Last week, the education minister, Peter Weir, announced the membership of a new panel convened with the task of devising an action plan for tackling educational underachievement.
The panel’s formation and remit had been written into the New Decade, New Approach document, so the announcement was not unexpected.
The decision to incorporate within the remit a specific reference to addressing long established concerns about the academic performance of working class Protestant boys provoked comment in the Assembly chamber from Peter Weir’s predecessor as education minister, John O’Dowd, who warned that it would be wrong to ignore the reality that educational underachievement amongst our most deprived communities annually impacted significantly greater numbers of Catholic than Protestant children.
Every year, the largest group of poor kids to leave our education system with little or no qualifications are working-class Catholic boys. In 2017/18, they represented over 56 per cent of all working-class boys in this category, with working-class Protestant boys accounting for 34 per cent (with around 10 per cent for boys not in either category.)
The issue of educational underachievement amongst working class Protestant boys cannot be denied and quite rightly remains a cause for concern. Several reports over the past decade, including by Dawn Purvis and John Kyle, have used appropriate statistical evidence to point to the reality that a higher percentage of working class Protestant boys annually fail to secure basic academic grade thresholds. A variety of reasons continue to be offered to explain this situation, ranging from references to a failure to move beyond an entitlement mentality that once promised shipbuilding and engineering jobs in a now distant past to the contrasting school cultures within our education sectors, the absence of role models and levels of parental and communal expectations and aspirations.
Good progress has already been made on addressing the relative underperformance of Protestant boys since it has been raised as an important theme. According to the latest Department of Education statistics, if just 88 more working class Protestant boys secured 5 good GCSEs, the relative disadvantage to their Catholic counterparts would disappear. That represents only three classrooms of children across any of our schools.
Yet securing parity amongst our poorest boys for jumping the hurdle of 5 good GCSEs should not herald an occasion to break out the champagne. After all, the better performance, in relative terms, of working-class Catholic children has yet to manifest itself in a decisive change to the profile of our most deprived communities.
John O’Dowd’s intervention highlighted the uncomfortable reality that, in the Northern Ireland of 2020, it continues to be the case that Catholic families remain disproportionately more likely to be poor, with all that entails for the educational prospects of children from these households. According to the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA), more than 70 per cent of our poorest 100 neighbourhoods are overwhelmingly Catholic.
As the state approaches its centenary year, it is a damning indictment that greater Catholic inequality remains an issue that has not been decisively addressed, and the absence of any reference to it in the New Decade, New Approach does not augur well for anyone hoping that it would be a priority for the newly resurrected Stormont Executive.
An effective and comprehensive strategy to tackle educational underachievement must be informed by a desire to address both the persistently higher levels of Catholic deprivation and the specific case of working-class Protestant underachievement particularly (though not exclusively) impacting boys.
Whilst there has been ample - and appropriate - recognition of the desirability and urgency of addressing the latter, the former continues to be an issue largely ignored at a political level. In any event, the most significant advances towards eradicating greater Catholic inequalities in the north of Ireland are likely to be made by equipping young people with the skills, qualifications and aspirations to lift themselves above the poverty line once they leave formal education and enter the world of work, precisely the same approach required to address the identified problems regarding educational attainment facing working class Protestant boys.
Actions, and not words, are what is now required. It is to be hoped that the panellists can quickly get to work with devising an action-oriented plan that can assist schools, parents and communities in improving the educational prospects for all our children, regardless of their religious background.
