrated in terms of having balanced numbers of Protestants, Catholics and some others, or is it a school that hopes to be integrated at some point in the future but is not at the moment? Is there a process for de-integrating a school if it does not achieve certain targets? I do not know what the answer is.
The Department has not defined how it interprets the legislation. We may or may not disagree with what they come up with, but it would be good to know how they define that, because otherwise what has happened, as a previous witness alluded to, is that over the years the definition of integrated education has been diluted progressively to become broader. There may be arguments for that, but it also then dilutes the concept. What is the distinction between this type of education and other types of education? I can only speak for my own school. The notion that somehow we are not promoting inclusion, cross-community understanding and different ethoses is misplaced.
Eve Bremner: This is a difficult one to answer in that, again, we respect the place of integrated education and understand the desire to have a legislative footing for that. It would be my sense that there was an opportunity missed, in that the legislation was not focused on quality of education, and was again more focused on the placement or the position of a sector, if that makes sense. That has given rise to a degree of discomfort in terms of the perception of whether there is additional opportunity or onus placed on the integrated sector that is not afforded to others. It is quite early on, I would have to say, in terms of seeing how that plays out.
I would also echo Leo’s point and the point that I made earlier. My concern is that if we only regard integrated education as a sectoral or governance solution, then it is perceived that integrated schools have the USP on providing inclusivity and cohesion. I just do not accept that. I accept that the statistics show the degree of diversity in our schools, which is to some degree reflective of our communities, I have to say, but I do not accept that integrated schools are or should be the only mechanism by which we can have cohesiveness and inclusivity.
It needs to be a mixed model, and there is a place for integrated schools; there is a place for other sectors and, in fact, plurality. If we think about our society and what we want, surely we have learned that developing respect for our cultures, views and beliefs is something that we need, and therefore to dilute it or diminish it does a disservice to that outcome of cohesiveness and inclusivity.
Seamus Bradley: In terms of the Act, it enhanced the Education Authority’s statutory duty. There is an immediate impact that we are seeing from that. First of all, in terms of the interest and awareness of the transformation process, we have seen an increase in interest in that, with schools actively exploring the possibility of transformation ballots and moving forward. One of our roles is to encourage and support those schools through that process along with colleagues. NICIE and IEF would be involved, as well as CSSC and the other bodies here today.
Internally within the organisation, we have worked to also build that awareness among our own staff, and to embed understanding across the staff teams about our statutory duties towards integrated education, including how those have changed and been enhanced by the 2022 Act.
We have a cross-directorate group that meets quarterly across the year. We invite to those meetings our colleagues from the other bodies to participate in that, along with our own staff from across each of the five directorates. We often would visit integrated schools as part of that process, and this is very much about ensuring that the staff of the Education Authority fully understand the statutory duty as it has come out. As I say, that is how we are building towards responding to the Act.
Now, there are other aspects of it that will be covered in the Department of Education’s action plan that we will respond to as well moving forward. One of the constraints we operate in—Roisin referenced it in the earlier session—is the constraint around the resource that is provided around transformation. There is certainly more scope within that to look at the resource provided for transformation.
At the moment, it would amount, in real terms on the ground to schools, to probably about one to two substitute cover days per term. That is for one teacher, so it is a very small resource available to schools that are looking to engage with this process and move forward in that space. We would welcome more investment in that space.
Mark Baker: It is good to hear that the EA is embedding understanding of integrated education. It would be good if they also embedded the understanding of the controlled sector as broadly, but I will not diverge from that point of view.
We have absolutely no concern about the intentions of the Bill; it was the contents of the Bill. When the chair of the Integrated Education Fund says that they are looking at a judicial review of the Department’s response to the Bill, we are in a situation where the precision of the legislation is problematic, and it has been. We all accept that.
The conversation is around demand at a time when there is not enough funding in our education system in Northern Ireland. Members will recollect our comments of last year around the underfunding of education in Northern Ireland. We believe the Bill potentially puts a duty on the Education Authority and the Department of Education to meet the demand and to resource the meeting of the demand within the integrated sector. I welcome that, but what I do not welcome is that being done to the denigration of any other schools. We need equality in our system, and Eve said that.
We also had a concern about the rhetoric around the Bill. We still live separate lives in some parts of Northern Ireland, so therefore there are schools representing their communities that will be broadly of one community identity. It is denigrating those communities and the schools that are serving them by criticising them, and that was a concern.
I have three points. Claire, you will not be surprised that I am going to reflect what Professor Tony Gallagher said a couple of weeks ago. There are three ways forward we need to go, and this is the problem with the Bill. We need inclusion across all our schools. It is vital, and the integrated sector is a good example. It does not have the exclusivity on inclusivity at all, but there is significant learning that can come from the integrated sector.
Secondly, we need as much sharing as we can possibly have. Criticising shared education and reflecting it from memories from 20, 30 or 40 years ago is unhelpful. Shared education is a very different thing today. It is vital that all our schools collaborate together. Shared education is even more important in those communities that potentially are single-identity, for whatever reason. We need integration.
To Stephen’s point about how you can measure demand if there is not an integrated school, that is where the transformation process comes in, Stephen. It is really important that parents in those areas, through the campaigns that the Integrated Education Fund have run such as Integrate My School, look at transforming their school and engaging in that process.
If we do not do all three, we are not going to get what we want, because the Integrated Education Fund’s target is for 25% of schools by 2035. What about the remaining 75%?
Q60 Claire Hanna: We were discussing at our last evidence session exactly that sort of organic diversity that exists in many schools. I am coming at it from a South Belfast perspective, where there are integrated neighbourhoods. I referred to both the academic excellence and the diversity that I meet every day in the schools I visit and the schools my children attend. Would you welcome some sort of metric or way of capturing and valuing that diversity?
Also, what are each of your sectors doing to challenge themselves to remove the real and perceived barriers to people from a non-traditional group? As I say, that definitely exists, but there is a lot more that can be done, including around things like feeder schools. That prevents people moving between the sectors. A very clear and real aspiration in the review was that there is a triple-track way of doing this, but one of them is very much existing schools that are not integrated challenging themselves to bring down those barriers.
Mark Baker: I will just give you one example, because I am sure my colleagues will give you others. I have spent the last two months meeting controlled school principals and governors in small local meetings, where I have been challenging them about the changing nature of Northern Ireland, the challenging demographics in Northern Ireland and that simple question.
For two reasons, you cannot allow people to walk past your school and think, “That is not for me”. You should not be doing it because, morally, every school should be open to all. Secondly, you should not do it because, in the business of education, you are losing people. As Dr Bloomer clearly said, pupils have a price on their head. The age-rated pupil unit is per pupil, and so you need to maximise the potential of the pupils in your school so that you can deliver high-quality education.
We are challenging schools. “Open to all” is not an aspiration; it has actions.
Eve Bremner: Claire, there is a role for us as managing authorities and there is a role for schools at a local level, but there are also fundamentally some system and structural issues. As managing authorities, we do not have control over the admissions criteria of schools, for example. We have to recognise the dynamic of academic selection in terms of parental choice as well.
From a CCMS point of view, ultimately, schools that are oversubscribed probably feel less motivated, if we can be honest about that.
Q61 Claire Hanna: It is very much a dynamic where I am sitting.
Eve Bremner: Correct, and that is in any sector. I am relatively recently in post, but a lot of the work that we have been doing has been around how we represent our values and our ethos. Roisin said earlier that we are Catholic schools, but you do not have to be Catholic to come to our school. Somebody said it is not just about words; it is about action, and that is something we reflect on going forward.
Seamus Bradley: In terms of our role, we have actively been bringing forward different and innovative solutions in different places. There are structural barriers, but we have shared campuses now beginning to come online. Limavady was formally opened last week; Ballycastle will begin construction in the next number of weeks.
We also have recently brought forward a development proposal for a remodelling of controlled education in Causeway in the Coleraine area, which will see the formation of a new controlled integrated school in that space. We are bringing forward different solutions and creating pathways of opportunity and provision that young people and parents can choose that are different from what has gone before.
It is a question of looking at where we go next. We have had some successes, and part of the strategy now needs to be identifying the next places that we bring those opportunities, and that we have those discussions with communities.
Leo O’Reilly: Admissions criteria are highly regulated by the Department and by the various circulars they issue every year to tell schools the criteria they can and cannot use.
We are continuing to use this terminology of Roman Catholics and Protestants, to quote the legislation, in having this debate. Maybe that was right in the last century, but increasingly, if you notice the statistics from schools, more and more parents are choosing to identify themselves as “other”. In some schools it is much as a third of the parents.
That says to me that parents now feel uncomfortable that, if they declare a particular religious affiliation, they are assumed therefore to be republican or nationalist. All of us who live there know that that is absolutely not the case. I just wonder for how long we should maintain that narrative of defining children and their parents, taking their religious beliefs and saying, “On the basis of that, you must be X, Y or Z”, whereas we all know that is not the case.
It is interesting that in the Northern Ireland Assembly’s designation system, we do not ask MLAs, “What is your religion?” We ask them if they are unionist, nationalist or other. The objective of integrated education, I assume, is not to promote religion; I assume it is to promote reconciliation and living together between the two traditions in Northern Ireland. Those are more accurately described in terms like “nationalist”, “unionist” and others.
Q62 Claire Hanna: That is a point well made.
Eve Bremner: Just to build on Leo’s point, Claire, it is more about diversity than our religious beliefs. We have a hugely changing society. We have a huge growth and change in our ethnic make-up, which is a fantastic thing. We are very proud that the majority of newcomers choose to come to Catholic maintained schools, and the doors are opened welcomingly to them. There is something about shifting the debate about diversity in education in a positive way.
Claire Hanna: We are going to need a whole other session, Chair. This is fascinating.
Chair: I think we are. Thank you so much for coming and being so precise with your answers; that is not a criticism of the first panel. We had a lot to deal with and a lot of differing views, which is really what we want. Thank you so much for your evidence this morning.