NI Humanists call for more ambitious action to deliver integrated education

Northern Ireland Humanists have responded to a consultation by the Department of Education calling its plan for integrated education unambitious.

The consultation was run on the Department’s Vision 2030 – A Strategy for Integrated Education. This strategy is a requirement of the Integrated Education Act (Northern Ireland) 2022, under which the Department of Education has a ‘duty to encourage, facilitate and support the development of integrated education’.

The strategy set out objectives including supporting schools delivering integrated education and increasing public knowledge and understanding of integrated education.

But Northern Ireland Humanists found that the strategy, much like the Integrated Education Act, to be unambitious with no credible plan to scale integrated education. The strategy has no plan to drive demand or expand provision, with no political leadership, investment or long-term plan for making integrated education accessible to the majority of the population. 

The proposed strategy also fails to mention Religious Education (RE) which is shaped entirely by the four main churches with an almost exclusively Christian curriculum that fails to foster integrated education through a critical, objective or pluralistic approach inclusive of minority religions and humanism. 

Watered down approach to demand for integrated education

Northern Ireland Humanists welcomed the Integrated Education Act in 2022 but noted that during its passage the legislation had been weakened, removing the duty to promote integrated education and a requirement for all new schools to be integrated. The Vision 2023 strategy similarly waters down the requirements of the Act to ‘meet demand’ for integrated education, by interpreting how parents are currently preferencing schools admissions as evidence of lower demand for integrated education – despite parents having to make choices about which schools to apply for in an environment where only 7% of schools are integrated. It is unsurprising that parents are choosing schools based on multiple factors – distance to their home, siblings in attendance, academic performance – but this shouldn’t be used as proof there is lower demand for a change to integrated education.

67% of people in Northern Ireland want integrated schools to be the main model for education, and this is reflected by the scale of parental and community support when schools are proposed for transformation, such as in the case of Bangor Academy and Rathmore Primary School. Unfortunately, the Education Minister Paul Givan blocked this proposed transformation. The Department of Education should seek to lift the barriers to integrated education, ensure political will for schools’ transformations to integrated status, and utilise a more appropriate framework for assessing – and increasing – demand for integrated education in the nation.

Northern Ireland Humanists Coordinator Boyd Sleator commented:

‘The children of Northern Ireland deserve a far more ambitious plan for transforming their school system into one where it does not matter what your background, faith or beliefs are in determining the education you receive. 

The Department of Education’s strategy for integrated education needs to go much further in delivering on the demand of the majority of people in Northern Ireland for integrated schools to become the main system. Integration also requires changing the exclusively Christian ethos of all schools, and providing an objective and pluralistic Religious Education curriculum.

The strategy must also set out how the Department will deal with a situation where the Education Minister can block the transformation of schools to integrated status against the overwhelming support of parents and the community of those schools.’