Academic and columnist Patrick Murphy has written a devastating critique of the Stormont Executive’s ‘long-awaited’ Programme For Government. In particular he highlights the ‘glaring omission’ of education. He goes on to say that none of the aspirations listed can be achieved without investment in education and “the abandonment of the apartheid system created by academic selection” (September 14).
The omission of education from the Programme for Government is unbelievable – it’s like attempting to build a house without foundations.
Professor John Fitzgerald (The Northern Ireland Economy: Problems and Prospects, 2019) warned that the north’s economy needed a devolved government to tackle ‘the worst educational system of any region in the UK’, which he estimates would take up to 30 years to fix. “What you have is a population that are poorly educated, which means their economy is unlikely to grow rapidly in the future.”
The proportion of young people in Northern Ireland who are not in education, employment or training (Neets) far outstrips that in Britain. According to the Department for the Economy, there are an estimated 24,000 people aged 16 to 24 who either did not work or receive any form of teaching or vocational training between April to June.
In the north, 21 per cent of 30 to 34-year-olds have not completed their post-primary education. This compares with 9 per cent for the Republic of Ireland.
We know what we need to do to drastically improve our education system, from one that educates a select group of middle-class children to an education system for all our young people. There’s a mountain of research going back to the Good Friday Agreement that clearly shows that one of the biggest barriers to a better education that working-class children face is the transfer test, which enforces a type of educational apartheid based on social class and it has to go.
All the political parties with the exception of the three unionist parties are in favour of abolition but because of the requirement for cross-community support, political unionism can block abolition of the transfer test. If you didn’t know better you would almost think that political unionism preferred an uneducated working class, much like that other champion of working people, Donald Trump, who claimed to love uneducated people.
Jim Curran, Downpatrick, Co Down
