Reclaim the Enlightenment (https://reclaimtheenlightenment.net/)was founded in 2017. Its aim is to recover and promote the innovative and progressive thinking of the late eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century Enlightenment, bringing forward into the present day its spirit of tolerance, pluralism, and rational inquiry.
Where we are
What school did you go to? As shibboleths go, this one is right up there with being asked where you keep your toaster. But answers to this question reveal more about us than an obsession with perceived community background. They speak to a system built on missed opportunities, on what could have been and what might yet be.
NI’s educators remain underpaid and underappreciated for their work. And like the rest of us they are stuck with a system that amounts to less than the sum of its parts.
A quarter of a century after the GFA, 92% of pupils attend a school in which a single ethnic/religious/cultural ethos predominates. Even our nursery sector is segregated: 47% of pre-school children never encounter children from a background other than their own.
Division and its costs
Community division, always the headline in these parts, masks deeper inequalities. The true divisor of our system is social class. According to the OECD, Northern Ireland had by 2012 the most socially-segregated education system in the developed world. At 30.5%, Northern Ireland has the UK’s largest population share with basic or no qualifications. In 2019-20, according to the Department of Education, 22% of year 8 pupils entitled to free school meals attended a grammar, compared to 78% who attended a non-grammar.
The Irish-medium and integrated sectors remain under-resourced, in need of development and availability to all. One of the most eloquent statements of the current system’s financial, environmental and emotional cost can be found here on Slugger in a discussion by Angeline King. Research by Matthew Milliken and Stephen Roulston reckons the cost of division and duplication to be 130 million miles of unnecessary travel, 9,000 tonnes of CO2 and £220 million a year – or a million every school day.
Faced with such daunting figures, it is reasonable to ask how we got here.
How did we get here?
Abolition of the 11+ was set in motion under Martin McGuinness as Education Minister and finally implemented under direct rule in 2008. However ‘abolition’ has meant in practice the deregulation and outsourcing of the transfer test, which isnow administered by a company named GL Assessment. Its director, Crispin Chatterton, self-describes as ‘a senior product leader with responsibility for £133m portfolio driving double digit growth over the last 4 years’. It’s difficult to know where our pre-teens sit in that portfolio or how far their success or failure helps drive its double digit growth.
Now run as a going concern, ‘academic selection’ has long been a misnomer for segregation by social class.
Sir Cyril’s Legacy
The founding premise of academic selection – equal opportunity and social mobility based on ability – is false. Winston Churchill’s chief statistician, Sir Cyril Burt, known as the ‘father of the 11+’, believed that intelligence was innate and heritable. A system designed after his heart – ie our system – might best be described as one which presents an appearance of fairness while underpinning the status quo.
After Burt’s death, his work came under scrutiny. A 1976 exposé in The Times concluded that Burt had falsified his data, perhaps even to the point of naming invented people as co-authors on his research.
Like it or not, we are all Burt’s children, handing social inequality down the generations. Although there are only a couple of private schools in Northern Ireland, middle-class parents continue to purchase access to education through social and cultural capital, as well as financially through a thriving industry in private coaching. So where do we go from here?
Where next?
Sweeping reform is hard to envisage and harder to cost, but many smaller steps are being taken.
The pandemic showed us, through the suspension of transfer testing in 2020, that the world continues to turn without academic selection. Local and Global Citizenship, introduced as part of a reformed curriculum in 2007, has become something of an afterthought when it should be central. Further transformation should result from campaigns by the North West Migrants’ Forum for greater teaching of Black history and by the Secondary Students’ Union of Northern Ireland for direct, comprehensive and age-appropriate sexual education.
For a better future we can also look to the past. Education of the working class became the preserve of self-organizing local initiatives in the eighteenth century on this island in the form of book clubs and bardic schools. The Irish medium and integrated sectors have similar origins in a culture of communitarianism and thirst for change. Educator and activist Mary Ann McCracken is finally achieving due prominence in her home city.
When, in 1947, the Unionist government brought in free, universal post-primary education here it led to lasting social change, forming, as Graham Walker notes, ‘a new generation of political activists’ galvanized to make the case ‘for equal rights and opportunities for all citizens’. Universal access to education, rather than the differential access offered by the grammar/secondary system, drove this change.
There were moments things could have been different, but the present moment is also one such time. The roots of our system lie, like so much everything else, deep in our tangled history. But maybe some solutions lie there too.
This contribution draws on research by Ann Marrion, John Gray, Alan Millar, Fergus Whelan, Fiona Pegrum, Jim Curran, Matthew Milliken, Niall Comer, Cath Lowther, Angeline King, and Stephen Roulston, published by Reclaim the Enlightenment as Is Our Education System Failing Our Children? Contributions to the funding of this research were made by Comhaltas Uladh and the Community Relations Council.
The publication will be launched as part of an event on Saturday 6th April at First Presbyterian Church, Rosemary Street Belfast. Attendance is free and refreshments are provided. Registration via this link: https://bit.ly/3TDfuvR
The day begins with the Mary Ann McCracken Radical Walking Tour.
This is a guest slot to give a platform for new writers either as a one off, or a prelude to becoming part of the regular Slugger team.
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