The Education Act was passed here in 1947. It provided free education for all up to the age of 15. Before this, children had to leave school at the end of primary. You could only go to ‘big school’ if your parents had the money to pay.
Catholics in the north were the poorest of the poor but at last the doors of education were open to them and they grabbed the opportunity with both hands.
There was fierce unionist and Orange Order opposition to the Act but the education minister, Samuel Hall-Thompson, who was the only member of the cabinet not in the Orange Order, pushed it through with the help of the then prime minister Basil Brooke. Pay-back for Samuel Hall-Thompson came two years later when he was forced to resign.
I think the Act was always going to go through despite the opposition because there was a feeling within unionism that Catholics were stupid and lazy and that the Act wouldn’t make any real difference. How wrong they were proved to be.
In fairness political unionism has never been in favour of education for working-class people and that was equally true for working-class Protestants. Unionist politicians have never treated working-class Protestants fairly. They have systematically let them down for decades.
Professor Peter Shirlow, director of the Institute of Irish Studies at Liverpool University, who was part of a working group which produced the report ‘Educational Disadvantage and the Protestant Working Class’, had this to say: “I have taught here for a significant amount of time but rarely have I taught Protestant males from the Shankill, Shore Road, Nelson Drive or other such communities.”
The only group to perform worse at GCSE than Protestant working-class boys are the children of Travellers.
The reasons for this underachievement are complex but much of the blame lies at the door of the DUP and their continued support for the transfer test, which research has clearly shown to be one of the biggest barriers to the academic progress of working-class children.
Jim Curran, Downpatrick, Co Down
