The 2018 All Children Together Dunleath Lecture: by Colm Cavanagh at Riddell Hall, The Queen’s University of . 7 March 2018: (7,420 words). ​

“THY PEOPLE SHALL BE MY PEOPLE: (Ruth 1.16): in the 21st Century”.

I am honoured to speak today and to hold up again the name and memory of Lord Dunleath in this 2018 Dunleath Lecture.

The Dunleath Lectures began in 1997 when Brian Lambkin gave the inaugural lecture. I remember that a strong focus of his lecture was the fact that in we were not addressing two religions, but two understandings of one religion. This issue was highlighted again a few weeks ago in the television series “Derry Girls”. It was pointed out to the young Catholic girl Clare that Protestants and Catholics were not two different religions - but simply two different Christian denominations. Clare paused to take this in, and when we next saw her, she was wearing a union jack dress for reasons I can’t remember - but which immediately appealed to the sole young loyalist youth who clung to her with the words “We’re outnumbered …” Flags/faith. It’s hard to prise them apart in Northern Ireland.

So: Why Integrated Schools? What I am going to do in this Lecture is look at that question? -Why Integrated Schools? -Then look at the religious and political context that has brought us to where we are in 2018. -Then look at the differing roles of churches and governments. -And finally look at Northern Ireland’s way forward - including the process of change - to see how to make one community: Thy People-My People.. ---

1 Even as I tell overseas visitors that we are not fighting here about religion, I am reminded that when the Boundary Commission drew up its reports in the 1920s, they labelled their working maps not as “unionist” and “nationalist”; not as “British” and “Irish”. “But as “Protestant” and “Roman Catholic”. Indeed one Commission map describes areas as

[1] “Catholic” or “Non-Catholic”. ​ (“And they say” commented a clergyman recently on seeing ​ ​ ​ that map, “that our Troubles have nothing to do with religion!”) ​ ​

Now obviously very few people here have been fighting a religious war, a theological war. ​ ​ ​ ​ The word “Transubstantiation” was never attached to a bomb. “Ne Temere Decree” was never graffitied on a wall. Nor was “Salvation by Grace Alone” ever written on a bullet. But the IRA at Kingsmills DID ask Catholics to stand out of the way before they killed the ​ ​ Protestants. People WERE sometimes asked to recite the Lord’s Prayer to see whether ​ ​ they used the “wrong” defining word “who” or “which” - and thus deserved to be beaten, or worse. The Pope does still appear in graffiti. Ian Paisley’s first political party with two MPs in Stormont, both Free Presbyterian ministers, was the Protestant Unionist Party, forerunner ​ ​ of the Democratic Unionist party. And in North Belfast young Catholic primary school girls told of being verbally abused or stoned when in their school uniforms they would go through a Protestant neighbourhood. We can all provide similar examples of religious labels for issues of identity or politics.

So when, 20 years ago, in 1998, I had the honour of giving the second Dunleath Lecture, I gave it the title: “Thy People Shall Be My People: The community impact of integrated schools”. Whatever the future holds, a united community would be better than a divided community - or, even worse, better than having TWO communities. When I recently ​ ​ re-read that lecture, it was so full of hope, the Belfast-Good Friday Agreement, had been signed by almost all our political parties and supported by enormous votes in Northern Ireland and the . What has happened that hope in the intervening years? ---

Listen again to those beautiful, words from the Book of Ruth: “She answered: Be not against me, to desire that I should leave thee and depart: for whithersoever thou shalt go, I will go: and where thou shalt dwell, I also will dwell. Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. The land that shall receive thee dying, in the same will I die: and there will I be buried. The Lord do so and so to me, and add more also, if aught but death part me and thee”. [2] ​ ​

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Biblical commentators draw many and different lessons from the Book of Ruth. But the plain explanation is of a total yielding of oneself to another. But Ruth’s story is a spiritual story - whereas politicians usually focus on more mundane matters. “Jesus”, as a UDA man once remarked to me, “made a good prophet. But he would have ​ ​ made a bloody awful prime minister”. Ruth was on a spiritual journey. Politicians are ​ usually not. And that throws up the Church-State differences that I will address tonight.

The public policy case for a single system of publicly-funded schools in this island began on 31 October 1831. That’s 187 years ago this autumn - it’s a long time for Government policy to be attempted and remain unfulfilled. Why was that Whig Government in 1831 so determined to have all Irish children attend a single system of schools? Well, in 1831, Ireland was a pretty divided society and Chief Secretary Edward Stanley saw it as the Government’s job to help unite the whole community.

Brian Inglis writes that "In 1828 a Select Committee of the House of Commons, appointed to see what could be done, advised that the remedy would lie in schools where the pupils could be segregated according to their beliefs, for purposes of religious instruction. But the assumption was that some basic Christian instruction - bible readings - could be given to all comers. The exact nature of this instruction aroused heated controversy when the Whig Government brought in an Irish Education Bill in 1831 at the height of the repeal agitation; ...“ [3] ​ ​

Inglis then quotes an interesting observation of how the whole scene looked to an Englishman, Charles Greville, clerk to the Privy Council, who wrote: 'while the whole system is crumbling to dust under their feet, while the church is prostrate, property of all kinds threatened, and robbery, murder, starvation and agitation rioting over the land, these wise legislators are debating whether the brats at school shall read the whole bible, or only parts of it". [4] ​

(Since Greville had attended Oxford University before 1828, one assumes that this was a Church of England perspective).

And for the record, the reported serious crimes in Ireland in 1831 were:

3 Murders: 201 Robberies: 1,478 Burning houses: 466 Attacks on houses: 2,296 Burglaries: 531. Robbery of Arms: 678. This rate of serious crime was almost as much as the total for England and Wales - whose population was almost twice that of Ireland. So Ireland was not a quiet society.

The 1831 Education Bill established a system from which - in the opinion of Chief Secretary Stanley - 'should be banned even the suspicion of proselytism'. ​ ​

Let’s look at Historical Background of our Government-Church Nexus: There are numerous examples down the centuries of those community divisions. And let me be clear that I am not claiming any higher or lower moral ground for Britain or Ireland. England acted as big countries do. Ireland would have done it to England if it could have. St Patrick did not first arrive in Ireland as a tourist, but as a captured slave!

Prof James Lydon wrote regarding the aftermath of the 1315-1318 Scots invasion of Ireland: "The two communities were left to confront one another, two distinct cultures which were naturally antagonistic to each other….. they remained locked in hostility to the end and folk memory, epitomised by the use of such epithets as 'Old English' and 'Old Irish' by later generations, kept alive the feeling of difference. In some respects it has lasted down to the present day". [5] ​

April 1324: "We order that theology teachers of Irish nationality at present living in these houses be allocated to houses of Englishmen. …” [This was part of a decree of William of Rudyard, Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, , Papal Judge-Delegate appointed by Pope John XXII to investigate King Edward II's charges against Franciscan friars of the Irish nation.

4 May 1324: " .. for the greater peace and tranquillity of this country we will and command that some English friars should be members of communities in all places of pure Irishmen, just as conversely Irish friars should be distributed among the English". [Dean William of Rudyard again].

In 1325, John Clyn, the Kilkenny Franciscan annalist, recorded that there was trouble throughout almost the whole Franciscan community in Ireland, 'each one taking the side of his own nation and blood'".

1366: The notorious Statutes of Kilkenny forbade English people in Ireland from marrying an Irish person; speaking Irish; using an Irish name; letting an Irish clergyman enter an English religious house; appointing an Irish cleric to any church in the English settlement; etc, etc. It’s widely assumed that English power was actually too weak to implement these rules. But they showed how King Edward III wanted to keep his English community in Ireland distinct and separate.

John Watt, University of Hull, wrote in 1972:- "By the end of the middle ages, the natural process of inter-marriage between the two peoples had, despite all legislation to the contrary, brought about a considerable degree of assimilation of the two cultures on all social levels. Nevertheless, in that period, as in all periods since the Invasion, bitterness between native and colonist was always a poison to envenom the sores of the ecclesiastical body politic. A typical case comes from 1431 when John Gese, bishop of Waterford and Lismore attempted [unsuccessfully] to impeach his metropolitan, Richard O Hedian, Archbishop of Cashel in a Parliament at Dublin. Among the charges [was] that of 'making much of the Irish, loving none of the English' “. [6] ​

And Education was deliberately used by successive London Governments as an implement of policy:

1537: Prof Edmund Curtis writes that "The Act of Supremacy 1537, if enforced, debarred Catholics from … keeping a school, and from university degrees". [7] ​

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Also in 1537 an Act for English Orders, Habits and Language came into force. This introduced a state system of education to assimilate the Irish to English culture as well as to the new Reformed Protestant faith. [8] ​

In 1570 the Dublin Parliament passed an Act for the Erection of Free Schools; this required a free school to be provided in every diocese and for the schoolmaster to be an Englishman.[9] ​

In February 1570 Pius V declared Elizabeth excommunicated as a heretic and her subjects released from obedience. Prof Curtis comments that: “the position of the peaceful Roman Catholic between the two kinds of zealot became more and more difficult. How was he to obey the Pope in spiritual things and be a loyal man to the Queen in temporal things?" [10] ​

1592: Ireland’s oldest surviving university, , would accept only anglicans - so, no presbyterians or Catholics - or indeed jews, or other faiths. This continued for two centuries.

Presbyterian marriages were for centuries not even recognised as legal.

In 1695: An Act made it illegal for Catholics to go for education abroad and forbade them to keep a public school at home. [11] ​

In 1733 Archbishop Hugh Boulter of Armagh “began a scheme of popular education and founded the 'Charter schools'. … Unfortunately”, comments Prof Curtis, “as the scholars could only be educated on a ​ ​ Protestant basis, the Charter schools never found any favour with the Catholic bishops or the mass of the people". [12]. ​ ​

I don’t need to go on. You can see how London rule included anglicanism - as nonconformists in Britain also knew just as well. ---

6 The society all this led to was described in 1999 by the sympathetic and insightful Senator George Mitchell in this book "Making Peace: The inside story of the making of the Good Friday Agreement": " … Northern Ireland is an advanced, modern society. Its people are productive, literate, articulate. But for all its modernity and literacy, Northern Ireland has been divided, by a deep and ancient hatred, into two hostile communities, their enmity burnished by centuries of conflict. They have often inflicted hurt, physical and psychological, on members of the other community, and they have been quick to take offense at real or perceived slights. They have a highly developed sense of grievance. … Each is a minority … Each sees itself as a victim community, constantly under siege, the recipient of a long litany of violent blows from the other".

[13]

Later in his book Senator Mitchell comments: "… I wondered how it was possible to have two such completely different views of the same society". [14] ​

How indeed?

Prof John Whyte in his 1990 book “Interpreting Northern Ireland” had judged that "The two factors which do most to divide Protestants as a whole from Catholics as a whole are endogamy and separate education. … "A striking feature of Northern Ireland society has been the existence of two parallel sets of schools. … "… segregated education is divisive, not so much because of what is formally taught, but because of the 'hidden agenda', the values - political more than religious - which are informally put across to the pupils". [15] ​

So let’s look at more recent education throughout this island. Down the centuries, the churches played an enormous role in education. The monasteries traditionally were centres of learning. Among the most famous manuscripts which survive from nearly 1500 years ago are the gospels, psalters and hagiography - such as the Cathach of Colmcille; the Antiphonary of Bangor; Book of Armagh; and the Book of Kells - but also very many books of history, sagas, poetry and place-lore - such as the Annals of

7 the Four Masters; the Annals of ; the Book of Ballymote; or the Book of Leinster; and very many others. So they were places of secular as well as religious learning

And my favourite school noticeboard on the island is of the St Patrick’s (Church of Ireland) Cathedral Choir School, Dublin, with the proud founding date of 1432 - almost 600 years of education.

After the Reformation, the Presbyterian wish to have everyone able to read the Bible, was pursued in its own schools. The set textbooks in Synod of Ulster schools were the Bible and Westminster catechisms.

In the 1950s the Catholic Church in Ireland included some 115 clerical and lay religious orders - many of them created by people who devoted their lives to educational, or nursing, service to the community. An astonishing dedication to service to the community at large for a religious ideal and for which the community has huge reason to be grateful. In the Republic of Ireland to this day over 90% of the schools are funded by government but managed by the Catholic Church; and a further 180 schools there belong to the Church of Ireland. In Northern Ireland the schools are funded by government but almost half have a structural input by the Protestant Churches and almost half are managed by the Catholic Church. This Protestant-Catholic divide is mirrored in our Teacher Training colleges. And the Government also funds two separate management bodies to match the Reformation divide - on one hand the Council for Catholic Maintained Schools; and on the other, the Controlled Schools Support Council with its representatives of the Protestant Churches which had transferred almost all their schools to the NI Department of Education.

But religion continued to drive well-intentioned but deliberate separation for centuries - across the reformation divide and also among the various churches. This was, of course, done with good intent. Each church saw itself as the one true church and the necessary route to salvation. So there was also religious competition and rivalry. John Coolahan describes the time of the National Board of Education in the 1830s, as: “a minefield over which the shrapnel of denominational invective blazed with dazzling ferocity”. [16] ​ ​

In our own day, the Free Presbyterian Church’s Independent Christian School Board website (www.independentchristianschool.org) quotes Baptist Pastor Brian Freer’s view that “our ​ ​ ​

8 State schools are rapidly becoming spiritual slaughterhouses for our children”. And Free ​ Presbyterians fund their own seven schools here so that their children will avoid the unbiblical ethos of other schools.

So what is the Role of Government?:- The role of a government is very different from that of a church. Churches wish to get people to see their supernatural truth and live according to that truth. Governments try only to manage civic life here on earth. Political theorists will argue about the role of Government. But in simple terms Government defends from outside attack (the army); keeps order (law and courts and police); works for the common good (the economy); provides common amenities (roads, schools, etc); and looks after the weak (welfare state). It’s enough to accept a government, - you don’t have to become a member of its party or be ​ ​ committed to its policies.

So in 1831, after assessing the evidence of consultations, Chief Secretary Edward Stanley, the 19th century Whig predecessor of today’s Karen Bradley MP, Secretary of State for

[17] Northern Ireland, set up a fund to grant-aid new “National Schools” across the island ​ - ​ the first country to create a publicly funded school system in the English-speaking world (although at the time most people here were, of course, Irish speakers). But since Government’s job is to manage life here on earth, Edward Stanley wanted to help build a strong, united community. Remember that within the previous 33 years there had been the 1798 rebellion in Ulster and Leinster; the Government had removed power from the Irish Parliament which had presided over that rebellion, and had arranged the parallel Acts of Union in 1800, bringing Ireland into a united Parliament in London; and in 1829 legal barriers had been lifted on most of the Irish people by the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act. So, accordingly, Stanley made it crystal clear that he wanted a single school system for all pupils - with all denominational religious instruction kept rigorously separate. Stanley wanted a system, as we have noted, “from which should be banished even the suspicion of ​ proselytism”. ​

The biggest church, the Catholic Church, largely agreed. The Church of Ireland, still the established church, felt that it was its job, not the government’s job, to manage education. ​ ​ And since it was not going to be allowed to manage the new system, it refused to participate. The Presbyterian Church rigorously opposed the separation of the Word of God from the ordinary curriculum, “the 3 Rs”. Remember that the study of the gospel was the reason

9 Presbyterians were so committed to literacy in Scotland and Ireland. So secular classrooms were not at all acceptable to them. Some fundamentalist Presbyterians made serious public objection - especially in Antrim and Down - monster meetings; attacks on school buildings, even painting a large letter “P” for “popery” on the school door. And so, rather than fail completely, the government eventually conceded what were in effect Presbyterian schools. But the seven unpaid Commissioners on the National Education Board were three Anglican, two Presbyterian and two Catholic - including both the Anglican and Roman Catholic archbishops of Dublin.

As now in 2018, anyone could attend any school. But religious schools then as now, tended to be pretty much schools for children of that denomination. Church of Ireland children continued to attend their separate Church of Ireland schools. Presbyterian children went to Presbyterian schools. And, since there were no Protestants to go to school with them, the schools that Catholic children attended were Catholic schools. That’s how it happened.

So the 1830s marked the first failure of a Government here to create its desired single ​ ​ school system.

92 years later the first Minister for Education in Northern Ireland was Lord Londonderry. In 1923 he passed an Education Act which forbade religious discrimination in the appointment of teachers and forbade the use of denominational literature in government-funded schools. The Catholic schools had already determined not to take part in the education system of the new Government. And under Rev William Corkey, The United Education Committee of the Protestant Churches was formed in 1924. 1924-5 was also the time that the Irish Boundary Commission was defining the new Border - and used as its guide not nationalist or unionist voting results, or British or Irish identity, but whether local populations were “Protestant” or “Catholic”. We were in the process of designing two states - one for Protestants and one for Catholics. Thus back at the government of Northern Ireland, under very strong public pressure from this Protestant lobby, in 1925 the Unionist Prime Minister Sir James Craig amended the Government’s own 1923 law so that teachers could now be selected on religious grounds and teachers would be compelled to give “simple bible instruction” to their pupils. In 1926 Lord Londonderry resigned his Ministerial post. [18] ​

So 1925 marked the second failure of government to create a single school system. ​ ​ Indeed it was not until the 1960s that Terence O’Neill was the first ever Prime Minister of

10 Northern Ireland to actually visit a Catholic school. I’m not sure that any previous premier had ever been invited to do so.

A few lone voices highlighted the negative impact of a divided educational system. It became more of an issue of public debate. Then in 1974 in the first, short-lived Power-Sharing Executive, its Programme for Government included what it called “Shared Education” - not the separated, shared education that is now talked about in 2018 - but as described by Executive member Paddy Devlin in his autobiography: "We produced a comprehensive social and economic programme, the most far-reaching ever drawn up in Northern Ireland…. [The third] far-reaching innovation was the introduction of integrated education, teaching Catholic and Protestant children side by side in the same classrooms for the first time … steadily making a positive contribution to removing community division". [19] ​

But in May 1974 that cross-community government of the Unionist Party, SDLP and Alliance Party, collapsed in the face of the Ulster Workers’ Council strike.

So 1974 marked the third failure of Government in its wish to have a single school system. ​ ​

After five short months of shared power, Northern Ireland yielded to 24 years of Direct Rule from Westminster - and some 2,000 further killings. But the previous year, 1973, the valiant Cecil Linehan and Betty Benton had formed All Children Together to promote

[20] integrated education .​ And it was they who created this Dunleath Lecture series. They ​ were the trailblazers, mighty people with a simple, compassionate request.

So Why Integrated Schools?:- ​ I can list the public support over many years for integrated schools. Individual Church of Ireland, Presbyterian and Catholic clergy, nuns and bishops; politicians of various parties; presidents and prime ministers; business people; sociologists and psychologists; consuls and special envoys, community relations experts; charities; the Children’s Commissioner; the United Nations; peace organisations; teachers and trades unions; The Good Friday Agreement. All have supported the integrating of our school system. And most importantly of all, the steady publication of public surveys kept reporting that some 70-80% of the population consistently voiced support for integrated schools. The 2007 Consultative Group on the Past (“The Eames-Bradley Report”) commented that

11 “Any society moving from conflict has no choice but to address the separations that exist between its people. ... ​ “Specifically the arguments about the ethos or quality of education provided in the faith based sectors have to be balanced against the reality that reconciliation may never be achieved if our children continue to attend separated schools”. [21] ​

Let me repeat that judgement: “the reality that reconciliation may never be achieved if our ​ children continue to attend separated schools”. ​

And that Consultative Group comprised three clergy among its 8 members; so it was not proposing an anti-church viewpoint.

So what has happened?

Back in the 1970s, In the absence of a single school system, some Belfast Catholic parents sent their children to Protestant schools. The Catholic Bishop of Down & Connor then refused the sacrament of confirmation to Catholic children who were not attending Catholic schools.[22] ​

In 1977 the then Londonderry City Council, in temporary portakabins because the IRA had bombed its Guildhall, came out by about two thirds in favour, in principle, of integrated education.

In 1978, during Direct Rule, the Northern Ireland peer Lord Henry Dunleath introduced in the House of Lords an Education Act that was duly passed by the Commons. It allowed schools in Northern Ireland to vote to become integrated. But despite all the public debate, no school succeeded in achieving this.

So in 1981, those All Children Together parents, without any government financial support and in the face of political, church and civil service indifference or hostility, opened - the first modern, formally integrated school in Northern Ireland. 28 pupils making temporary daily use of a scout hut. Indeed one political party even opposed the school on traffic safety grounds. Those All Children Together parents were treading a road similar to that of the first Educate Together School in the Republic of Ireland which had opened three years earlier in Dalkey, County Dublin.

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In 1985, and still without any guaranteed Government funding, the newly-formed Belfast Trust for Integrated Education opened Forge Primary School, Hazelwood Integrated Primary and Hazelwood Integrated College.

In 1987 supporters and schools formed an umbrella group, the NI Council for Integrated Education.

And, still under Direct Rule from Westminster, the Belfast-born Minister for Education Brian Mawhinney, MP for Peterborough, an evangelical christian, persuaded the NI churches to design a common christian religious curriculum.

In 1989, Mr Mawhinney delivered the Education Reform (NI) Order. S64 of this Order for the first time imposed on Government “the duty to encourage and facilitate the development ​ of integrated education, that is to say the education together at school of Protestant and Roman Catholic pupils”. And S65 gave the Department of Education the duty to maintain ​ i.e. to finance, any duly created integrated school. To meet this duty, the Department turned to that umbrella body NICIE; and funded it to do this work.

In 1991, Browlow Integrated College, Craigavon, led by the redoubtable Errol Lemon, became the first existing school to transform to integrated status. The following year, 1992, Carhill Primary, Garvagh, became the first controlled primary school to transform to integrated status.

Also in 1992, when the Foyle Trust for Integrated Education began the process of opening Oakgrove Integrated College, the initial expectation of Lord Belstead, the Minister, and his Department officials, was that the proposed College would open with independent funding. But we had to tell them that the large charitable foundations, Nuffield and Rowntree, were no longer prepared to finance integrated schools in Northern Ireland - that it was now the job of Government.

Later that year, 1992, with co-funding from those interested charitable foundations, the Department of Education established the Integrated Education Fund as an independent body, chaired by Jonathan Bardon, to finance the furtherance of integrated education. To date it has raised over £20 million for this cause. Amazing work.

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In May 2007, for the first time, the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Féin formed a power-sharing government.

Also in 2007, with funding from IEF, the Foyle Trust for Integrated Education published the first-ever international directory of joint Protestant-Catholic church schools. It discovered 20 of them - mostly in England, with others in Australia, America and the Republic of Ireland.

15 May 2014 was a hugely important day when Mr Justice Tracey in the High Court sided with Drumragh Integrated College, led by its ever-active principal Nigel Frith, in its judicial review of the Department of Education’s second refusal to allow Drumragh to expand. The Judge found that “integrated education” was different from a school with a denominational ethos which happens to have a mixed intake. An integrated school is a stand-alone concept as defined by the 1989 Education Order. And that the Department has to be alive to its statutory duty to encourage and facilitate these - including future needs, not just immediate demand.[23] ​

On 23 March 2016 it was announced that the Fresh Start Agreement between the Democratic Unionist Party, Sinn Fein, the UK and Irish Governments, included a £50 million per annum package for 10 years to finance integrated and shared schools. Unfortunately £43 million of that was returned unused in the first year; but it now appears that roll-over of unused budget will be allowed in future.

In 2017 the Department of Education finalised, with the churches, a scheme of management for integrated schools run jointly by Catholic and Protestant churches. This has not yet been taken up by churches in Northern Ireland.

In January 2016 the Education Minister John O’Dowd MLA (SF) commissioned two people to carry out an Independent Review of Integrated Education - Professor Margaret Topping of this Queen’s University and myself. We were asked to review the planning, growth and development of integrated education. The completed report was published on the Department website on 2 March 2017: www.education-ni.gov.uk ​

14 We made 39 recommendations. But in the current absence of a Minister or Assembly, little progress has been possible. The Department has continued its work to update its guide to schools interested in transforming to integrated status. And IEF has continued its good work to publicise this process by print, internet and the cinema video “Integrate My School” by the excellent Liam Neeson.

In March 2012, NICIE had hosted here in Belfast the inaugural conference of the Integrated Peace Education: Global Network for Practice and Research. It was organised by Claire McGlynn of Queen’s University, Prof Michalinos Zembylas of the of Cyprus, and Zvi Bekerman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It was attended by people from Berlin, Bosnia, Croatia, Cyprus, Israel, Macedonia and, of course, representatives of NICIE, IEF and of various integrated schools in Northern Ireland.

Many interesting things arose from that conference. Two in particular strike me. Firstly, we in Northern Ireland were very dissatisfied at our slow rate of progress - “Only 65 schools in 31 years!” “Only 7% of school pupils in 31 years!”. But the people from other countries were responding: “You opened 65 schools in only 35 years! You have 7% of school pupils in only 35 years! How did you manage it?”

And secondly: Arising from that conference the Nansen Dialogue representatives from former Yugoslavia asked NICIE for assistance. NICIE staff members Paula McIlwaine and Cliodhna Scott-Wills have worked in Macedonia. Nigel Arnold, principal of Glengormley CIPS; and Noreen Campbell, former NICIE chief executive and former parent at and principal of Hazelwood Integrated College, are currently on the Management Board of Nansen Dialogue Center, Skopje, Macedonia. And Dr Anne Murray, former principal of Oakgrove Integrated Primary, last month completed for Nansen Dialogue Skopje, an evaluation report of intercultural education at a Macedonian school. This reminds me of Lord Mawhinney’s introduction to Jonathan Bardon’s history of All Children Together: “This story”, he had written in 1990, “ has relevance for divided societies in countries ​ ​ far from Ireland’s shores. It is a true example of the David and Goliath story, of the power of ordinary people to challenge church and state, and to transform societies…” [24] Little did those Lagan College parents realise in September 1981 that they had laid the foundations for a body of experience and education of use to conflicted societies in other countries.

15 In 2018, NICIE is publishing a second, updated edition of the “International Directory of Joint Protestant-Catholic Schools, Colleges & Universities”. Some of the 2007 schools have amalgamated or closed. Some more schools have been located - especially in Australia. Some more have opened - none yet, unfortunately, nearer to Northern Ireland than County Laois in the Republic of Ireland.

So today, there are 65 integrated schools with 23,000 pupils, one Northern Ireland child in 14 attends an integrated school. Roisin Marshall and her NICIE staff are always working to support the existing integrated schools as well as talking with parent groups interested in integrated education. And Tina Merron and her IEF colleagues have raised that astonishing £20+ million for integrated education.

The Independent Review of Integrated Education: So what help can be found in that so far little-used Independent Review of Integrated Education? Its formal title is: “Integrating Education in Northern Ireland: Celebrating Inclusiveness and Fostering Innovation in our Schools”.

We spoke to a wide range of stakeholders: The Department of Education began by giving us full briefings on all its works and responsibilities. We circulated a public consultation and then met or received written responses from a variety of interested parties: the ; Protestant Churches/Transferors; Catholic Church representatives; Education Spokespersons of political Parties; teacher unions; the teacher training colleges; schools; representatives of university schools of education, psychology, sociology and business strategy/change management. And we then made 39 recommendations.

I will not go through in detail all 39. And just for clarity, it was so obvious as not to need stating, attending an integrated school is voluntary - no suggestion of compulsion. So the following 10 headings cover the main issues:

1): No more “Turnaways”: that in future no applicant to an integrated school should ever ​ be turned away. And obviously there should never again be a refusal to open or expand an integrated school “because of the impact it would have on existing schools”. (I cannot recollect ever hearing of an applicant to a controlled school being told that there was no room and that they should go instead to a Catholic school; or vice versa. But this happens

16 to scores of applicants to integrated schools every September. In September 2016, for example, 28 of the 65 integrated schools were over-subscribed at first preference stage.

2): Govt should Promote and Plan Integrated Schooling: that the legislation for ​ integrated schools should be the same as for Shared Schools. i.e. that it should be the duty of the Government to promote, as well as to encourage and facilitate, integrated education. ​ ​ That, accordingly, the Dept of Education and the Education Authority should pro-actively plan for, set targets for, and monitor the progress of integrated schools. And they should report on that progress every two years to the NI Executive and Assembly.

3): New Schools/Closing Schools: That when the opening of any new school or the ​ closing of any existing school is envisaged, that a local audit be carried out to see whether local parents would instead prefer an integrated, joint-church management or shared school option.

4): Pre-School Places: That pre-school places should be approved at all integrated ​ primary schools which seek these. The Education Authority seems to have agreed late last year, that nurseries at controlled or Catholic Maintained schools, de facto serve those sectors, and do not serve the integrated sector.

5): “Transformation”: That the Department should upgrade the guidelines for schools that ​ wish to transform to integrated status. I thank the Irish Medium & Integrated Schools Branch of the Department for having already taken up this work. The Education Authority should also re-create the post of Transformation Officer.

6): Teacher Training: That all teacher training should include serious cross-community ​ training to prepare the students to teach in any publicly-funded school. And since there appears to be little support anywhere for continuing the exemption from Fair Employment legislation of post-primary teachers, we endorse the Equality Commission’s view that this be removed at once; and soon afterwards for primary teachers as well.

7): “Open and Welcoming Schools”: That since some schools will not wish to be ​ formally integrated, the Dept should set up a working group to develop indicators for an “Open and Welcoming” kitemark for schools. (This would provide a route for such schools to demonstrate publicly that they are open and welcoming to any applicant).

17 8): Area-Based 6th Form Provision: That the Department should consider moving ​ towards open-access (i.e. mixed sector) 6th Forms on an area basis. This recommendation will cause funding problems for many schools unless the funding mechanism is re-designed. But it was impossible to ignore the 2013 finding of the Salisbury Review, that our current model of post-16 provision is not fit for purpose. Our education system is for the pupils, not ​ ​ for the institutions.

9): “Fresh Start Funding”: That this funding should prioritise the accommodation needs ​ of existing integrated schools. And that unused funding be carried over into the following year - which seems subsequently to have been agreed,

10): Innovation Hubs: The creation of two inclusive pilot Innovation Hubs in Belfast and ​ Derry~Londonderry to help foster the creativity, innovation and business entrepreneurship that our society so urgently needs. ---

So finally: How do we proceed from here.

In June 2008 Brian, by that stage Lord, Mawhinney spoke at a Belfast meeting of Westminster’s All-Party Committee on Northern Ireland. Addressing the integrated schools movement representatives present, he said:- “The work you do is very, very important. It may appear slow and you may think progress is very limited; but at some stage your work will bring about a tipping point in society. I do not know how many schools that tipping point will be: 100 schools? 200 schools? But you will then be seen to be The Answer: and your work will be mainstream So always be conscious of just how important your work is - and keep at it”.[25] ​ I would love those words of encouragement to be framed on the walls of the staff room and the governors’ room in every integrated school; as well as in the offices of NICIE and IEF.

Creating Change and Managing Change:

[26] One leading theorist of technology change, Prof Everett Rogers, suggests ​ that innovation ​ happens in five stages: -the Innovators: c2.5%: (Innovators) “Brave people, creating the change” (like Lagan ​ ​ ​ College and the Hazelwoods)

18 -Early adopters 13.5%: (Visionaries) “Respectable people, trying out new ideas, but in a ​ ​ careful way”. ​

-Early majority 34%: (Pragmatists) “Thoughtful people, careful but accepting change more ​ ​ quickly than average”. ​

-Late majority 34%: (Conservatives) “Sceptical people, who will use new ideas only when ​ ​ the majority is using it”. ​

-Laggards 16%: (Sceptics) “Traditional people, caring for the ‘old ways’, critical of new ​ ​ ideas and will only accept it, if the new idea becomes mainstream or even tradition”. ​

So where is Lord Mawhinney’s “tipping point”. It is suggested that if you add those first two categories together:- the 2.5% Innovators and the 13.5% Early Adopters, you get the tipping point i.e. somewhere about 16% of the population. So the integrated schools are about half-way there, half-way towards providing a norm for society.

Two further crucial insights - again in technology, and so not designed for people and society:- for an innovation to replace an existing product that serves the same purpose, the new product must actually be an improvement; and the cost of moving away from the existing product must be low enough to encourage the change. So integrated schools must be excellent schools. And the Transformation process must be attractive, not problematical.

And lastly Change Management. How to get all this societal change to happen. In this we heard the insights of a professor of business strategy and change management. While accepting that society is not the same as business, it was interesting to hear that if a large international business considers change, it commissions a report - preferable one side of an A4 page. If it accepts or amends the report for implementation, the company then sets out what it wants to achieve; sets a deadline; allocates a budget to it; instructs the Managing Director to implement the change; and also appoints, say, five Change Champions to make sure the change happens. In NICIE and IEF we certainly have change champions. But we can’t leave it all to them. There is serious encouraging and lobbying work to be done - whether with the Northern Ireland churches and political parties, or with direct rule parties in Britain. Already we have more than five volunteer Change Champions to reinforce the professional work of NICIE and IEF.

19 Machiavelli observed 500 years ago: “ It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out nor more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to handle than to initiate a new order of things; for the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order; this lukewarmness arising partly from the incredulity of mankind who does not truly believe in anything new until they actually have experience of it”. [27] ​

So how do we manage this task?

The job of the schools is to be brilliant. To just be the best teachers possible. To see those precious young people as the foundation of our new, reconciled society. To be a teacher is such a special privilege - helping the aspirations of parents to facilitate their children’s growth into mature, vibrant, ambitious, creative, autonomous adults. But not all of us have those natural or professional skills .

So those other people have a parallel job. It was summed up in an anecdote about President Lyndon Johnson in the US. A man came to lobby the President and Johnson listened to him in the Oval Office for 20 minutes. Then Johnson responded.

“OK. I have heard what you said. And you have convinced me. I agree completely with you. Now go out and force me to act”.

That’s the parallel job - to convince the government of the usefulness of having integrated schools and that the community is now ready - after 187 years - to adopt the Government’s policy.

We’ve come a long way and the tide is flowing in our favour - from 1 school to 63. From 28 pupils to 23,000. Indeed in the 21 years since the first Dunleath Lecture, 29 new integrated schools have opened. So let’s do what Brian Mawhinney urged.

The work we do is very, very important. It may appear slow and we may think progress is very limited; but at some stage our work will bring about a tipping point in society. I do not know how many schools that tipping point will be: 100 schools? 200 schools? But we will then be seen to be The Answer: and our work will be mainstream So always be conscious of just how important our work is - and keep at it”.

[END].

20 References: [1]: “Report of the Irish Boundary Commission 1925”: Irish University Press, Shannon, Ireland: 1969. [2]: The Bible: Book of Ruth: Chap 1: 16-17. [3]: The Story of Ireland” by Brian Inglis: Faber & Faber 1965. [4]: ibid. [5]: “Ireland in the Later Middle Ages” by Prof James Lydon, TCD: Gill & Macmillan, Dublin 1973. [6]: “The Church in Medieval Ireland”: by John Watt, Univ of Hull: Gill & Macmillan, Dublin 1972. [7]: “A History of Ireland” by Prof Edmund Curtis, Univ of Dublin: Methuen & Co, London: 6th ed 1950. [8]: “The Growth of British Education and Its Records”: Colin R Chapman: Lochin Publishing Society, England: 1992. [9]: ibid. [10]: “A History of Ireland” by Prof Edmund Curtis, (supra). [11]: ibid. [12]: ibid. [13]: “Making Peace: The inside story of the making of the Good Friday Agreement” by Senator George Mitchell: Heinemann, London 1999. [14]: ibid. [15]: “Interpreting Northern Ireland” by Prof John Whyte, UCD: Clarendon Press, Oxford: 1990. [16]: “The Daring First Decade of the Board of National Education 1831-1841” by John Coolahan in “The Irish Journal of Education 1983”. [17]; “The Irish Education Experiment: The National System of Education in the Nineteenth Century” by Donald H Akenson: Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1970. [18]: “Education and Enmity: The Control of Schooling in Northern Ireland 1920-1950”; by Donald H Akenson: David & Charles, Newton Abbot. 1973. (A publication of the Institute of irish Studies, The Queen’s University, Belfast). [19]: “Straight Left: An Autobiography” by Paddy Devlin: Blackstaff Press 1993. [20]: “The Struggle for Shared Schools in Northern Ireland: The History of All Children Together”: by Jonathan Bardon: Ulster Historical Foundation 2009. [21]: “Report of the Consultative Report on the Past” [“Eames-Bradley Report”] 2009: available on-line at www.cain.ulst.ac.uk ​ ​ ​ [22]: “The Struggle for Shared Schools in Northern Ireland: The History of All Children Together”: by Jonathan Bardon: Ulster Historical Foundation 2009. [23]: www.ief.org.uk [Follow Menu to: “Article 64 Definition & Duty”]. ​ ​ [24]: (In Lord Mawhinney’s introduction to) “The Struggle for Shared Schools in Northern Ireland: The History of All Children Together”: by Jonathan Bardon: Ulster Historical Foundation 2009. [25]: ibid. [26]: “Diffusion of Innovations” by Prof Everett Rogers: Simon & Schuster (5th edition) 2003. [27]: “The Prince” by Niccolo Machiavelli: 1513. ------

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