What ‘Before the Vote’ gets right and wrong about education…

John Doyle’s Before the Vote: Planning for a united Ireland, published by DCU Press in September and available as a free download, compares Northern Ireland and the Republic on the economy, welfare, health, and education. It then sets out what the Irish state would need to plan before a border poll. Doyle, professor of politics at Dublin City University, says the book does not argue for or against unity. Its treatment of education deserves a closer reading than it has had so far, because it contains both the book’s clearest proposal for Northern Ireland and its least supported claim.

The Irish News report on the Belfast launch (paywalled) gave education prominent space. It reported Doyle’s figures on participation in education and his description of the transfer test as “the biggest single cause of poor educational outcomes in Northern Ireland”, together with his view that ending it is “probably the most important step” towards better results. The report reflected Doyle’s argument accurately. It repeated the claim without asking what supports it, and that is the question worth asking.

The gaps Doyle reports are large. In 2022, 93.9% of 15 to 19-year-olds in the Republic were in education, compared with 70.6% in Northern Ireland. Doyle’s Table 2.2, adapted from ESRI data, puts early school leaving among 18 to 24-year-olds at 4% in the Republic and 10% here. In 2019, 18% of 25 to 34-year-olds in Northern Ireland had no qualification beyond lower secondary level, compared with 7.4% in the Republic. The figures come from research by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) in Dublin.

The figure that drew less attention is the one for university degrees. Doyle reports that 29% of 25 to 29-year-olds held a degree in both jurisdictions. The difference lies below degree-level education. In the Republic, 36% of that age group held a post-secondary qualification outside university, against 11% in Northern Ireland. The Republic has built extensive Post Leaving Certificate provision, which offers routes to qualifications outside university that are less widely taken in Northern Ireland.

This matters for the argument about selection. If Northern Ireland matches the Republic on degrees but falls far behind on further education, progression to university cannot explain the gap. What happens after compulsory schooling, and which qualifications are available outside university, also matters. Ending selection at 11 might help some young people who now leave education early. It would not by itself create the further education places, qualifications and routes into work that the Republic has built and that Northern Ireland has developed far less.

Doyle’s case against selection draws on research showing that it divides children at 11 into schools with very different completion rates and progression to higher education, and that it contributes to early school leaving among poorer pupils. That research supports the view that selection contributes to differences in completion and progression between schools, with disadvantaged pupils particularly affected. It does not show that selection is a larger cause of the North–South gap than poverty, further education provision or the Republic’s DEIS programme for disadvantaged schools, which Doyle himself credits with keeping pupils in school. The book offers a ranking of causes that its evidence cannot sustain.

There is a further difficulty in Doyle’s own economic chapter. He reports an ESRI study which found that in Northern Ireland, unlike the Republic, productivity showed no statistically significant relationship with education levels or investment. Doyle puts this down to political instability and uncertainty over access to EU markets, and he may be right, but the study itself did not identify a cause. Its authors warn that better education and investment, without a broader strategy to make firms more competitive, do not guarantee higher productivity. That means that the economic return from education reform here cannot be taken for granted, and the economic case for abolishing selection is more conditional than the book’s tone suggests.

The proposals in Chapter 9 are more careful than the headline claim. Doyle suggests ending academic selection in a united Ireland as the Republic did when it introduced free secondary education. Each school could decide whether to keep academic selection, but those that kept it would lose state funding. On ethos and patronage, he recommends a plural, publicly funded system, at least during a transition, so that schools with a British or unionist ethos could keep it through their boards of governors. He argues that a single non-denominational system imposed at unity would be read in unionist areas as Dublin taking control of their schools.

He is also critical of the Republic. He points out that 88% of its primary schools have a Catholic ethos, although only 69% of the population identified as Catholic in the 2022 census. Many schools run by Education and Training Boards, which the state describes as multi-denominational, hold religious ceremonies that isolate children who opt out. Doyle argues that the Republic should address this before any referendum if it wants to be credible on the issue. That is a fair point and would be necessary for alignment with JR87.

The proposals stop short of the legal questions that a transfer of sovereignty would raise. Article 2 of the First Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights requires the state to respect parents’ religious and philosophical convictions in education, and Doyle elsewhere calls for minority rights in a united Ireland to be subject to external oversight, including by the European Court of Human Rights. Schools are likely to be an early test of those guarantees, in disputes over religious instruction and over admissions to minority-ethos schools in areas where that community is outnumbered. Doyle discusses minority-rights guarantees at some length elsewhere in the book, but his education proposals receive no comparable scrutiny, and he does not examine how they would meet that obligation.

Doyle is right that the education gap is real and that selection belongs at the centre of the debate. His own figures suggest that it cannot be the whole explanation. A plan for education in a united Ireland would need to address further education and parents’ rights as seriously as it addresses the transfer test.